David Chater

Sean Lock says that he was reluctant to appear on this show. "I knew I'd have to write jokes about Chris Tarrant," he says. "Can you imagine a more barren, uninspiring, emaciated topic than that? I'd rather perform an hour of new material about pylons to a submarine crew after the stripper had cancelled." But after he has set the tone at the start of the programme, there are some wonderful contributions during the evening. Jamie Theakston is unwittingly hilarious because of his inability to read an autocue and Terry Wogan (who says that Tarrant is "always drunk and nobody likes him") gives a masterclass in comic timing. Mind you, Tarrant gives as good as he gets. His performance at the end proves that you don't work in television for more than 30 years without developing impregnable self-assurance.

In a merciless variation on a tribute show, a host of comedians and celebrities line up to lampoon Sharon Osbourne. At the start, the host Jimmy Carr compares her to the Queen. "Her children are dysfunctional. Her husband is incoherent and nobody is really sure what she does." Thereafter, the likes of Alan Carr, Ronni Ancona and Louis Walsh take to the podium and let rip about her age, her plastic surgery, her husband, her incontinent dogs, her foul mouth and her fashion mistakes, while she sits at a table and cackles loudly. The highlights of the evening are Ancona reading extracts from Osbourne's new novel, Revenge, and Patrick Kielty risking his life to mock her parenting skills. "What a delightful evening it's been," says a glum Jack Dee.

It's wonderful to have Outnumbered back on our screens for a third series. If you've only just returned from a shopping trip to Mars, it is based on the life and times of two besieged middle-class parents (Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner) who are doing their best to raise three precocious children. It follows a comic tradition that goes back to Joyce Grenfell, but the brilliance of the show is the accuracy of the children's dialogue and the naturalism of their performances. Because so much of it is improvised, it is inevitable that some episodes won't be as strong as others. But tonight's, in which all the family (including the grandmother) go on a day trip to London, is a delight. I was enjoying it so much that I forgot to take notes in order to steal the best jokes.

For this two-hour bonanza in aid of Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity, Channel 4 recently assembled 24 of Britain's best comedians to perform in front of a live audience at the O2 arena in London. So - deep breath - Jack Dee, Andy Parsons, David Mitchell, Fonejacker, Jack Whitehall, Jo Brand, James Corden, Jason Manford, John Bishop, Kevin Bridges, Kevin Eldon, Lee Evans, Mark Watson, Michael McIntyre, Noel Fielding, Patrick Kielty, Rich Hall, Rob Brydon, Ruth Jones, Sean Lock, Catherine Tate and Shappi Khorsandi take turns on stage to make it the biggest live stand-up show in British history. If that's not enough for you, Alan Carr and Bill Bailey perform with Stomp and Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Johnny Depp provide additional sketches.

Jonathan Creek (Alan Davies), the scruffy magician and master sleuth, is back for a one-off special. Jonathan Creek has always been a strange sort of a show. Not remotely serious enough to be scary and not funny enough to be a full-on comedy, it's more like an offbeat version of Midsomer Murders with magic thrown in. This particular story involves disappearing houses, old men crawling through the undergrowth, beautiful women impaled on railings and deception on a grand scale. Paul McGann/p] plays a writer of murder mysteries, the success of which depend on making the reader trust everyone and then, in the most innocent and everyday details, sowing the seeds of terror. There's not much terror here but it's amiable, ingenious and very silly.

Incredibly, this is the 20th anniversary and the 39th series of the BBC's flagship entertainment programme - the only entertainment programme that is consistently and genuinely entertaining. Paul Merton's unstoppable flow of surreal invention never seems to dry up, while Ian Hislop must be one of the few people on the planet who can appear on television suffering from a burst appendix and still manage to be funny. With an election looming, the big challenge of the new series - according to Richard Wilson, head of comedy at the production company Hat Trick - will be "to take the spectacularly dull things that politicians say and get laughs out of them". The host tonight is Lee Mack, with Alexander Armstrong and Jo Brand booked to appear later in the run.

On a Thursday? Are schedulers messing with our minds? Is this an April fool? Since time immemorial Have I Got News for You has been a fixture of Friday nights, like crowds outside pubs and kebabs on the pavement. It boots us into the weekend with a flurry of vicious wit, surreal satire and cheap jokes at the expense of John Prescott's figure. It's our pressure valve on the end of the working week, allowing the nation to let off steam and laugh at our betters, while wondering where Paul Merton gets his I'm-wearing-this-for-a-joke shirts and noting the steady advance of Ian Hislop's chins. To plant it on a Thursday seems like sacrilege, until you remember that tomorrow is Good Friday, so the weekend sort of starts here. Let's hope series 39, which starts with Lee Mack at the helm, can keep up the standards.

Anyone who knows Justin Lee Collins and the horror of his Bring Back... programmes will be relieved to know that this new mixture of chat and variety show is nowhere near as bad as it might have been. Filmed in front of a young audience of 300-odd people at the plush Rivoli Ballroom in south London, it is full of good humour and high spirits. "I wanted the show to feel like a circus," he says, "with me as the ringmaster." During the run of the series, he will play darts with Meat Loaf and Ewan McGregor, interview Gok Wan and Mathew Horne, compliment Sharon Osborne on her plastic surgery and organise an offbeat dance competition. The most pleasant surprise of all is that he doesn't scream and shout with artificial exuberance.

Jason Manford hosts a new Friday-night variety show, which is recorded the day before transmission to keep it as topical as possible. "It's a mixture of music and comedy," he says. "But the music will all be live and the comedy will be varied. Among the performers will be John Bishop, Jo Brand and (to mix it up a bit) Joe Pasquale." Manford is the ideal choice as presenter. Most people don't like being screamed at at the end of the week and he is a relaxed and genial comedian - a bit like the pleasant bloke in the pub who makes his mates laugh with gentle stories about the oddities of his family. With luck his personality will set the tone, although the words "ITV" and "variety show" together have an ominous ring.

Caroline Quentin returns for a second series of this dismal sitcom, which is aimed at viewers who worry that one day My Family will disappear from the schedules and there will nothing to replace it. It's the same-old format that passed its sell-by date sometime in the early 1980s, in which an ordinary family muddles along doing the best they can and being oh-so-funny. In this opening episode the husband and wife have bought a book on keeping alive the romance in marriage. They decide to spend an evening of quality time together - with entirely predictable results. Without wishing to sound negative, it is lazy, mindless, patronising, cowardly and desperately unfunny drivel. What is so frightening is that no one at the BBC thought to say: "Hang on, we ought to be aiming a bit higher than this."