Brian Viner

Pegg & Frost's new film is a very fun night out

For all its flaws, The World's End is fun. It's not as appealing as Shaun Of The Dead, but I preferred it to Hot Fuzz.

Dad's Army: Permission to laugh, sir!

Clive Dunn, who died last week, was just one of the reasons Dad's Army is still as loved today as ever.

Michael Palin: our very silly man in Brazil

Michael Palin is still globetrotting for the BBC and as amiable as ever. What keeps the old Python happy?

Interview with Hat Trick boss Jimmy Mulville

All the successive BBC suits know that in Have I Got News For You, they have enduring comedy gold. Yet Jimmy Mulville's original expectations were low. "I didn't even like the title, and the pilot was the worst programme made by human beings up to that point"

As for last night Sally (Olivia Colman), personal assistant to Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville), head of deliverance at the Olympic Deliverance Commission in the always amusing and sporadically very funny Twenty Twelve, I yearned for the happy ending that she herself seemed to yearn for, a meaningful clinch with her boss. Alas, the final episode didn't yield the romantic encounter it had promised, despite Sally continuing to show much more devotion to Ian than he got at home from his needy, nagging, pixellated wife.

It's hard to think of a spoof documentary that has been more fortuitously timed than Twenty Twelve. The first episode poked fun at the Olympic countdown clock, and within less than a day the real clock had malfunctioned. Since then, there's been no end of argy-bargy concerning the future use of the Olympic stadium, with the decision to hand it to West Ham United robustly challenged by Tottenham Hotspur and Leyton Orient. Oh, and marathon man David Bedford has resigned, citing general ineptitude. So it has taken only a very small leap of the imagination into the fictional world of the ODC, whose head of sustainability (Amelia Bullmore) was last night confronted by a man from the London Wildlife Stag Beetle Outreach Project, worried that clearing an area of tree stumps would wreak devastation among his beloved beetles.

Similarly outraged was Tony Ward (Tim McInnerny), a volatile film-maker aghast at the deployment of Greenwich Park for the equestrian events, and the probable daily invasion of "20,000 pubescent girls from second-rate public schools in Surrey with dreadful aspirational mothers". To demonstrate his opposition, Ward had a large pile of horse manure dumped outside the ODC offices, which Fletcher agreed to deal with to "keep it from Seb".

I don't think that's another example of art and life colliding, but it easily could be. Indeed, Ward and Roberts finally came face to face in the Today programme studio, where they were asked a succinct question by James Naughtie, just about the only truly unlikely turn of events in the entire half-hour.

[Episodes] is a frustrating comedy, three-quarters of the way to being very funny, but getting there only sporadically.

Actually, I think my review of the opening episode still holds up: the problem lies with our very own Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan, whose banter - as very English husband-and-wife scriptwriters relocated to Hollywood - never quite convinces, probably because it was written by Americans. Which makes Episodes a case of life imitating art imitating life, or maybe the other way round. Whatever, I hate to seem in thrall to the big starry name, but it's Matt LeBlanc playing a revved-up version of himself who makes the thing worth watching, and who gets all the best lines. Catchphrases are cheesy, said Sean (Mangan) last night. "Really," said LeBlanc. "Tell that to my house in Malibu."

In Episodes, the gap between Britain and America is explored from the perspective of married TV comedy writers Beverly and Sean (Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan), whose hit show is taken up by a US network and Americanised beyond all recognition. After last week's opener I aired some reservations about the rhythms of the comedic banter, but hoped that it would get better when Matt LeBlanc (playing a souped-up version of himself) joined in the fun, and last night, with several very good gags both verbal and visual, it did.

The eighth series [of Shameless], which began brilliantly last night, is to run for 22 episodes (the first five on consecutive evenings), which is much more them than us, and an indication of Channel 4's enduring faith in Paul Abbott's extraordinary gallery of grotesques, headed by Frank Gallagher (the peerless David Threlfall). Last night, Frank tried to come to terms with the terrible news that his daughter Debbie had been killed while serving in Afghanistan, and then with the terrible news that his ex-wife Monica had faked the news of Debbie's death, with the help of her gay partner, posing as a military policewoman. I wonder if the Americans are ready for a family as dysfunctional as the Gallaghers, who make the Simpsons look like the Obamas.

There weren't many duff notes in Friends, the slick NBC sitcom that ran and ran from 1994 to 2004 and, for those of us with homes full of teenagers, is still running and running. But one of its duffest notes was the casting of Helen Baxendale to play Ross's British wife, Emily. Nothing against Baxendale, but amid all that sassy American humour, she seemed as flaccidly English as a stale Rich Tea biscuit surrounded by freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies.

In fairness, that was kind of the point; we weren't meant to warm to Emily. And Baxendale, deliberately, didn't get many killer lines. But it wasn't just that; whip-smart, wisecracking American humour just doesn't sound right emerging from a British mouth. For the same reason, Daphne Moon (Jane Leeves) was my least favourite character in the otherwise sublime Frasier. It's not that British actors aren't capable of wonderful TV comedy, just that the dialogue in the best US sitcoms is rooted in New York-Jewish traditions of razor-sharp put-downs and one-liners. Think Woody Allen and Neil Simon. On British television, comic dialogue has a different rhythm.

Anyway, all of this brings me to Episodes, in which Matt LeBlanc (dim, amiable Joey in Friends) plays a heightened version of himself in the latest example of what is rapidly becoming a TV genre all of its own: celebrities indulging in a game of double-bluff with us, playing themselves as slightly more neurotic and prima donna-ish than they actually are, which of course suggests that they're not neurotic prima donnas at all. Steve Coogan did this beautifully in The Trip recently, as did Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. In Episodes, it is LeBlanc's turn. He plays Matt LeBlanc, hugely rich and successful thanks to Friends, who to the horror of married British comedy writers Beverly and Sean (Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan) is cast as the lead in the US version of their hit UK show. They wanted their British lead, a fruity RSC type called Julian (Richard Griffiths). But they get LeBlanc.

So far, so good. It's a great idea, with great opening credits: a script flying from London to LA. And there are certainly precedents for television successfully turning a mirror on itself; The Larry Sanders Show of blessed memory did it exquisitely. Moreover, there's something painfully real about British comedy writers being lured to LA by the sweet blandishments of network bosses and the promise of a Spanish-style hacienda in Beverly Hills, only for the semi-detached back in Chiswick to seem even more alluring once the dream starts to sour. You should hear the British writing duo Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, who did the whole hacienda thing, on the subject. Yet I find myself unable to give a fat thumbs-up after the opening Episodes, and the problem lies with Greig and Mangan, or at least with their script. In a British context, they're both terrific comic performers. Greig was pitch-perfect as the hapless heroine in David Renwick's wonderful Love Soup. But here, trading waspish one-liners in the land of Jack Benny and George Burns, they seemed out of place. And although that's the whole point - that they are out of place - they should at least be talking like Brits, not Americans.

Still, it's early days. I have a feeling that Episodes will get better the more LeBlanc gets involved. And there have already been some lovely gags, like the friskiness that gripped Beverly and Sean when they saw that the vast bath in their rented Beverly Hills home could easily accommodate both of them, only for it to wear off while they waited for the damn thing to fill.

Filling me with feelings of inadequacy for the comparative dullness of my banter, the relative poverty of my impressions - are Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan, regrettably coming towards the end of The Trip. There's been precious little else on the box these last few years that has got my wife and me shedding big fat tears of laughter, but The Trip never fails to oblige. I love it for its originality and its daring. And hats off to Coogan in particular for allowing himself to seem so obsessed with his place in the entertainment firmament. Last night, he compared his own three Baftas to Brydon's none, which wouldn't have been quite so funny without the suspicion that he meant it.