Jane Simon

In the first of tonight's two BBC3 pilots, Leo Richardson's stage play transfers to the screen in a riot of txt speak, Lambrini and adolescent angst like a teenage Sex And The City set in the suburbs of Croydon.

Holliday Grainger plays the beautiful but slutty Dirty Debbie, whose scatter-gun approach to love wreaks havoc among her more sensitive friends and neighbours.

Among the grown-ups look out for Sharon Horgan, unrecognisable as Debbie's Auntie Pat, while the young cast are all eye-catching and plausible, like a walking manual to noughties etiquette. "I can't follow everyone who follows me (on Twitter)," complains the lovely Ben. "How would that look? That's like Facebook."

Catherine Johnson is most famous for writing the hit musical and movie Mamma Mia! In this pilot, she delivers a cheery take on broken Britain with her tale of two best mates - "dappers" in Bristol-speak, apparently - Faye and Ashley, and their two toddler daughters.

They're not strictly single mums. Ashley's boyfriend Ryan is still on the scene, although he's more of a liability than a help.

Lenora Crichlow (Annie the ghost from Being Human) stars opposite Ty Glaser (who briefly played posh blonde Libby Charles in Emmerdale).

The laboured accents get in the way of the performances and the girls' attempts to earn cash come straight out of the Big Sitcom Book Of Cliches but there's a nice energy about these friends on benefits (not to be confused with Friends With Benefits).

"They're Del Boy and Rodders in thongs," is how Ryan describes them - and you might think that's recommendation enough. The kids are sweet, too.

Sky has said it's trying to build a reputation for drama, and it's certainly going the right way about it. This adaptation of Sir Terry Pratchett's 33rd Discworld novel concludes tonight and it's a gloriously-realised, filmic vision of the fantasy universe.

It follows Sky's recent adaptations of Pratchett's Hogfather and The Colour Of Money, as well as bestsellers by Martina Cole and Chris Ryan. And with 20 more feature-length films in the works, all based on novels, Sky is definitely going to be giving the other channels a run for their money drama-wise.

Tonight opens excitingly, with the Ankh-Morpork post office in flames and under threat of closure from a flying banshee. The stellar cast is headed by Richard Coyle as conman-turned-postmaster Moist von Lipwig and Claire Foy as Adora Belle Dearheart.

But it's the spectacular scenery and special effects that make this an absolutely first-class show.

Few things are guaranteed to make you panic quite so much as someone telling you not to. That's certainly the case in the last episode of the current series as Jake has to break news of a very worrying phone call to his dad.

With Pete and Sue's marriage rocky this week after he drunkenly kissed another woman, the Brockmans are really going through the mill. But thanks to the resilient skin of young boys all this is water off a duck's back to Ben, who is occupied elsewhere re-enacting his latest battle and attempting to become the first man to scale Everest (or the stairs at any rate) backwards without oxygen.

And Jake is about to discover that even family disasters can have a silver lining of sorts when Kelly - the object of his first serious teenage crush - is recruited to babysit him and his brother. As always though, it's Karen who steals the show during an earnestly hilarious conversation with a nurse in A&E.

As another series ends you can't help but wonder how long Ben and Karen's reign will last and what sort of performers the actors who play them will eventually grow into. Daniel Roche who plays Ben already looks like Alan Davies's tiny stunt-double, while Ramona Marquez would be able to reduce politicians to tears with a line of questioning and logic that would shame Jeremy Paxman.

The family-centred improv' comedy has been a bit patchy of late but this episode is a corker. Tonight it's not just the kids who have been misbehaving, as Sue (Claire Skinner) discovers when she checks Pete's (Hugh Dennis) mobile for messages. But there's no time for a heart-to-heart when the kids are about.

If it's not Jake (Tyger Drew-Honey) turning the garden into a watery war zone, it's Karen (Ramona Marquez) asking if it's ever OK to hit a classmate.

Meanwhile, Pete's worried about the impending clash as Sue's sister Angela (Samantha Bond) turns up with her new husband (Douglas Hodge). While the adults struggle to remain civil, the children call a spade a spade - or, in Jake's case, reel off 18 names for a part of the male anatomy. Nudity and toilet habits also feature - but that's kids for you.

Indeed, some families might see this comedy more as a documentary. A funny one, mind.

If you missed last week's episode I urge you to check it out on the BBC's iPlayer. In it we saw documentary-maker Brendan (one of the three deluded wannabes all played by Marc Wootton) pitch his idea for a climbing disaster documentary to a Hollywood producer. "Right, it'll look like an accident. Boom, this is what just happened to happen and, boom, then you're filming it... That could work. Absolutely..."

In practice, Wootton earns himself a lifelong pedestal in the pranksters' hall of fame, right next to Borat.

This week, Brendan's big idea is to release a condor into the wild. And he has persuaded a passer-by to pretend to be an ecology expert. Also tonight, aspiring actor Gary Garner films his show-reel and fake psychic Shirley Ghostman drugs the competition at an audition for a new show called Spirited.

If there are TVs in the afterlife, you can bet Jeremy Beadle will have La La Land on series link.

Anyone remember BBC3 series High Spirits With Shirley Ghostman? Back in 2005, the fake medium, played by comedian Marc Wootton, raised merry hell on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross with some extremely offensive jokes about cancer patients.

Well, Shirley's back from the dead tonight in this hilarious new comedy series which sees Wootton playing three Brits who are all trying to make their mark in H­ollywood. As well as Shirley, there are wannabe documentary maker Brendan Allen and Gary Garner, an East London taxi driver who reckons he's got what it takes to be the next Jason Statham.

Taking a massive leaf out of Borat's book, all the people Shirley, Gary and Brendan meet in Los Angeles are real and have absolutely no idea they're being set up. It makes for some fantastically cringe-worthy encounters, for instance when we watch Brendan (a cross between Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock) pitching his idea for what he thinks is a brand-new kind of shark documentary to an incredulous and increasingly exasperated producer.

And wideboy Gary somehow befriends veteran actrees Ruta Lee and blags himself studio time with A-list ­snapper Lennon, whose patience quickly wears thinner than a size-zero supermodel. Shirley, meanwhile, has actually talked his way into getting an actual publicist on board to help him escape the scandal he left behind back in the UK.

La La Land is a genius idea, brilliantly executed and we can't wait to see what this talentless trio gets up to next.

If you are a fan of Ricky Gervais then you're probably also a fan of his podcasts. They became the most downloaded podcasts of all time, with something ridiculous like eight million downloads.

Technology has yet to come up with a word for what we should call it when old podcasts are turned into cartoons and then shown on TV.

If you watched Channel 4's Comedy Gala on Easter Monday - when Ricky, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington contributed their thoughts on swimming with dolphins - you'll have seen how they, and their pointless ramblings, have been turned into Hanna-Barbera style animation. In short, it's genius.

The double bill of episodes shown tonight to kick off the series was recorded back in 2005 but given a new lease of life with the addition of pictures - and with Ricky Gervais drawn as a modern-day Fred Flintstone, they couldn't be fresher or funnier.

If this is all new to you, you'll find out tonight why Pilkington - the pair's former producer at radio station Xfm with the alleged perfectly round head - has been described by Gervais as the funniest man on the planet.

His deadpan musings on dinosaurs, monkeys in space, haunted houses and sexy metal pants are the backbone to these chats, while the other two laugh hysterically and shout him down as a gullible buffoon.

And now, for the first time, you can actually see what Karl's fantasies might actually look like. His mad theory on why air travel is intrinsically wrong, may also be of some comfort now to the millions who were affected by the volcano cloud.

The series started in the US a couple of months ago. What the Americans will have made to references to Derek Acorah, heaven only knows. Still, who cares? These three belong to us - a trio of national treasures. Fact.

Having recently endured a colonoscopy in real life, Hugh Dennis must have thought he'd heard all possible jokes about bums and cameras. But Ramona and Ben dream up some more tonight when his character Pete is due to have the same procedure.

Tonight's theme - if this collection of non-sequiturs can claim a theme - is Why It's Wrong To Treat Women As Sex Objects Or Domestic Servants. But there's more comedy in the bit with Ramona re-enacting The Apprentice with her stuffed toys.

Speaking of TV, Jake and his dad have very different tastes as Pete moans about Making Of... shows. "TV shows are like pork pies," moans Pete. "They're fantastic but you don't want to know what goes in them." Which might explain why he now needs to have a camera shoved up his insides.

Passion is a word that's bandied about a lot on reality TV programmes. But I've never seen anyone so tirelessly dedicated to putting that passion into action as I have in this show.

Fake pigeons dangling from wires, an alcoholic bird and a woman who can talk to animals. These are the surreal ingredients of the return of C4's Comedy Lab pilots tonight. Coincidentally, there's also a talking dog you could describe as a comedy lab - as in Labrador.

If you're a fan of BBC4's Flight Of The Conchords you'll recognise US comedian Kristen Schaal, who stars as Penelope and wrote this with her pal and co-star Kurt Braunohler.

The Mighty Boosh's Julian Barratt plays an MP who Penelope has just 3,762 days to assassinate. It's funny, charming and daffy but will it make a series?