After a week of such iconic women in their pomp, it is odd to come back into a world that has Big Top - the new sitcom starring the Britain's Got Talent judge Amanda Holden - as part of its cultural furniture. And at 7.30pm on BBC One, this is a big, spendy piece of furniture: like a wardrobe from Heal's, or a new double bed.

Last seen in a dramatic role as she unexpectedly burnt to death in Wild at Heart on ITV1 while trying to save a trapped giraffe, Holden's return is in a no-less baffling set-up: as "Lizzie the Circus Maestro", she runs a circus of what appear to be educationally subnormal friends and relations, in the "north Staffordshire area".

Despite a cast list of putative all-killer no-filler - Tony "Blackadder" Robinson, John "Fast Show" Thomson, Ruth "Hi-di-Hi!" Madoc and, in the first episode, even the handsome Patrick Baladi from The Office - Big Top comes from a school of sitcom acting where technique boils down to saying the words LOUDLY and rolling your eyes - much like Brian Blessed asking for a glass of white wine in the pub, on behalf of a male companion. The fact that there's a "comedy foreigner" who gets his words mixed up, and Thomson has to deliver lines such as "We need to catch those escaped ferrets - without the audience noticing!" only adds to the viewer's liverish sense of doom.

Of course, in the scheme of things, quibbling about the supporting cast here is like kicking up rough about the bread in your s*** sandwich: this is a sitcom starring Amanda Holden. I don't want to be proscriptive about comedy (it's a wide church, it's a deep well, it's often a mystery) but, by and large, it tends to be the preserve of people who can move their faces around a bit. Who knows the reasons behind it, but here Holden has as much facial motility as a seized gearbox. When she bangs home a punchline, it's like watching someone play Tetris at half-speed. I've seen tectonic plates break into a smile faster. She does, however - despite working in a big tent full of sawdust - wear incredibly tiny miniskirts and strappy heels throughout.

At the end of half an hour, a quick burst of data input into the standard-issue Viewer's Calculator reveals that, were the awfulness of Big Top rendered into miles, we could use it as a bridge to the Moon.

Finally, Channel 4's Comedy Showcase returns - essentially The X Factor for sitcoms. Every week there's a new pilot, with the most popular being commissioned for a whole series - before, presumably, having a nervous breakdown and being admitted to the Priory.

First up for the phone vote was Campus - the new project from the Green Wing team: essentially Green Wing but set in a red-brick university, not a hospital. The show is already so well-formed that finding it having to audition for a series seems bizarre - like Patti Smith turning up to an X Factor audition in Cardiff, and doing Piss Factory to a gob-smacked Simon Cowell.

The writer/director/producer Victoria Pile has two trademark techniques: creating worlds where a horrible, dark surreality keeps oozing through the cracks; and characters who take childlike gestures to extremes - walking past a shelf and pushing all the books off with a triumphal air, stealing lipstick from a handbag and putting it on during a conversation, shouting "Shut!" at a door that's already shutting.

Although, like Green Wing, Campus works as an ensemble of freaks, perhaps the most intriguing mutant is Vice Chancellor Jonty de Wolfe (Andy Nyman). Initially, he looks like the weakest character - a small, bumptious David Brent clone who keeps attempting Jamaican patois to make a point. But by the end of the show he has turned into a more sinister version of the shopkeeper in Mr Benn - wandering around the library in a floor-length taffeta ballgown, urging depressed students to commit suicide and, on one occasion, simply disappearing in the middle of a monologue, as if it were a Las Vegas floor-show, leaving his English lecturer Matthew Beer (Joseph Millson) holding a madly clattering clockwork monkey, and his jaw.

The 2007 Comedy Showcase resulted in series commissions for The Kevin Bishop Show, Plus One and Free Agents, from which The Kevin Bishop Show has made it to a second series - making it very much the Leona Lewis of the enterprise. But Campus is far superior stuff to Kevin Bishop. It makes Kevin Bishop look like ... David Sneddon. Campus - it's a yes from me. I'm putting you through to Boot Camp.

The Thick of It: a whirlwind of swearing and satire

What can one reasonably expect to achieve in three minutes? It's nothing. You could get a pot of tea half-brewed, maybe, or go from 47th to 46th in the call-centre queue for O2. Clean a grill pan. Dice a kilo of lamb. Shave one leg. It's not an inspiring list.

Compare this dawdling, Neanderthal sclerosis, then, to the first three minutes of The Thick of It. The opening episode of the third series landed last Saturday night, like one of those mysterious glowing objects that crash in Oklahoma in sci-fi films, humming with advanced technology from a superior civilisation. The first three minutes went at such a pace that it was like someone sticking a whisk in your head and revving it until you had brain-meringue coming out of your eyes.

Is The Thick of It the best TV show ever made?

The Thick of It, Armando Iannucci's scabrous Westminster sitcom, has changed the way we see politics. Not bad for a TV programme with only six episodes to its name. Caitlin Moran catches up with its foul-mouthed spin doctor star Malcolm Tucker to follow the making of the second series.

In a week when we had both the best and the worst dramas of 2009, the third big show of the week, Micro Men, was as simple and restorative a pleasure as a cup of hot Heinz Tomato Soup, taken in a favourite armchair. With snuggle-socks on.

The most important thing was how committed everyone - director, screenwriter, actors - was to the idea that Clive Sinclair is inherently funny. And it's not a premise that you can argue too vociferously against. Played by Alexander Armstrong from Armstrong and Miller - who showed every evidence of walking on to the set every day shouting "My job is brilliant, and I am having the time of my life!" - Sinclair threw things through windows, dropped and did press-ups during meetings while dressed in a Jimmy Savile-esque tracksuit, and shouted "Bloody bugger!" a lot in his strangled, ginger voice.

The Eighties nostalgia-porn - Manic Miner, perms, Trimphones with curly leads and dials that go "wudder wudder wudder" - was full-on but never stupid, and the script used the battle of party-time Sinclair versus the goody two-shoes BBC Acorn as a winning example of that much-maligned genre, comedy-drama. It peaked with a single shot of an underpass, in Cambridge, at night. The chief executive of Acorn is walking in the road ... when he is nearly run over by Sinclair in a prototype C5.

"Get on the pavement, with the other pedestrians," Sinclair hisses, camply, before accelerating, painfully slowly, away.

Of course, for many of us, this week was not just some normal, ho-hum weeky week: as unremarkable as April 7-14, say, or, I dunno, February 19-26 inclusive. No. This week was Peep Show week. The return of the sitcom locked in a permanent, and fabulous, battle of champions with The Thick of It to be the definitive show of what we must, still, sighingly, refer to as "the Noughties". Peep and Thick are like the John McEnroe and Björn Borg of comedy - sometimes one triumphs, sometimes the other, but for miles and miles around there's no real competition. No competition at all. That one writer - Jesse Armstrong - works on both lends the very real possibility that he might be the funniest person in Britain.

I'm not in the habit of suggesting that the Government should forcibly take sperm samples from scriptwriters, and keep them in a cryogenic vault, in the event of a "comedy emergency" in which everyone funny dies, and we need to restock Britain's gag-writing ability with a concerted breeding programme. But, you know, it might be worth bearing in mind.

As series six starts, Peep Show's profile - once so "cult" that its future looked perilous - has never been higher. The inexorable rise of David Mitchell - thinking lady's beaky sex-penguin du jour - means that even the show's first trailer was subject to mass excitement on Twitter. When we last saw Jez (Robert Webb) and Mark (David Mitchell), they had just found out that either one of them might be the father of Sophie's (Olivia Colman) forthcoming baby. This is an usually "big" plot for the show - after all, even when Super Hans (Matt King) got addicted to crack ("That stuff is more-ish!"), it didn't really take up more than six or seven gags.

Within minutes of the first episode opening, more "big" stuff has happened - Mark has got the terminally feckless Jez a job at his company, JLB - but then JLB goes bust. The sexy business dick Alan Johnson (Paterson Joseph, playing one of the all-time amazing sitcom characters) comes to deliver the bad news: "I just got in from Aberdeen. JLB no longer exists. Thank you, Britain, and good night!" and then is driven away at top speed in a company car.

"That's the last Beemer out of Saigon," Mark sighs. The problem was that, as the episode went on, I noted, with mounting terror, that I wasn't really ... laughing. Yeah, there were a couple of nodding smiles, and the "Beemer" line got what would, on a Laugh Graph, be called "a snorty chuckle", but ... the usual, glorious, abandoned fug of a) borderline hysteria and b) intense emotional anguish, caused by minutely observed cases of total t***tishness, wasn't descending.

I was looking a cataclysm in the face: that Peep Show might have "gone off". We've all got to stop being funny some time. Maybe this was their time. Maybe it was all. Over. Or - maybe it was just a bad opening episode? So I rang people. I blagged. I cried. I sent a courier that cost £38. I got episode 2 sent over, and sat down to watch it in a state of pre-emptive tension rivalled only by the day before my C-section. And oh, thank God - episode 2 is one of the best episodes yet. Mark and Jez have a debate about the temperature setting on a boiler that is less like dialogue, more like an MRI scan of the idiot human brain. Then, later, Jez gets to deliver the line, "I'm a feminist - so I believe women should have any mad thing they want." It's all going to be OK. It's all still amazing. When The Thick of It comes back next month, the skies will be, once again, filled with the boom and clatter of their glorious rivalry.

Dan Clark: a likeable type

How Not to Live Your Life leapt from YouTube to the BBC. The Times ask if its star, Dan Clark, is the new Rik Mayall.

The dead-fly garnish on this week's bucket of swill was Anonymous, the new celebrity prank-show on ITV1.

"What happens when celebrities want a day off?" the introduction ran - to the immediate, incredulous answer from the viewer, "Take the day off?"

But this was not the full question Anonymous was asking. The full inquiry was, "What happens when celebrities want a day off - and cause havoc with dozens of cameras, ingeniously hidden from view?"

Well then, in that case, the answer is obviously, "Fill up 45 minutes of prime-time on a Saturday night and, technically, not really have a day off at all."

The "killer" idea of Anonymous is that it gives celebrities "the biggest makeover - a new face". Thanks to a much-mentioned "five hours in prosthetics", Fiz from Coronation Street got rigged up as a blonde Essex girl, the X Factor judge Louis Walsh got disguised as an old man, and the former rugby player Matt Dawson was transformed into a camp West End choreographer. Thus disguised, the celebrities then pranked their celebrity friends - usually by behaving with intolerable wackiness, while their friends acted with bemused good grace.

The essential problem with Anonymous - and it became obvious in minutes - was the disguises themselves. While the stars certainly weren't recognisable as themselves, they also weren't necessarily recognisable as normal human beings, either. Frankly, those prosthetics were poor. Fiz's chin looked like it was constructed of three pieces of pre-sliced turkey breast. Matt Dawson's face had the alarming unyieldingness of a Bakelite death mask and Louis Walsh looked like a statue of Freddie Boswell from Bread, as sculpted by the blind woman in the video to Hello. Even in a post-Simon Weston world, you would momentarily break stride on sighting them in the street. And in every single prank, the victims commented on how alarmingly awful the prankers' prosthetics were.

"As soon as I saw him, I thought, 'He's had loads of plastic surgery,'" Austin Healey said of Dawson's wonky-Spam head.

"I just thought you'd had really bad plastic surgery!" Fiz's Corrie colleague Michelle Keegan howled at Fiz, who looked like Nikki Chapman wearing Craig David's Bo' Selecta! chin.

You do have to wonder if the muchvaunted Anonymous "Four hours in prosthetics!" is strictly necessary. After all, Jeremy Beadle regularly managed to get people's houses knocked down while wearing disguises no more audacious than "a hat".

I am not one to take against a garrulous homosexual - they constitute the greater part of my social and cultural diet - but the opening episode of Alan Carr: Chatty Man was the nearest I've ever come to shouting: "Just shut up, you rambling poof!"

While there has been amazing progress over the past ten years in making this country less homophobic (Graham Norton getting Eurovision, bisexuals on Doctor Who), the dark reality is that that many people have merely swapped homophobia for "finding gays cute".

I attended an advance fan-screening of Torchwood last week, and every piece of dialogue between Captain Jack and his boyfriend was greeted with knowing, slightly hysterical laughter from the audience - as if everything that the characters were saying was high-camp, bitchy banter. In actuality, a great deal of it wasn't, and some of it was outright sombre - yet it was all drowned out by Pavlovian giggling at the "cute queer couple having a bitch-fight".

If we really are reducing gayness to camp, in terms of social progress, it's going to be as useful as supporting sexual equality - but only so long as all the women are giggly and have big tits.

As a camp man at a crucial moment in his career, then, Carr has some mighty socio-sexual-political currents to swim against. Alas, to the disappointment of any watching recruitment officers at Stonewall, Carr's new chat show consists of little more than an hour of pointing at things - Bruce Forsyth, pictures of people from Big Brother, his own set - and squealing. It makes Mr Humphries from Are You Being Served? look like Harvey Milk.

With an hour of airtime to fill, without Justin Lee Collins, Carr appears not to generate any actual material - he just relies on mannerisms. The third line of his opening monologue is on Britney Spears: "She sings like she's talking through the intercom at a drive-thru McDonalds." Unfortunately, the line also appeared in a Mirror interview with Carr, printed on the same day - a pretty damning index of his productivity. The conversational topics for his first guest, Bruce Forsyth, were: how big Bruce's chin is, how old Bruce is, whether Forsyth knows who will be on the next series of Strictly Come Dancing? (no), and how old Forsyth is again. Forsyth seemed exasperated by the end - like an old, greying horse being harassed by a tiny Jack Russell.

Most damningly of all, the audience laughed at everything Carr said - like a previously unknown experiment involving Pavlov giving his dog a biscuit every time Larry Grayson said, "Shut that door".

There was no creative exhaustion evident in Psychoville - the new project from Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton from The League of Gentlemen. Psychoville has a purposeful air to it: as if someone had said: "Right, lads. The plot is: it's a sitcom about psychopaths! No messing about - and let's make sure we've got a scene with an incestuous mother and son scratching each other's eczema before the ten-minute mark, OK?"

As with The League of Gentlemen, most of the characters are played by Shearsmith and Pemberton, in a variety of wigs, prosthetics and pendulous rubber bosoms. It's a bit like a collegiate version of The Nutty Professor, but with jokes about bestiality. Well, just with jokes, really. I don't remember there being any in The Nutty Professor.

Darkest moment so far: Mr Jelly. He's a clown and children's entertainer. "Mr Jelly Keeps Kids Quiet" is the logo painted on the side of his car. Mr Jelly comes to children's parties and combs their hair until they cry. Then he puts lipstick on their eyes.