David Mitchell (I)

"This is a horrible stupid game!" moans David Mitchell towards the end of tonight's episode. "Whatever we say, if we get it wrong, we'll look like we've believed something ridiculous." Yes, that's the general drift: anecdotes and personal habits so far-fetched we refuse to believe they're true, though some must be.

Did Richard Madeley really wake up naked in a cupboard one Christmas morning, holding two cans of spray snow? Do pigeons nest using clippings from Kate Humble's hair? As the controversies rage, they're all leading up to the priceless sparring between Mitchell and rival captain Lee Mack. This week's battleground: pens.

The best comedy of the week was to be found over on CBBC, where series four of Horrible Histories made its debut (confusingly, BBC1 is currently showing series two).

Based on the cheerfully bloodthirsty books by Terry Deary and Martin Brown, it plays a bit like Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time, if you replaced the visiting professor of history from Queen's College, Oxford, with a talking rat making jokes about wee.

There have been plenty of bloody revolutions featured in Horrible Histories, but the team's most recent coup was to reunite The League of Gentlemen for the first time in a bronze age. Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith turned up as craven Hollywood execs keen to panel-beat the messy lives of historical figures into award-bait biopics, and while Gatiss's American accent was pretty duff, the bickering spark between the three gentlemen remained.

Recruiting the league should not distract from the tireless efforts of the core cast, particularly Jim Howick, who has matured from being an off-model David Mitchell into a gifted comic actor in his own right. But ultimately, the highlight of this first salvo of new shows was a prancing Charles Darwin explaining the ch-ch-changes of evolutionary theory via an exquisite David Bowie pastiche. Horribly good.

While some panel shows are having trouble finding their footing, Would I Lie To You? just seems to keep going from strength to strength.

Rob Brydon, David Mitchell and Lee Mack seem to make a perfect team. There's so many angles for them to play with: Mitchell's poshness verses Mack's working class background; Mitchell's southerness and Mack's northerness; Mitchell and Mack's Englishness verses Brydon's Welshness, and so on.

There is one significant change to this new series, however, that being the show is now on before the watershed. This, for me, is a worry. You may remember that this happened to QI when it moved to BBC One, which ended up as a failure and resulted in QI moving back...

However, it would seem that it's survived this changed. The show seems to be just as funny as ever, especially the bit when Mack trying to claim that his ex-girlfriend's names spell out the world "Bermuda". The guests, Alexander Armstrong, Mel Giedroyc, Alex Jones and Chris Tarrant, provided much amusement too.

WILTY remains fresh enough to stake a claim as the funniest panel show on TV.

It helps that the team captains are perfect in their roles, each bringing a specific style of humour to proceedings: David Mitchell's logical dissection of someone's story can sometimes get wearisome, but usually it's a delight to see him analyse things with such comical scrutiny; while opponent Lee Mack plays looser with the rules and manages to create a feeling of uncertainty because he adopts a level of ineptness in his truth-telling that might sometimes be a double-bluff. There's also comedy mined from how middle-class southerner Mitchell and working class northerner Mack (now that's a double-act name, Robert Webb!) are from different backgrounds and upbringings.

The only problem facing WILTY is that, as time goes on, you wonder if Mitchell and Mack will run out of stories that are sufficiently funny/bizarre enough to sound false. Not that the show relies on their stories alone, but I hope they each have good anecdotes left to squeeze out before everything they say becomes a lie because they've exhausted the truth. This is a problem that doesn't affect the rotation of guests, thankfully.

Now in its sixth series, WILTY? remains fresh enough to stake a claim as the funniest panel show on TV. This is probably because it's more of a parlour gameshow than most others in the genre-which are often quiz-based because it's easier to attach scripted jokes to that format. WILTY?'s more like Call My Bluff, only with humorous anecdotes replacing esoteric words. Two teams of three celebrities tell each other personal stories (sometimes with the aid of props) in order to trick the opposing side into thinking the yarn is gospel truth or a barefaced lie. More often than not, this makes for a highly amusing half-hour of trickery and repartee.

It helps that the team captains are perfect in their roles, each bringing a specific style of humour to proceedings: David Mitchell's logical dissection of someone's story can sometimes get wearisome, but usually it's a delight to see him analyse things with such comical scrutiny; while opponent Lee Mack plays looser with the rules and manages to create a feeling of uncertainty because he adopts a level of ineptness in his truth-telling that might sometimes be a double-bluff. There's also comedy mined from how middle-class southerner Mitchell and working class northerner Mack (now that's a double-act name, Robert Webb!) are from different backgrounds and upbringings.

The only problem facing WILTY? is that, as time goes on, you wonder if Mitchell and Mack will run out of stories that are sufficiently funny/bizarre enough to work. Not that the show relies on their stories alone, but I hope they each have good anecdotes left to squeeze out before everything they say becomes a lie because they've exhausted the truth. This is a problem that doesn't affect the rotation of guests, thankfully.

If you were thinking Friday nights had become a little joyless lately, here's good news. The best panel shows around are back to make BBC1's end-of-week comedy desert bloom again.

First, Rob Brydon wheels his festival of half-truths, fantasy and implausible facts back into view. It's in a new, pre-watershed time slot, which means some of the more colourful exchanges between team captains Lee Mack and David Mitchell will be reined in. But their exaggerated oik/toff banter should still be one of the funniest things on TV.

Ed Reardon - celebrated creator of an episode of Tenko, ghostwriter for z-list celebrities and, sometimes, their pets - is back, and this time he's happy. So happy, in fact, that his facial muscles have difficulty in adjusting to this new emotional experience.

Reardon fans, who include RT's very own Alison Graham and Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman, need not fear that his inner rage at the injustices of modern life or, more specifically, his life has been dampened. He begins by railing against the happy young women they place on the front of broadsheet newspapers who have just passed their GCSEs with flying colours. Why can't they show abject failures, he wants to know? And why does even the sport section of said papers have to contain a wry look at the world by David Mitchell? Why not just give him his own damn section and have done with it?

Life has certainly improved for Ed since he took up with 1960s model Fiona (played by Jenny Agutter) - she's going to fly him on an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris - but can this spate of happiness last? No, of course not. An attempt to get his passport renewed ends in the squalid disaster we have come to expect from genius writers Andrew Nickolds and Christopher Middleton. Who'd have thought a company called Merkury Kouriers could invoke such disdain?

David Mitchell and Victoria Coren announce engagement

David Mitchell has announced he's engaged to his TV presenter and poker-playing girlfriend Victoria Coren today.

This is Sarah Millican's first steps into a television series of her own, after appearing on nearly every panel show under the sun!

There have been complaints from some quarters that Sarah Millican's possibly the most overexposed comedian currently around. I personally don't think that's the case. Yes, she appears on a lot of panel shows, but she always the guest - she doesn't host any or appear as a team captain, unlike David Mitchell for example.

The Sarah Millican Television Programme is part stand-up, part talk show. Each show covers two different television genres, this week being "animals" and "dating", with the guidance of a guest expert (Chris Packham and Tracey Cox respectively). It has to be said that she seemed to look a bit uncomfortable dealing with this format and perhaps the given material, but I don't doubt she'll soon cope with it as the series goes along.

Millican is certainly funny and the show is very good, but it does have one or two problems, namely with video cameras. There's annoying gimmickry with the "Millicam" in which a video camera is sent into the studio audience and certain people answer Millican's questions. The main problem, though, is that they also filmed the audience members holding the Millicam, so the Millicam instantly becomes redundant...

Then there was Sarah's guest interview with her own father Phillip, during which she wore a silly headcam, which gets one laugh at the beginning but then of course just becomes rather tiresome.

However, other than those minor issues, I'd recommend you giving The Sarah Millican Television Programme a viewing.

Is Alexander Armstrong the poshest man in comedy?

More so than Miranda Hart, Stephen Fry and David Mitchell, Alexander Armstrong seems to be the acceptable face of posh comedy.