Stag is 'Bullingdon Club meets The Revenant'

Hitting television screens later this week is a brilliant new dark comedy from BBC Two that evokes the likes of Boris Johnson and David Cameron with Tom Hardy and Leonardo DiCaprio on a nightmare weekend in Scotland.

Six main actors and supporting cast play a variety of roles in the Horrible Histories' take on William Shakespeare's lost years. The Bard had tried being in a band but it didn't work out so it's off to London for fame and fortune and a nasty Spanish Catholic plot to kill Queen Elizabeth I.

It's all a hoot with touches of Python, Blackadder and The Young Ones as the great and the good of Elizabethan England tread the boards. Damian Lewis does a cameo as Sir Richard Hawkins, Ben Willbond hams it up as King Philip II of Spain with his trio of assassins, miserable Christopher Marlow (Jim Howick) helps the Bard and Helen McCrory is all you hope for as Elizabeth I.

Great fun but will it fill the big screen?

Radio Times review

One of the many strengths of this show is the guarantee that there'll be an entirely new, entirely brilliant comic character to enjoy in every episode, in addition to the magic kingdom's regulars. The other week the team even had the nerve to create tremendous womaniser Philip of Woolworth, then kill him off after only one hilarious scene.

Tonight there's another lothario, who lasts a bit longer as he attempts to woo Debbie (Martha Howe-Douglas): King Bernard (Jim Howick) joins her on her latest quest, but he's more interested in his planned statue of himself. The blowsy love ballad Bernard sings to try to make Debbie his queen is terrific, as is Laurence Rickard's episode-stealing turn as Chamberlain, Bernard's disgusted manservant who has long since resorted to burning sarcasm.

Yonderland does preening, benign fools as well as any comedy. But now Debbie also, finally, meets the realm's less benign fool: Negatus.

Mat Baynton and Jim Howick on Yonderland and more...

In the last of this week's chats with the cast and creators of Yonderland, here's Mat Baynton and Jim Howick...

I think the best way to start the review of this programme is with the following statement: Peep Show is better than Father Ted.

I know that according to Channel 4's Greatest Comedy Show Father Ted's is better, but it's wrong. It's merely more popular. Peep Show's funnier because of the writing, the plot devices, the innovative camera work, the quality of the performances and the darkness of the humour and characters. Peep Show may never have attracted more than 2 million viewers for a single episode, but the quality of it stands.

Peep Show returned with its usual mix of darkness and desperation, thanks to the struggling lives of flatmates Mark and Jez (David Mitchell and Robert Webb). At the start of this series, Mark is trying to get Jez out of the flat so his love Dobby (Isy Suttie) can move in. Mark's plans are so desperate; he even thinks breaking Dobby's microwave will help. Also, Mark gets a job tip from - of all people - Super Hans (Matt King), Jez decides to undergo therapy, and the health of Mark's love rival Gerrard (Jim Howick) takes a turn for the worse.

There's so much to like in this opening episode, including Jez's somewhat paranoid display when he attends his therapy session, to the horrifying consequences which result when Mark tries to prevent Isy from seeing Gerrard. One interesting plot device which seems to be sprouting is Jeff (Neil Fitzmaurice), now living with Sophie (Olivia Colman), getting a bit too close to Mark's baby son Ian for his liking...

The award-winning sitcom returns for an eighth series after a gap of two years. Starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb as a flat-sharing odd couple (as the original tagline put it, "two very ordinary weirdos") the show, written by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, has never attracted a mainstream audience but retains a dedicated cult following and deserves its reputation as one of the best sitcoms around. It is also the longest-running sitcom in Channel 4 history.

Despite the long interval, we pick up exactly where season seven left off - with Mark (Mitchell) trying to eject Jeremy (Webb) from the flat in order to install his love interest Dobby (Isy Suttie). But neither seems eager to comply with Mark's plans. In fact, Dobby is more concerned for the welfare of Mark's chief love rival Gerrard (Jim Howick) who's milking a flu attack for all its worth; while Mark's efforts to move Jeremy on by funding some psychotherapy sessions prove predictably futile. Meanwhile Super Hans (Matt King) has traded in his musical ambitions for a job in a bathroom fittings firm and suggests Mark try out for a position there too - something he's determined to go for even when tragedy intervenes.

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.