Johnny Vegas

Oh joy! Buoyed by its deserved win at last month's National Television Awards, the sun-licked, unashamedly bawdy sitcom is back to beat away those February blues. And, yes, that really is Cilla Black playing herself - and giving the Garveys a far frostier reception at her villa than the holiday snap below implies. The big question is: what's happened to Madge and her fortune? Fear not, the vinegary gran has survived the interseason cast cull (unlike poor Johnny Vegas) and, when she does show up, bears an alarming resemblance to Ben Gunn from Treasure Island. Other delicious frights include Tim Healy as a roller-skating cocktail waitress throttling real-life missus Denise Welch, who's butched up as debt-collecting Scary Mary. And almost the entire ensemble joins in the final, chokingly funny poolside brawl.

Cilla Black plays herself (appallingly) as the sitcom returns even broader, perhaps too broad and lacking Johnny Vegas more than ever. Good enough to hold your attention but now feels stretched at an hour.

"Fast-moving" is somehow still too slow a phrase to describe Not Going Out, a sitcom that doesn't physically move much further than a similar flat-based show like Johnny Vegas's Ideal, but does so at three or four times the rate. Lee Mack writes and stars as displaced Lee in the flatshare comedy, where tonight things take a potentially sinister turn when Tim returns from a work do with a pocketful of a suspicious powder. Not a lot of soul, but plenty of what US comedy writers call "yucks", so it's worth checking out if you haven't yet.

Interview: Jo Enright

Jaffa Cakes, Sainsbury's, Nescafe. Actress turned stand-up Jo Enright has voiced ads for them all. The 42-year-old has also appeared in TV ratings winners such as I'm Alan Partridge, and Ideal, with Johnny Vegas.

A cute kitten being pecked to death by a robin on a Christmas card would have been funnier than this jumble of a play by Andy Lynch (again), here assisted by Johnny Vegas. Vegas also played Les Dawson. The plot concerned Dawson being a surprise appointment to host the BBC's top Saturday evening attraction of yesteryear, Blankety Blank. The character action was between Dawson and a disapproving BBC executive, played by Nicholas Parsons. It sounded like a bundle of unwashed insecurities being laundered in public as well as a waste of the serious talents of Nicholas Parsons, the best straight man in the business.

Johnny Vegas used to be the ubiquitous clown of the moment but, having been promoted as the most unpredictable man in light entertainment, became slightly too unpredictable and now seems required to attempt reinvention as a character actor. The acute afternoon play he co-wrote, Chequebook and Pen, conjured up the ghost of Les Dawson, with Vegas doing an impassioned impression of the comedian in his awkward Blankety Blank days. Nicholas Parsons, who happily seems to have forgotten where self-parody lies, was the dame of the piece, playing himself as a devious game-show host rival.

Vegas's play discovered a moral of its own in the compromises Dawson was forced to make to become a prime-time star; in a bravura closing argument, he put the case that creativity had nothing to do with packaging or consumers but was all about "doing what you believe is right and doing it your way". Try telling that to Simon Cowell.

Does that title ring a bell? Can you hear Les Dawson saying it as he presented the humble prizes on Blankety Blank? This play, starring Johnny Vegas, co-written by him with Andrew Lynch, imagines how the BBC might have engaged the great Les (played by Vegas) back in the 1980s, to host the prime-time show. Nicholas Parsons plays Farson, embodiment of traditional forces at the BBC, opponent of all the comic subversion Les stood for, his nemesis. It's fiction. How I wish the late Mike Craig, comedy producer, were still around to discuss it on Front Row.

Sky Arts is doing its bit to promote drama, launching a series of Chekhov Comedy Shorts to celebrate the playwright's 150th anniversary.

The opener, A Reluctant Tragic Hero, sticks Johnny Vegas and Mackenzie Crook in a lavishly dressed but irredeemably stagey drawing room set, where the topic under discussion is domestic purgatory. Well, Vegas not so much discusses as rants, while Crook fills half an hour with an admirably extensive set of facial responses.

While entertaining enough, the play never quite takes off.

Vegas, for all his energy and charisma, never appears comfortable with the text. Also, somebody should have told Chekhov that the play's pay-off gag is a bit on the weak side.

Johnny Vegas is perhaps someone you would not automatically associate with Anton Chekhov. Likewise Mackenzie Crook. But here they are in Chekhov: Comedy Shorts (Sky Arts 2). In this first one, A Reluctant Tragic Hero, Vegas plays Tolkachov, a man at the very end of his tether, fed up with running tedious shopping errands for his family. Crook is Murashkin, Tolkachov's mate, who should be - tries to be - sympathetic, but then gets it all wrong and adds to poor Tolkachov's problems.

And hey, it works. Vegas gets to do what he's designed to do - make a lot of noise and be miserable (he has tragedy built into his features). Crook gets to say not very much, be a bit gormless, and have a long, hollow face. Which suits him fine, too. Nineteeth-century Russia could easily be 21st-century anywhere; I guess that - the continuing relevance - is what makes Chekhov a dude. Hey, who said this column can't do serious literary criticism?

Anyway, they're quite good fun, and there are more to come, with other unlikely Chekhovian actors including Steve Coogan, Julia Davies and Mathew Horne. Bring 'em on.