The importance of seizing life's windows of opportunity was not lost on the team behind the Beeb's other post-Christmas winner [aside from Toast], Just William. Not that it would have taken a casting director of genius to realise that Daniel Roche - the 11-year-old actor who played Ben in Outnumbered - was born to play William Brown, Richmal Crompton's schoolboy anti-hero.

With his natural curls and even more natural scowl, Roche brought Brown to life as no other child actor has before. But what really elevated Simon (Men Behaving Badly) Nye's adaptation were the moments inbetween young William's adventures and the painstaking attention to detail of its early 1950s period setting.

With an adult cast including Rebecca Front and Daniel Ryan as the long-suffering senior Browns, and Warren Clarke and Caroline Quentin as the nouveau riche Botts, Nye's four episodes - perhaps taking inspiration from The Simpsons - fully appreciated that there was room here for all the characters to manoeuvre. There were storylines involving William's sister Ethel, subplots based around the staff at William's school, visits from members of the extended Brown family and, of course, the sthpectacularly sthpoilt Violet Elizabeth.

The sharpness of the script was evident from episode one, in which William's brother Robert, newly obsessed with Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones, had this exchange with his mother: Robert [mumbling]: "I need to go somewhere." Mrs Brown [not looking up]: "If you're passing the shop could you buy a loaf of bread?" Robert: "No, I need to escape. I'm going to join a biker gang." Mrs Brown: "Righto. Maybe you should borrow Mr Nuttley's motorbike and see if you like it first."

Who of us brought up in the stifling atmosphere of the suburbs will not have had a similar early life exchange, in which a burning passion is reduced, with a seen-it-all-sigh, to the status of hobby?

Thus, while Toast and Just William were both unashamedly nostalgic, both also carried off the crucial trick of ringing true to a 21st-century audience. Good writing, fine acting and a past (unlike the foreign country of Upstairs, Downstairs) that we can all remember and relate to.

It's not too much to ask for is it? And especially at a time of year when, for many of us, the televison screen is the window of opportunity in the corner of all of our living-rooms.

Clumsiness can be very funny indeed in the right hands, but there's something about badly simulated incompetence that kills comedy like a sledgehammer to the temple. There were a couple of notable examples yesterday, first in CBBC's new version of Just William (which featured a particularly egregious example of wobbly moped riding).

Just William was a good deal more bearable, coming with the recommendation of Daniel Roche in the title role (he also played the Williamesque younger son in Outnumbered), Simon Nye writing the script and Martin Jarvis doing the voiceover narration, as if they were knowingly passing the baton from one generation of Crompton interpreters to the next. The original stories, remarkably, spanned nearly 50 years of British social history, so you can pretty much take your pick of period. Here they have opted for the Fifties, which can certainly find textual sanction in the canon, but still feels slightly wrong. The world William inhabits - of irate gamekeepers and vicars and tea-parties - is solidly anchored in the Twenties, and begins to look a little hollow and unpersuasive when updated.

That's hardly likely to worry its target audience though, which Nye clearly feels may include a few nostalgic older viewers. The script, perfectly functional when the children were talking, seemed to perk up a little when they disappeared - even finding room for an amorous little exchange between Mr and Mrs Brown. The excellent Rebecca Front plays Mrs Brown and Caroline Quentin takes the role of Mrs Bott, salient here because it was the episode in which William first encounters Violet Elizabeth Bott, a simpering confection of tulle and ringlets with the lockjaw grip of a saltwater crocodile.

For an adult the laughs didn't come from the sight of angry gamekeepers stopped in their tracks by a muddy puddle they could easily step across (more ersatz incompetence), but the sound of Mrs Bott trying to get her aitches in the right place, or the attempted recovery of Mr Brown after he's precipitously answered "yes" to her question "Do I look like a panda?" "It's our favourite of all the bears," he adds placatingly.

Incidentally, I don't know why it's assumed that children have the interpretive equivalent of myopia when it comes to facial expressions, but - with a few honourable exceptions - all the acting here is wildly over-amplified, as it all too often is in comedies for children.

Outnumbered's bloodthirsty Ben is a William for our times, so the casting of actor Daniel Roche, so brilliant as the violence-obsessed middle child in the hit BBC1 sitcom, is perfect. The sublime Martin Jarvis, who is William to so many of us, thanks to his peerless readings of Richmal Crompton's tales on Radio 4, narrates a series of four stories (daily until New Year's Eve). Here William and the Outlaws first encounter insufferable Violet Elizabeth Bott, the be-ribboned, lisping brat who manipulates everyone with her threats to "thcweam and thcweam and thcweam until I'm thick". Warren Clarke and, particularly, Caroline Quentin have a whale of a time as Violet Elizabeth's vulgar, nouveau riche parents (dad is the Bott's Digestive Sauce magnate), while Rebecca Front and Daniel Ryan are sweetly forbearing as William's mum and dad. It's aimed at kids, but adults will have fun, too, if only as they look back fondly on a world where children could play outside for hours on end and the sun always seemed to shine.

A Cinema Near You, Radio 4, review

Gillian Reynolds reviews Radio 4's comedy pilot A Cinema Near You, starring Mathew Horne and Caroline Quentin, plus the rest of the week's radio.

Mathew Horne (of Gavin & Stacey TV fame) plays Alex, a struggling young cinema manager in this new comedy by Simon (Men Behaving Badly) Nye. Here's the situation: Alex has to promote a forthcoming attraction, an arty Swedish film. But no one's interested, not even Mrs Duke (Caroline Quentin), the cinema's rambly, elderly owner, or neighbouring café boss Jane (Mel Hudson), who fancies him. Here's a tip: look at the cast. Consider author's other work (translations of Molière and Dario Fo, films, TV, scholarly studies of painters, awards). This one (produced by Jane Berthoud and Simon Mayhew-Archer) may go far.

I began watching Life of Riley and I thought, hello, I've been hijacked by a time­ lord and Tardised back 30 years. Doctor Who must have been ancient when this script was written, a family sitcom that went back to before Terry and June. It was as if the last generation had never happened. It must have been written by a TV re-enactment society. I watched in wonder as the familiar mumming and the leaden setup-punchline-reaction trudged across the screen like the ghost of Christmas specials past. It stars Caroline Quentin, who wears a look of resigned depression throughout. This may be character acting or it could be medication having a bad reaction to the script. Nobody comes out of this well. If you set the cast on fire, they wouldn't generate enough energy or warmth to roast a marshmallow. This may well be the dreariest inspiration-bereft thing on the box. It's a zombie sitcom, the dug-up, unfunny dead.

The comedy hell continued with Life of Riley, which feels like a parody of the kind of bland, mechanical, family sitcom they supposedly don't make anymore. It even has a hackneyed punning title in which the protagonist's name is inserted into an everyday phrase.

I don't know what depresses me most about this dire Caroline Quentin vehicle, the endless procession of arthritic gags (mother on telephone to stepson: "Danny it's Maddy... Maddy?... I'm married to your father, yes."), its healthy ratings, or the clinically treated laugh track. It's like being mocked by the cackles of the dead. At least Outnumbered is back soon to show how it should be done.

Only in an atmosphere in which originality is viewed as marginal or suspect could a series like Life of Riley (BBC1) be produced. It may seem unfair to pick out this harmless sitcom as an illustration of the failings of British comedy drama, but perhaps not quite as unfair as the decision to recommission another series.

Life of Riley is not the worst sitcom (a title for which competition is too fierce to contemplate), and it even featured one clever line - when his daughter asked him what he was doing drinking coffee at an Ikea-like warehouse, Neil Dudgeon (as Jim Riley) replied: 'Just wanted to see what our bookshelves look like when they're assembled.' The problem is that none of the cast, led by Caroline Quentin, is able to say the lines as if they mean them, because the lines - with that single exception - neither refer to a known reality nor create a new one. Instead, the dialogue is rooted in sitcomland, that dislocated place where everything is said for effect and nothing has any effect. Life of Riley is the anti-Glee, tired, predictable and pointless.

Was Life of Riley made to test varying levels of Alzheimer's? Beginning its second run, the "jokes" fitted distinct categories: things that were topical/funny two years ago (self-service checkouts); ten years ago (self-help books); only to dimwits (falling over during a trust exercise); or never (Caroline Quentin's mumsy character - woops! - making a chocolate cast of her hubby's hairy bum). Its laughter track should have said "Gah!" and "Eeeg!" - but instead rollicked along and even seemed to positively discriminate, the higher hilarity-count for Nana's gags about boiled eggs and tea only explainable by a BBC effort to counteract recent allegations of ageism. Big Top, The Persuasionists, now this: anyone with their BBC comedy glass understandably more than half empty had better go to Dave at 10.20pm tonight for emergency care - the excellent Psychoville is rerunning and proves that somewhere Aunty still has a live and kicking funnybone.

Eight- to 12-year-olds will love this inoffensive family sitcom, which returns for a second series starring Caroline Quentin and Neil Dudgeon as a chaotic married couple attempting to corral their picturesquely badly behaved kids. Life of Riley can't possibly be aimed at grown-ups, what with its broad jokes about bottoms and the perils of incorrectly loading the dishwasher. The adults behave like kids, which is probably why young 'uns will enjoy it, and the kids are knowing, cheeky and annoying. It also features the world's oldest sight gag about that falling over backwards trust exercise, which even a late-developing toddler will see coming.