Brian Viner

I was going to review the first episode of this new comedy last week, but received the wrong DVD, so my panegyric has had to wait: it's beautifully acted (especially by Russell Tovey and Sarah Solemani in the lead roles), wonderfully written (by Stefan Golaszewski), and intermittently very funny indeed. Last night, Steve refused to go to the pub to celebrate his 24th birthday, citing a nasty dose of flu when in fact he just wanted to stay at home watching porn. That was pretty much all that happened, but it happened exquisitely.

It's tempting for critics to look for the antecedents of new comedy, which is probably very annoying for those who conceive and write it. But here goes anyway. Him & Her seems to owe something to The Royle Family, in that, within the most mundane domestic setting, it gets its laughs from character rather than situation, powered of course by a terrific script. Also in common with the Royles, Steve and Becky are themselves telly addicts, working their way through the Morse box set. Those little references by television to television can sometimes look glib and self-conscious, but here they work perfectly, and last night Morse came in handy in all kinds of ways, not least as a device to have Steve caught by Becky and their friends as he vigorously played with himself. It was enough to shake the ghost of John Thaw, but only with huge guffaws of laughter.

Complicated family relationships can be played for laughs, which brings me to Grandma's House, now approaching the end of a series that has provoked catcalls and bouquets in roughly equal measure. I'm with the bouquet-throwers, and while I'm aware that you'd have to sit through quite a lot of amateur dramatics before encountering an actor quite as wooden as Simon Amstell, I think he gets away with it, which may indeed be part of the conceit.

The rest of the conceit is that Amstell more or less plays himself, a gay, Jewish comedian called Simon who used to host a TV panel show (Never Mind the Buzzcocks in Amstell's case), and whose mother and grandmother (Rebecca Front and Linda Bassett) are desperate for him to get back on the telly being rude. Last night, they were horrified that he could find nothing funny to say about Peaches Geldof or even Peter Andre, and I was with them all the way; no comedian should ever fall so low.

No amount of digital remastering would have improved the pilot episode of The Adventures of Daniel, just some top-to-bottom rewriting. Not unlike the BBC's other new sitcom, Grandma's House, The Adventures of Daniel revolves in sub-Seinfeld fashion around a comedian playing himself, in this case the teenage Scottish stand-up Daniel Sloss. He seems like an engaging and talented lad, but he was ill-served by some gruesomely unfunny material, all constructed around the notion that his (Scottish) girlfriend's (English) dad didn't care for him, but thought that his (Scottish) girlfriend's (English) sister's (Scottish) boyfriend was the bee's knees. As the (Scottish) girlfriend's (English) mother, looking faintly as though she had wandered into the wrong rehearsal room, was Imogen Stubbs.

Some of the previews of this pilot were decidedly enthusiastic. One of them even featured the emotive word "funny". So maybe I was alone in finding it, on the whole, as funny as gastroenteritis. Coincidentally, trawling through the channels not long after watching it, I happened on a superannuated Scottish stand-up, Billy Connolly, on one of his world tours, and was reminded what "funny" really is. But then not everyone is tickled by Connolly, either. What "funny" is more than anything is subjective, so let me just say that The Adventures of Daniel might be your thing, but on this early evidence it certainly isn't mine.

It was a curate's egg of a half-hour, not that a curate and his egg offer the best metaphor for a show about a loving but bickering family of east London Jews. In fact, it is a singularly ill-fitting metaphor, the expression "curate's egg" originating in the old Punch cartoon about a curate who was too timid to complain about a bad egg he had been served. There would be no such timidity at any table of Jews worth their salt beef. Even a visiting rabbi would spit out such an egg.

Enough eggs already. Grandma's House revolves around the simple idea, one that dates back almost to the birth of television comedy, of different generations of the same family arguing in a front room. Steptoe and Son did it to great effect, so did Til Death Us Do Part, so did The Royle Family. In some ways, Grandma's House is The Royle Family with chopped liver. In other ways, it is Seinfeld removed to Gants Hill. And the nod to Seinfeld is evident in the character of Simon (Simon Amstell), the presenter of a TV comedy panel show about music, which - just as Jerry Seinfeld played a stand-up comedian called Jerry, a mildly fictionalised version of himself - is precisely what Amstell, the co-writer of Grandma's House with Dan Swimer and erstwhile presenter of Never Mind the Buzzcocks, is in real life. Or was. Indeed, in last night's opening episode Simon announced to his family his intention to quit his TV show, much to their dismay. "In my kalooki group that's all we talk about," lamented his grandma (Linda Bassett).

The other obvious parallel with Seinfeld is that Jerry Seinfeld made it through nine seasons of that phenomenally successful show rarely ever being more than engagingly wooden as an actor. Good acting was the preserve of his brilliant co-stars and so it is here. Amstell barely seems to try to act, just issues his lines semi-mechanically wearing a half-smile, just as Jerry did.

Still, it didn't matter in Seinfeld and, strangely, it doesn't matter here either. Amstell, aided by the sensible decision not to run a laughter-track, somehow makes a virtue of his self-consciousness, and in any case, there are enough pitch-perfect performances, notably from Rebecca Front playing Simon's divorced mother, Tanya, and Samantha Spiro as his aunt, Liz. It helps that the writing, too, is often pitch-perfect. Tanya is being courted by Clive (James Smith), whom Simon loathes, but who is considered highly eligible largely on account of a 42-inch plasma TV on which "you can see every hair of Noel Edmonds's beard". And when Simon's grandpa (Geoffrey Hutchings) breaks the news that he has cancer (an unwittingly poignant detail, given that Hutchings died suddenly last month), it is questioned on the basis that "years ago he found a lump on his testicle and it was a raisin in his pants".

Just as a wandering raisin can be mistaken for a testicular lump, so can a promising first episode be mistaken for a good new sitcom, and I wouldn't like to commit myself too soon. Besides, there are reasons why London-Jewish humour is far less familiar to us than the kind of New York-Jewish humour exemplified by Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Seinfeld and Larry David (whose Curb Your Enthusiasm also has loud echoes in Grandma's House). It is no accident that the Jewish humour British audiences know best and love most has historically been imported, mordant and razor-sharp, from the United States. Nor is it any accident that Jewish characters in British sitcoms are, for the most part, pretty forgettable. It is more than 40 years since Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width, and not even the warm glow of nostalgia does it any favours.

The main source of the comedy in Miranda is that she is a human stegosaurus, huge and hugely unfanciable, which as others have noted is politically not very correct. And if political incorrectness isn't reason enough on its own to love Miranda, there are plenty of other reasons, not least, in our house anyway, that it is the first new primetime sitcom I can recall that unites the whole family, all laughing our socks off. The hugely engaging Miranda Hart also deserves a medal, or better still a Bafta, for reminding us that slapstick can be funny. Not an episode goes by without her tripping over something, or getting stuck in something, which in less assured hands would be justification for throwing a heavy object at the telly, but it takes real deftness to appear as galumphing as that. She might even be the reincarnation of Tommy Cooper. At any rate, she deserves to have her name in the title.

Home Time - Episode 1 Review

Hold on to your remote control units, Home Time is that dispiritingly rare thing in a new comedy: it's funny. Gaynor, beautifully played by co-writer Emma Fryer, is a mixed-up 29-year-old who left her native Coventry at 17 and hasn't been seen since, even by her parents. Her old friends, still furious with her for doing a runner and not having the decency to come back even when Diana died, have stayed, stagnating, in "Cov". It's slickly and engagingly done, as we might expect of Baby Cow, the production company that gave us Gavin & Stacey. Of course, expectations are routinely dashed by television. But these might just last the course.

The North-South divide opened up again in The Omid Djalili Show, in which Djalili, a large comedian of Iranian extraction, a background he mines about as relentlessly as British Coal once explored the seams of South Yorkshire, enjoyed himself with the notion that Geordie girls out on the razz don't wear much in the way of clothing. In the current edition of Radio Times, Djalili explains his comedy thus: "I play on stereotypes. I do lots of silly ethnic voices. People with Middle England sensibilities might think, 'Are you crazy? How can you find this funny?'" Well, I don't think it was my Middle England sensibilities that got in the way of my enjoyment of The Omid Djalili Show, I think it was the crassness and tired unoriginality of most of the material. I laughed at the opening sketch, in which a recycling centre had bins earmarked not just for bottles but also fluff, fairy lights, fridge magnets, Jordan biographies, odd ski boots and articles by Richard Littlejohn, but things went vertiginously downhill from there.

Unlike The Omid Djalili Show, the stand-up comedy and sketch format is in safe hands in Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, paradoxically, because whatever Djalili might think of himself, Lee is an infinitely edgier, more dangerous operator. He never swears, yet his invective is coruscating, and last night - bringing the curtain down on a series that has never been less than 100 per cent watchable, even though I've done much of the watching through my fingers - he directed it at comedy itself, and in particular at the kind of American stand-ups worshipped by legions of British comedians. Lee doesn't do veneration, and deserves to be venerated for it.

Editor Note: This is another review which was written prior to the episodes being broadcast. The comedy episode was actually episode five.

Who are we to scoff at other cultures, when there is so much to scoff at in our own? In Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, our host turned his gimlet eye on British television, and had riotous fun with the notion that Del Boy falling through the open bar on Only Fools and Horses is repeatedly voted The Funniest Moment Ever on Television, and will be shown again and again "until the rocks melt and the sea burns".

Last Night's Television - Keep taking the mic

In my front room, Stewart Lee was preaching not so much to the converted, as to an ayatollah. He did so brilliantly, though. And what I love about his act is that he does not feel remotely bound by the conventions of showbiz brotherhood.