It's up to you whether you regard the hacking scandal as more tragedy or farce. Guy Jenkin sees it as the latter, so the Drop the Dead Donkey co-creator brings us another news comedy. This time it's a scurrilous red-top called the Sunday Comet, which may, purely in your imagination of course, feel like a broad caricature of, say, the News of the World at its height (or depths). Only a clip was available, but highlights look to be Celia Imrie as a royal expert and an Australian proprietor played by Michael Kitchen.

"This is the story of a British tabloid newspaper," says the on-screen message at the start of Hacks. "Obviously everything in it is made up." Then, for the next hour, Guy Jenkin's satirical look at you know which story chronicles recent events remarkably accurately. Not the boring bits - the most outrageous, and the most fun. It is fun. And very, very silly.

Claire Foy is properly good as the pushy moral vacuum of an editor. Kayvan Novak - Fonejacker turned phone hacker - is hilarious as an investigative reporter who specialises in the art of disguise and whose resemblance to a real investigative reporter who specialises in the art of disguise is obviously purely coincidental. Likewise Alexander Armstrong as "David Bullingdon", the posh twat who somehow gets to run the country. (From now on we must all refer to the PM as David Bullingdon, OK? And that includes you, Mr Miliband.)

But Guy Jenkin's master stroke is to give Wendy De ... sorry, "Ho Chi Mao Feast", the position at the heart of the story she clearly merits. Her brutal attack on the protester at the hearing - during which she repeatedly and ferociously bashes his head with her high heel until the blood spatters the select committee - is a joy.

Hacks: the satire that puts the tabloids in the stocks

Someone somewhere was always eventually going to make a scabrous comedy out of the phone hacking scandal. We should give thanks that that person is Guy Jenkin, the co-writer of long-running Nineties newsroom comedy, Drop the Dead Donkey...

It didn't take long for the first phone hacking comedy to make it to our screens. This hour-long swipe at the tabloid scandal, written by Guy Jenkin of Drop the Dead Donkey fame, is set at The Daily Comet, where staff land stories by any means necessary. Phone hacking, entrapment, blagging... the hacks here do it all. Press baron Stanhope Feast (Michael Kitchen, playing a gruff Antipodean magnate with a young Asian wife) demands some big exclusives from his flame-haired editor Kate Loy (Claire Foy). But her moral compass went awry some time ago and it's about to cause a major scandal. The salty script is peppered with political references, while a colourful cast includes Nigel Planer and Celia Imrie.

An anthropologist of the future wanting to study the life of British children in the early 21st century would have a field day with Outnumbered, the sitcom beloved of the middle classes because it so precisely seems to reflect their lives.

In the opening episode of the fourth series, shown on Friday, daughter Karen is having a conversation with her mother, Sue, who has just started to work full-time. "It's a mum's duty to pick up her children from school," she opines.

When her mother points out that she herself might like to work when she grows up, her retort is swift: "See, you're getting aggressive. That's what happens to women who work like men. They start turning into men. They get hairy chests and they smash up town centres." Sue exclaims in exasperation, but Karen barely looks up from her colouring. "You're getting aggressive. You'll get hairy." As a mother who works full time and spends a lot of the rest of my life sitting around kitchen tables having remarkably similar chats with my offspring, the exchange made me rock both with laughter and recognition. It is this sense of shared experience that has made Outnumbered, written by Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin, but also partly improvised by its cast, such a success.

Whereas most television sitcoms, such as My Family, which preceded it on screen last week, rely on incident, plot and comic misunderstanding to raise a laugh, Outnumbered is always at its best when its characters are simply bumbling through the mundane business of their lives: the fight over the Wii controller, the cheese stuck in the toaster, the dinosaur melted in the microwave, the keys which vanish just as you are leaving home.

It is particularly sharp on the vagaries of modern language: this week's conversations about the use of the word "gay" could have been recorded in many homes as a generation of school children apply it in the new sense of "feeble" to the horror of their parents who have co-opted it (against the wishes of a previous generation) to mean homosexual. The glee of the children when their father described the Wii controller as a "nunchuck" - "you said you'd never say that, you said that it wasn't a real word" - was equally astute.

From the anthropological point of view, however, it is the way in which the children behave that is of most interest. The family depicted in Outnumbered is one where the children rule: their parents are hapless, helpless adjuncts to the kids' power. It is not only that the youngsters argue each and every point. It is that on many occasions - such as Karen's decision to attend her uncle's funeral - they get their own way against the wishes of their parents.

In this way, Outnumbered depicts the sea change in behaviour in which a generation brought up to be submissive to its parents, finds itself once again in thrall - but this time to its children. For all its humour, it is essentially true.

Outnumbered: Leader of the comedy revolution?

Combining fine actor improvisation, a smart script and some relatively innocuous storylines to paint a familiar picture of the 'joys' of family life, Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin's creation has amassed enough prizes to make Alex Ferguson go green-eyed. But with the kids another year older I wondered if it could still cut it.

The Brockmans are the most convincing sitcom family since the Royles. The last episode in the latest series of Outnumbered was, as usual, perfectly pitched between exquisite gag-packed comedy and fleeting moments of unsentimental family drama.

But even when dealing with Pete's drunken indiscretion with another woman, or little Karen's road accident, writers Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin never lost sight of their comic intent. Instead, Karen expressed disappointment that dad had broken his wedding vows - "the vicar's going to be furious" - before harassing a kindly nurse with tacit threats of legal action if her jab hurt more than just "a tiny bit" as promised.

The subtly touching closing scene, in which the realistically reunited parents left hospital with a bandaged Karen, as she wittered on delightfully, said more about enduring family ties than any number of schmaltzy homilies.

Although the youngest kids in Outnumbered are exasperating, they're also unaffectedly charming and clearly far funnier and more real than any other children in sitcom history. Partly improvised by child actors Ramona Marquez and Daniel Roche, their skewed righteousness, ruthless inquisitiveness and semi-logical flights of fancy appear to be an endless source of inspired comedy. I just can't work out whether it's a good thing or not that one of the funniest comedy performers in Britain is a partially scripted nine-year-old girl.

One of the many great things about Outnumbered is that it's lovable without being nauseating; the humour is warm, but not cloying. Everything gels. There are great scripts from Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin, and a super cast: Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner as sweetly exasperated parents Pete and Sue, and a trio of astonishing child actors.

In normal years, The Royle Family would be the sitcom special to be most keenly anticipated, but after last Christmas's aberration, "The New Sofa", judgement should be reserved on Caroline Aherne's latest reunion, "The Golden Egg Cup" (Christmas Day, 9pm BBC1). For unalloyed excitement, the 'Outnumbered Christmas Special' has me slathering at the chops. It's Boxing Day, and Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin's recognisably modern metropolitan family, the Brockmans, has been burgled - and I don't mean harassed parents Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner getting every scene stolen from under their noses by the improvising child actors, Tyger-Drew Honey, Daniel Roche and Ramona Marquez.