Keith Watson

If there's a more excruciating half hour of comedy on offer this year than last night's Him & Her: The Wedding, then please don't make me watch it. I don't think my nerves would stand it.

Writer Stefan Golaszewski unerringly distilled every cringe-making wedding speech you've ever heard as the top table at Laura and Paul's ill-fated nuptials heaved under the weight of seething resentments, frustrated passions and desperate doubles entendres. It was a car crash you had to watch through your fingers - all the while suppressing a snigger.

Because, though the humour is black as treacle, there are laughs to be mined from this delicious dissection of love turned sour. There was best man Steve, dying a thousand deaths as the room turned against him, bridegroom Paul, fondly recalling how his forbidden lover knew every contour of his body, and bride Laura, a woman intent on carnal revenge with anyone.

Till death do they part might come sooner than we think.

Jon Hamm plucking a balalaika, Daniel Radcliffe drug-addled and lovestruck, sly jokes about accidental discharge... it was reassuring to find A Young Doctor's Notebook (Sky Arts 1) hitting its scurrilous stride once more. Actors looking like they're having a ball playing their parts can come off as plain self-indulgent but here that joy shines off the screen.

Though it's set in post-Revolutionary Russia, A Young Doctor's Notebook feels strangely contemporary, with Radcliffe and Hamm note perfect as the younger and older versions of Bulgakov's country physician. Witty wordplay slices and dices through the crude surgery but beneath it all lurks a gimlet-eyed study of the human condition.

Pulling back from the brink of self destruction, Radcliffe's naive young medic found that a nasty dose of unrequited love was the wake-up call he needed. 'There's more to us than morphine,' was the moral of the story as he took baby steps towards depending on himself.

Review: Him & Her

You don't need social realism to make a comedy hit home. But it's the nightmarish moments of shared recognition that have made Stefan Golaszewski's anti-romance Him & Her feel so near the funny bone.

Sitting down and listening to someone read you a story. How long is it since you did that? Not since you were a kid, I'll bet. But that's what Crackanory, the belated grown-up follow-up to children's favourite Jackanory, is asking us to do.

It seems an oddly perverse choice of revival in this age of multitasking, e-readers and texting while you're eating your dinner and listening to your iPod all at the same time. Slowing right down and listening to someone else talk at you: that requires you chill that pulse rate right down.

But it's worth the effort. The opening double bill of slightly twisted short stories repaid giving them your proper attention. As Jack Dee told topical tale Bitter Tweet, a barbed attack on social media manipulation that featuring a hapless bloke called 'Dazpants80' crossing tweets with singing fringe Joaquin Blieber, it was simply impossible not to be pulled into this sharply drawn world.

True, there were some concessions to a modern audience; it wasn't just Dee sat in an armchair. There were some simple dramatised sequences - Dazpants80 finding himself a prisoner in his pub - and a few animated distractions to soften the blow of simply listening.

But for the most part, this was Dee as storyteller, delivering the lines of writer Nico Tatarowicz. It felt like a comforting throwback to a simpler age, which was rather odd, given the subject matter.

The second story, Toby Davies's What Peebee Did Next, told with a knowing tongue in her cheek by Sally Phillips, was more of a throwback to the old Jackanory, albeit with a gruesome sense of humour.

The story of a toymaker who left his happy family an unusual bequest, it had the ring of a Grimm fairy tale, a moral homily popping up to save the day at the 11th hour. At least I felt like I'd had a beginning, middle and end. Some five-season dramas don't deliver that.

Where you stand on Hebburn (BBC Two) rather depends on whether you find comedian Chris Ramsey, who plays lead character Jack, as charming, witty and engaging as he plainly finds himself.

For my money, he comes across as a tad too pleased with himself.

It's symptomatic of how Hebburn, a sitcom hewn from the age-old generation-clash tradition, misses the salt-of-the-earth family feel it appears to be going for.

The character of Dot, the resident nan, is another case in point. She's a grasping woman whose blood has turned to pure bile and it's a wonder no one has dumped her in the nearest canal.

Yet we're supposed to chortle at her manipulatively nasty behaviour - I think.

It's all an awful waste of Gina McKee as Pauline, the mother of the piece and a woman mocked and undermined at every turn.

McKee lends her a serenity that's unlikely in the circumstances - she should pack her bags in the car, put ailing hubby Joe in the backseat, drive down the A1 and leave the lot of them to rot.

They could scarcely have timed it better.

In the week when ex-BBC executive Mark Byford popped up to plug a book and defend his £949,000 pay-off as 'not greedy', Jolyon Rubinstein and Heydon Prowse went chugging outside the BBC to raise money for BBC In Need. The Bafta-winning duo behind The Revolution Will Be Televised (BBC Three) were bang on the money.

You could criticise the second series of this mischievously scabrous satire as taking aim at exactly the same targets as the first - self-serving politicians, fat-cat money-brokers, corporations exploiting tax loopholes. But when those targets are so blatantly in need of a kicking, it's good to see someone stepping up to the mark.

The pair's stock-in-trade is penetrating the inner rings of power in cunning disguise. Their secret weapon is that they're entirely plausible as children of privilege. These chaps don't have chips on their shoulders, they've got herbed frites, and it's the sense that they are rejecting their own sense of entitlement that gives this revolution some added bite.

Toast Of London is the theatrical comedy starring Matt Berry that has been crisping up my Sunday nights. Berry's character, Steven Toast, takes a bit of warming to but his mix of outlandish ego and frustrated ambition means you can both laugh with and at him.

That, coupled with a delight at taking a pop at a range of random targets - Prince Philip, Michael Portillo and Minnie Driver all got the Toast treatment - make it stand out from the comedy crowd.

Last night, Toast endured a row about crazy golf and mini-golf ('what's the f***ing difference?'), pondered the possibly career-ending prospect of accepting a laxative ad and sold his soul to a crazed billionaire by acting in the worst film ever made.

It all climaxed with a musical finale entitled This Whole Life Is Beneath Me. I might get a T-shirt with that on it.

Spooks meets Yes, Minister in Ambassadors

If Spooks had a one-night stand with Yes, Minister, the fruit of that union would be something akin to Ambassadors (BBC Two), in which Peep Show duo David Mitchell and Robert Webb work their socks off to show us there's more to their double act than the hapless misadventures of Mark and Jeremy. It almost works.

Matt Stokoe as handsome barman Alex in Misfits (E4) would be in with a shout if there's ever a Bafta going for Least Sexy Sex Scene.

Both of his less-than-amorous encounters in the opening episode of this rollicking drama's final series were as erotic as a plate of cold semolina. And, it should be added, intentionally so.

The sending up of Alex's studly stereotype - he's granted a superpower which you just know is going to come back and bite him in the backside - is just one of the plotting pleasures of Howard Overman's clever storytelling.

Misfits is a show powered by its own internal logic, its character shifts continually catching you on the hop.

It takes itself not too seriously but just seriously enough to combine the potty-mouthed wise-cracking of Rudy One and Rudy Two (Joseph Gilgun, hilariously doubling up) with a spooky line in the supernatural, last night introducing a troop of Satanic scouts into the action.

This plotline climaxed in one of Alex's deathly bed scenes, his encounter with cheeky Scouser Finn - watched by a mouth-taped Jess - about as warped a ménage à trois as I've encountered without involving an illegal download.

If the rest of this farewell season is as good as this, then we'll be going out on a high.

Today's fan poll: if you had to choose between James Corden and Mathew Baynton being mistaken for a rent boy and forced to perform a boy dance for the pleasure of drunken Russian gangsters, who would you plump for?

Right answer. It was Baynton's Sam, the little of this little and large combo, who lost a last remaining shred of dignity as The Wrong Mans (BBC Two) cranked up the thrilling element of its comedy-thriller plot.

It was just one memorable moment in an episode that also involved Corden getting mugged by an airbag. Visual comedy doesn't often do it for me but The Wrong Mans gets it spot on.

Described memorably as 'a scrawny hobbit and a male Clare Balding' - now you come to mention it - Baynton and Corden have fast developed into a winning double act, the latter resisting the temptation and letting Baynton's befuddled straight man set the tone. Thus far, The Wrong Mans is getting it totally right.