Keith Watson

You could graffiti a whole train carriage with the influences at play in Misfits. This fresh stab at a British superpower thriller is a little bit Heroes, a little bit Hostel, with slithers of Skins, Power Rangers and Dead Set thrown in for good measure. Yet from that messy mix, writer Howard Overman has somehow contrived something that feels fresh and original. Making a virtue of its zero budget by setting the action in what looks like a vandalised comprehensive, the Misfits set-up is simple. A mixed bag of young offenders turn up for community service, get caught up in a freak storm featuring giant snowballs and discover the crazy weather has bestowed them with bizarre powers.

But they're not the only ones warped by meteorological madness. Their previously caring, sharing probation officer has been transformed into a bloodlusty zombie and he's up for a killing spree, determined to pick them off one by one. It's at this point that you're better off disregarding E4's defiantly upbeat description of Misfits as a 'comedy drama'. There are laughs but they're of the salty, sweary, bloody kind. Misfits works just fine as a blood-and-guts horror romp and it's stronger on hysteria than hilarity. There's a brain bouncing around in there, too. The superpowers our merry band of losers find themselves in receipt of are directly related to their character traits: the geeky psycho becomes invisible (as he feels much of the time); a girl obsessed by what others think suddenly finds she can read minds. It's a neat touch that gives you something to chew over during the odd lapse in carnage.

And for those of you who like this sort of thing, follow Misfits on Twitter and you'll become privy to a secret character who doesn't actually pop up in the show until the sixth episode. Well, rock me back on my multi-platform boots, how darned moderne.

Miranda Hart is very tall and, from certain angles, looks a bit like a man. That's not me talking, that's the set-up for Miranda, a sitcom that feels like it's been beamed in from the 1970s in which the titular heroine makes jokes about her height and being mistaken for a bloke. There are times when you don't know whether to laugh or cry, but not in a good way.

That's a little unfair. Any show that contains the line "I look like I've had a chiffon-based anaphylactic shock" (Miranda had donned a super-sized wedding frock) is not entirely without merit. So credit where it's due: there were more laughs in last night's opening episode than in the entire series of Lunch Monkeys, Home Time and Mumbai Calling put together. Faint praise, admittedly. Still, that's as good as it gets.

For anyone tuning in hoping for some edgy 'kraut Queen' jokes would have been sadly disillusioned. Chocolate penises (penii?) was as risque as it got, which is fine if you find cacao-based genitalia intrinsically amusing. If not you had to suck on a lot of knowing asides to camera and the gauche charms of Miranda which, after the umpteenth time she'd gone tongue-tied and bonkers in the presence of her dreamman, wore pretty thin. Miranda is tall and she looks a bit like a man: but that don't make her Rhoda.

If I had to name a TV guilty pleasure, then Doc Martin would be near the top of the list, if guilt is the right way to describe being swaddled in an eiderdown of cosy eccentricity. Either way, it's been the perfect X Factor comedown, so the Doc's departure last night will leave a grumpy hole in my heart. Except, of course, he'll be back. We'd been led to believe Martin Clunes was packing up his stethoscope and departing Cornwall, lured back to London by daft thoughts of a brilliant career. The subtext being Clunes was yearning to do more documentaries on dogs, or the Orkneys, or whatever. But all it took was a popped sprog and a baleful look from Louisa and his irascible armour, nurtured over four series, collapsed in a mist of paternal pride. Well, for 30 seconds at least.

So we haven't seen the last of Clunes and his coterie of clotted admirers. The love that burns bright in the breasts of Mrs Tishell and PC Penhale - there really is something about a man with a stethoscope - may yet speak its name.

Malcolm is to the God-like The Thick Of It what Jedward are to The X Factor. As in the love-to-hate-to-love element that keeps us coming back for more. Want to know how Simon Cowell feels when he looks at Jedward running rampant across his carefully controlled kingdom? Over to Thick Of It punchbag Glenn, who caught the sentiment perfectly: 'I feel like I'm in a therapy group being run by my own rapist.'

It's lines like that, flowing like twisted rivers of bile over characters drowning in their desperation, that lift The Thick Of It head and shoulders above the comedy competition. Sometimes the plot twists can tie you up in knots and this week the moral maze surrounding a people's champion being used as a political puppet pretty much ruptured my blind alley. But then a clueless PR with the social skills of a baboon who explained his presence thus - 'I'm the Nazi guard... only in a non-gassy way' - had me howling too much to care.

If the past year has taught us anything it's that politicians are a bunch of selfserving, egotistical incompetents only interested in lining their own pockets. Then again, if you've ever caught an episode of masterly Westminster satire The Thick Of It, that won't have come as any great surprise. It's odd to think that, thus far, there had only been six episodes and two specials plus a movie of Armando Iannucci's lacerating satire, because when it roared into ankle-biting action on Saturday it was like welcoming back an old friend. An ulcerous, sarcastic old friend who delights in spitting pure bile, but an old friend nonetheless. Spin-off film In The Loop kept the momentum bubbling but this was the real thing.

The insults and paranoid bitching kicked off in the opening seconds and scarcely paused for breath, with Peter Capaldi's Malcolm, a masterclass in amorality, leading the way. Malcolm's every utterance is a withering blow to the guts but I particularly liked his phone remonstration - 'that's a wretchedly homophobic headline, you massive poof' - aimed at a red-top editor who'd run an unsympathetic story.

If I was nit-picking it would be the sneaking feeling that the idea of anyone getting hot under the collar over a Labour minister planning to send their child to a private school seemed a little last year. Hasn't any pretence at those kind of old Labour principles long since flown the nest? And the addition of Rebecca Front as the new minister didn't quite make up for the absence of Malcolm's pet rottweiler Jamie. But the writing in The Thick Of It is second to none, with the careerist bureaucratic underlings who prop up the whole decaying system ruthlessly exposed along with the backbiting nature of office politics. How would your colleagues assess you if asked their opinion by your new boss? Something like 'that's like asking what you think of skirting boards - I'm sure you need them but I'm not sure why'? That was unctuous Olly on ageing sidekick Glenn but feel free to lift it for personal use.

Though Micro Men won't be winning any Baftas for Best Make-Up - Alexander Armstrong's slaphead looked like it had been dabbed on in the dark - this was a terrifically entertaining romp down memory-stick lane to the days when computers were still crazy, far-out inventions, not a fixture in every home. 'Jesus - it's like trying to read Braille through a pair of gardening gloves,' was the colourful verdict on one early prototype.

Armstrong had a ball as Sir Clive Sinclair, crackpot boffin behind the ZX80 and a whole raft of equally unreliable gizmos, while Martin Freeman provided the perfect foil as Chris Curry, head of Acorn. While Acorn's products lacked the style and pizzazz of Sinclair's output, they did have the benefit of working for more than a week. By telling the story of these two pioneers - first collaborators and later rivals - Micro Men provided a hilarious insight into recent history. We were in the 1980s but it might as well have been the Dark Ages, so much has changed.

I generally only find children funny if they're being catapulted off a see-saw into a dung heap on You've Been Framed, so I approached School Of Comedy with caution. The idea of a bunch of precocious baby actors pretending to be adults in a bunch of sketches smacked of overindulgence, an idea best restricted to an end-of-term high-school skit, not granted a whole TV series.

Yet, though it had its iffy moments, School Of Comedy is laugh-out-loud funny. That's principally down to the rubber-faced Will Poulter, of Son Of Rambow, who is surely a star in the making. Segueing effortlessly from dunderhead schoolteacher to South African security guard by way of a defence lawyer with a neat line in hypnotising juries, Poulter gave a masterclass in comic timing and nifty accents. The rest of the cast are fine but this is Poulter's gig: the boy deserves his own show.

So much for cosy clotted cream Cornish whimsy, this was Doc Martin dishing out edgy philosophy laced with knife-edge drama. Well, it was for five minutes or so. The rest was jokes about blue wee and bisexual beardy blokes, but I have to admit that Doc Martin knows how to tweak my guilty-pleasure buds. It helps that each and every character in it is slightly potty, thus reinforcing the citydweller's view that the country/seaside is nice for a visit but you're likely to go a bit bonkers if you actually live there. It teases you too, keeping potentially intriguing characters such as PC Penhale and Pauline Lamb puttering around in the background when you want to dig deeper into their endearing lunacy. Indeed, there are times when Doc Martin would be better without Doc Martin, so the threatened departure of Martin Clunes could actually turn out to be a good thing. So what if its lobster pots are overflowing with cardboard cut-out eccentrics, there's just enough salt among the whimsical sugar to make Doc Martin perfect chill-out medicine.

The writers of Trinity (ITV2) have got bare-faced cheek - and that's not a reference to leading lad Christian Cooke's penchant for wearing his boxers at half mast. What's obvious is that this toffs v peasants black comedy thriller pays a huge debt to Society, Brian Yuzna's 1989 horror classic where the rich literally feed on the poor. Society (the movie, the concept) is all about fitting in and that's the motor driving Trinity, a bizarrely enjoyable hybrid of Gossip Girl and Brideshead Revisited - with a dash of Dr Phibes - that's set in an imposing university where the elite have ruled the roost for centuries. Though they let the odd working-class oik in for a spot of amusement.

It's not the subtlest satire you'll ever see but, what with Charles Dance doing something murky in the lab, dark secrets swirling round the quadrangle and a young, lusty cast bouncing from mystery thriller scenes to parodies of American Pie at the drop of a pair of knickers, there's never a dull moment. My guess is that the incidental pleasures are likely to outweigh any burning interest in discovering the truth behind the shadow hanging over drippy heroine Charlotte's past but, with potty-mouthed posh totty Isabella Calthorpe having a ball rolling her tongue around the filthiest lines in the script, Trinity is shaping up as an unholy treat.

Off The Hook proved yet another lacklustre sitcom offering from a channel that seems to be making them a speciality. This time, it was the tale of four students sharing a flat in their first year at uni. Check off the cliches: there's the 'funny' fat ginger one; the wibbly middle-class sap/hero; the barely written blonde girl; and the kooky one - in this case a depressed songwriter who is a less appealing combination of Phoebe from Friends and Danny Kendall from Grange Hill.

Last night's plot involved ginger and sap going to a hip hop party to impress a 'hot' girl despite not knowing anything about hip hop. Ho ho! Sap thinks there's a rapper called the Notorious BFG! Get your carbon-dating gear out to discover how old that one is. Needless to say, hilarity didn't ensue when the pair didn't fit in with the cool kids at the party. Yes, that chestnut - a premise so ancient it was using a Zimmer frame when Happy Days was newly born. It's like Hollyoaks but with a cast of four, and no jokes. Or a less comedically innovative version of Two Pints. I'm just being grumpy, though; as the owner of pubic hair I'm probably a bit too old for BBC3's demographic. Grumble.