Yes, it's yet another talking heads/clips show but it does give us an opportunity to relive some cracking stand-up routines - last week's gave us Eddie Izzard covered in make-up and looking dazzling as he delivered his super skit about school-level French from his 1990s Dress To Kill show. This time, Bill Hicks rightly gets a look-in, as does Lee Evans's ingeniously physical Bohemian Rhapsody routine. Jonathan Ross, Micky Flanagan and Rich Hall are among those sharing their reverence.

Frankie Boyle needs barring. I'd hope we'd seen the last of this unpleasant comic when he left the BBC's Mock The Week but, no, up he popped this week on Channel 4 with Frankie Boyle's ­Tramadol Nights, a new show mixing stand-up with sketches. It was awful. Boyle's big idea is to be as nasty as possible to as many people as possible.

Wow, Frankie, that's never been done before. American comedian Bill Hicks founded that particular style back in the late Eighties. But he was slightly different to Boyle - he was occasionally funny.

Boyle, however, mistakes outrage for humour and just ends up coming across like an attention-seeking ­simpleton. An attention-seeking ­simpleton with a silly ginger beard. Does that offend you, Frankie?

Michael McIntyre bounds on stage, newly svelte and very natty in a purple suit. He doesn't look like the most polarising figure in British comedy. Polarising in the sense that mass audiences adore him, while other, less successful comics marinate in resentment whenever his name is mentioned. Fine, yes, McIntyre is very safe (though he says "s**t" twice, to my horror - it's like hearing your favourite auntie swear), but the observational stuff is fun. It may be obvious, but there you go, that's observation for you. Anyway, I like him, and the Glasgow audience at the first of a new run of Roadshows is in his pocket immediately as he tells cute stories about his two small children, revolving doors at airports and trampolines in gardens. None of it will start any revolutions, but who needs that on a Saturday night? He's not Bill Hicks. McIntyre is wildly enthusiastic about the night's acts, including local boy Kevin Bridges, garrulous Canadian Craig Campbell and Radio 4 favourite Milton Jones, whose punning, literal schtick makes my teeth itch with annoyance.

A Brit on the side: Why US comic Hicks felt home in UK

Bill Hicks is a byword for acerbic brilliance in the UK - but he couldn't buy a laugh in his native America. On the eve of a new documentary about the maverick comedian, Peter Watts asks: what makes us love him so?

Gervais's comedy army

Bill Hicks, Stewart Lee and a nursery rhyme with a 'blue' ending. Ricky Gervais reveals the moments that put comedy hairs on his chest.

As Rory Bremner well knows, understanding a nation's sense of satire is a good way to start understanding that nation at large. Starting with Holland and the spiky musical comedian Hans Teeuwen ("I'm once, twice, three times Hans Teeuwen!"), Bremner embarks on an unapologetically intellectual quest to take the satiric pulse of three nations (Ireland and Switzerland are to follow). Tonight's edition is smart, engrossing and - providing you've a stomach for edgy, Bill Hicks-style jokes - occasionally very funny.