Jane Simon

Don't get too excited about the reappearance of Outnumbered. This repeat of the first episode of series two is just plugging an awkward gap in the TV schedules and the rest of the series won't be following. The family are at the wedding of Sue's cousin Julie - and young Karen (Ramona Marquez), the undisputed star of the show, is chief bridesmaid, quizzing the bride relentlessly on her dubious taste in boyfriends. While we wait for a third series to materialise, there are plenty of other TV shows where Karen's unique world view and unwavering style of interrogation could - and should - be employed. Hosting Have I Got News For You, standing in for Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, interviewing suspects on The Bill... She's far too good to waste on just sitcoms.

I don't know what to make of Krod Mandoon - but it doesn't matter, because Sean Maguire looks absolutely amazing. I haven't been keeping a close eye on his career lately and I realise now that this was a mistake.

After EastEnders he went off to become a pop star and mope about in Dangerfield before becoming massive - in every sense - enjoying a successful TV career in the States and bulking up for movie spoof Meet The Spartans. All I can say is - wow! - in a professional sense, of course.

Krod Mandoon - also starring Matt Lucas as evil Chancellor Dongalor - is a medieval spoof. A bit Robin Hood, a bit Blackadder, a bit Shrek, a bit Monty Python And The Holy Grail - although sadly with much, much weaker jokes. This shouldn't come as much of a surprise as it was written by Peter Knight, whose CV includes something called Big Wolf On Campus. What is a surprise though is that the best thing about it is Maguire, who stars as the extremely buff, sword-carrying freedom fighter Krod Mandoon.

Just to underline the cheesiness of it all, he plays it with a flawless American accent, and his girlfriend, pagan warrior Aneka (India de Beaufort) will definitely get the guy vote too. You'll love it or hate it, but you'll be driven mad trying to work out who's under the pageboy bob of Chancellor Dongalor's henchman. Take a bow Holby City's snide (and bald) anaesthetist Keith Greene (Alex MacQueen).

If Krod Mandoon had been written by the same small army of writers who came up with this, it'd be really on to a winner. Much has been said about the death of the sketch show, but this first episode of the boys' third series made me laugh out loud so many times I was unable to make proper notes. Their deconstruction of The Apprentice is absolutely spot on. And after Robert Webb wowed us with his Flashdance for Comic Relief, it's extraordinary to discover how perfectly suited he is to the role of Queen Victoria. A stand-out sketch involving the gift of a tree is pure, rude genius and allows David Mitchell as her Prime Minister (I'm guessing from the beard it's the Marquess of Salisbury) to go off on a rant that plays brilliantly to his pompous strengths. It could almost be Peep Show in Victorian dress. Now there's an idea...

The past four weeks have been a fun and charming ride, but as we reach the final episode, it's obvious that the plot has painted itself into a bit of a corner. The only possible outcome of this farce must be they will somehow return to their old bodies - which will of course depend on lightning striking twice in the same place.

Now that he's mastered walking in heels and applying eyeliner (the only skills any woman needs obviously) Danny is rather enjoying being Veronica and having Fiona in love with him. And he's in no hurry to return to his previous grotty existence. Interestingly, the scene where Veronica's friend Siobhan catches her in bed with Fiona and then phones to deliver a stern telling off about how this is hurting her boyfriend suggests that writer David Allison doesn't really know women as well as he thinks. A real best friend would of course turn up at Veronica's with a bottle of wine and make lots of supportive and sympathetic noises while all the time making sure that she's brought up to speed on every last scandalous detail.

Small-time dope dealer Moz is now even smaller as it's a relatively svelte looking Johnny Vegas who returns for a fifth series.

And there's good news for those shell-shocked by the apparent death of his friend Jenny at the end of series four. Turns out she's not dead, she's in a persistent vegetative state - and there's arguably more intelligent brain waves going on in her head now than we ever saw from her before.

From her vantage point propped up in bed in Moz's living room, she sees the world now in a series of song and dance numbers - making a series that was already on the edges of weird just that little bit weirder.

By way of making amends, Moz announces that he's giving up dealing - a development that none of his regular stream of oddball clients can quite get their heads around. And every one of them is convinced that they can snap Jenny out it.

Although as Moz points out: "She's in a coma. Not in a sulk."

If you found yourself trapped in the wrong body, would anyone believe you? That's the predicament facing Veronica and Danny in week two of the sweetly subversive gender-swapping comedy.

Rachael Stirling still has the best time of it as she tries to get her new man's brain around the vagaries of fashion while fending off the romantic advances of her sock-ironing boyfriend Jay (Paterson Joseph).

For Martin Freeman, who now has the body of a DIY store worker and the mind of a frothy fashion journalist, life is an endless round of police cells as he doesn't even know his own name.

But he does know Veronica's name - so why doesn't he simply phone her, instead of constantly barging into her office and home like a total loon?

But there are two more weeks left, so the two leads must be kept apart a little longer. For now, enjoy their discomfort and some lovely performances as they discover how the other half lives.

Danny Reed is a woman trapped in a man's body. Or is it the other way around? Martin Freeman and Rachael Stirling star in this gender-swapping switcheroo comedy where, after a lightning strike, two strangers wake up to find that they've traded places.

Although Martin Freeman is the better known of the two, it's Stirling - best known for her role in Tipping The Velvet as well as for being Diana Rigg's daughter - who gets the lion's share of screen time in this first episode.

With the body of Veronica but the brain of Danny, her reactions as she - or he - discovers she now has a handsome boyfriend (Peep Show's Paterson Joseph) and a luxury apartment are a wonderful mixture of horror and delight.

Mind you, not even a lightning strike can explain why the front page story on the local Manchester newspaper Veronica works for is about a traffic jam in Dublin.

As Danny and Veronica try to find their missing selves, this four-parter has a lot in common with ITV's recent hit Lost In Austen, because once Danny has stopped playing with his own breasts, he sees all the tosh women supposedly have to put up with and he's having none of it. In that respect, you can tell it was written by a man.

But while the cliches are impossible to avoid - and we'd feel cheated if they weren't there - they're handled deftly enough to sweep you along.

Reactions to this remake have been pretty mixed and if things don't pick up in week two, the BBC could find that it's the viewers who are doing a disappearing act.

Tonight finds Martin Clunes's Reggie having trouble with office small talk and a visit to his company's sympathetic Wellness Person is called for. There are also unwanted visits from his mother and father-in-law to contend with - and Geoffrey Whitehead and Wendy Craig, in particular, have both been pulled from the BBC's bottomless pit of stupidly posh-voiced thesps.

Like the show's ill-judged laughter track (the weaker the gag, the bigger the laugh), these cardboard cut-out characters are harder to believe in than Reggie's flights of fantasy - although Clunes continues to do a heroic job conveying Reggie's disconnection with the rest of the human race.

You'd have to be very brave or very foolish to tackle a remake of classic 1970s sitcom The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin. As this was written by the novel's author David Nobbs together with Men Behaving Badly creator Simon Nye, it's definitely a gamble worth taking.

It helps that Martin Clunes, who has the unenviable task of stepping into Leonard Rossiter's shoes as the downtrodden office man, looks nothing like the 70s star. Viewers who remember the original will be preoccupied with making comparisons. So what else is different?

Modernisation means that even Reggie's fantasy life must be politically correct - so no more hippo fantasies. And as his boss Chris Jackson, Neil Stuke has a the difficult job of measuring up to John Barron's masterful CJ.

What is strange is the fanciful excuses Reggie used to give each morning for why he was late now sound exactly like announcements commuters hear every day. "Wrong kind of passenger at South Norwood?" Why not?

If you aren't familiar with the Radio 4 series, the best way of describing this format is Dragons' Den meets Room 101.

Members of the public pitch their ideas for useful inventions or innovations to the host Dave Gorman and a celebrity guest - tonight it's Catherine Tate - who then debate with increasing hilarity whether their idea is truly worthy of the label genius.

To give you some idea, the sort of brainwaves that got the thumbs-up on the radio in the past ranged from the eminently practical - selling socks in threes, rather than in pairs - to the surreal: running the House of Commons to the same rules as the panel show Just A Minute.

The advantage of TV, of course, is that we can see what prototypes of these ideas might look like and get some idea of how well - or not - they would work.

For instance, a bus whose journey gets decided by a democratic vote by the passengers sounds ludicrous enough on paper but, in practice, it's completely round the bend.