This is the fourth time Richmal Compton's larger-than-life schoolboy has been cut down to size for the small screen (previous William Browns famously include a scabby-kneed Dennis Waterman - he could be so bad for you), and some might argue these stories actually work best on the radio, c/o the peerless readings of Martin Jarvis - who, in a best-of-both-worlds scenario, also intermittently narrates this new 1950s-set adaptation from Simon Nye, which does lack a certain fizz. Outnumbered's Daniel Roche plays the scowling scamp, tonight encountering Violet Elizabeth Bott.

Lord Emsworth (Martin Jarvis) is getting Empress of Blandings, his prize pig, ready for the Shropshire Agricultural Show. He's worried about possible nobbling by rival breeder Sir Gregory Parsloe (Michael Jayston). Meanwhile scandal looms if Emsworth's brother Galahad (Charles Dance) publishes his memoirs so Parsloe hires private detective Percy Pilbeam (Matt Lucas) to nick the manuscript. And love, as ever in a PG Wodehouse comedy, is making life very complicated for the younger set. Dramatised in two star-studded episodes by Archie Scottney, made by glamorous independents Jarvis and Ayres Productions.

This comedy drama that's mercilessly taking the myth out of BBC war reporting is something of a hidden gem. Indeed, we hear that John Simpson, John Sergeant and Martin Bell have actually gone to war themselves over which one of them the wonderful David Bradburn (Martin Jarvis) is based on. Tonight, David throws his fags out the pram when media darling Jeremy Pax - sorry, Jeremy Morrison - is drafted in to report on a ceasefire...

The satire that pokes fun at the competitive world of war reporting continues with the BBC's junior stringer, Harry (Bruce Mackinnon), facing his toughest assignment to date: a rendezvous with his girlfriend's fiercely intimidating father. Elsewhere, David (Martin Jarvis), the bumptious chief foreign editor, learns that if he doesn't file an exclusive pronto, he will have to return home to work on the apparently much-maligned breakfast show.

Taking the Flak is a satire on TV foreign correspondents. More precisely, it is a satire on John Simpson, the BBC's foreign editor. David Bradburn, played by Martin Jarvis, is about the same age, weight and hirsuteness as Simpson and is the BBC's "chief foreign editor". It must have been good fun for BBC people to guy Simpson - who has, to be sure, a measure of the pomposity all famous broadcasters acquire. But to make him into a womanising, fraudulent vampire, sucking the facts out of local stringers and fixers in order to feed his self-dramatising "pieces to camera", is a terrible thing to do to this boldest and most illuminating of reporters. Still, satire is unfair by nature. Broadcasters dish out much worse to politicians and other public figures who don't have their comfort and salaries, and it would be fine if it were funny. But it's very bad.

Taking the Flak (BBC2), which competes for the same airtime, begins promisingly enough. Harry, the local stringer in Karibu, is doing a piece to camera: "This ancient country, 38 times the size of Wales, is in desperate need." (Any plague-spot of indeterminate location is always compared to Wales. Wales is not quite sure how to take this.) Over his shoulder, the cheerful life of Karibu pursued the even tenor of its way.

At this point the BBC's visiting firemen arrived, to cover the crisis, led by Martin Jarvis (playing, lets face it, John Simpson), and it all went to hell in a handcart. (Perhaps Susie Dent can explain the handcart.) The plot was chaotic. The locals were not always intelligible. And I am very sorry for the woman from the World Service who had to mime incessant diarrhoea. You wonder if the trip to Kenya was worth the shilling, as some of the funniest scenes were back at the BBC where Nigel (Mackenzie Crook) was holding the fort with minimal fortitude ("The editor of the six is literally foaming at the mouth. He bit a picture researcher").

Andy Hamilton was asked recently why he stopped writing Drop the Dead Donkey, the granddaddy of this genre, and he said you couldn't keep up. Damien Day - GlobeLink's shameless star reporter - putting a teddy bear on a bombed building would be considered quite mild now.

"This ancient country, 38 times the size of Wales, is in desperate need." So begins BBC correspondent Harry Chambers' piece to camera from a central African republic at the start of this spoof on foreign news reporting. "It wouldn't take much to make a difference here," he adds, "A visit by Angelina Jolie or Fearne Cotton... perhaps even a simple, one-off drama by Richard Curtis." It's one of the better jokes in what turns out to be a rambling farce set under African skies - imagine Drop the Dead Donkey crossed with Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. Martin Jarvis is enjoyable as a John Simpson-style foreign editor who flies in to take over any story when it gets big enough, treading on the toes of local stringers like Harry. But Jarvis and the rest of the cast have to fight with a script that wobbles alarmingly. A running joke about a plump female reporter's troubled bowels is about as unfunny as comedy gets. There's a great satire to be made deconstructing the foibles of the news machine. Sadly, this isn't it.

This new comedy series was co-created by a journalist, co-filmed by a cameraman who's won RTS awards for reporting - and viewers may notice more than a little of foreign affairs editor John Simpson in fictional correspondent David Bradburn (played by Martin Jarvis). When war breaks out in the fictional African country of Karibu, where the child soldiers play football with Kalashnikovs for goalposts, the first BBC news television crew arrives, it seems, within minutes. The BBC's local stringer, Harry Chambers (Bruce Mackinnon), think he's about to win his first news scoop, but is promptly gazumped by his senior colleague, Bradburn, who flies into town and files his first flak-jacketed piece to camera without a jot of Karibu knowledge in his head. There's an over-reliance on fart jokes and Carry On farce here - at one point a dog is blown up by a land mine, splattering Chambers in "comedy" blood. The show bares its satirical teeth, though, in the plausible way it sends up the BBC news game's preening hierarchy. The reporters all clamour for precious minutes on "The One", "The Six" or "The Ten". Suddenly, the satire starts to ring true. It's just strange that a spoof of war reporting didn't want to take itself, well, a little more seriously.

There must have been a lot of wicked fun in the making of this series, which does for foreign correspondents what Drop the Dead Donkey did for a television newsroom. A senior foreign correspondent (Martin Jarvis) and his crew arrive in Africa to cover the outbreak of war. But the fighting is nowhere near as fierce as the rivalry between this grand old man of journalism, a young local stringer who resents having his thunder stolen, and a battered BBC World Service correspondent. Although much of the comedy is broad, it could have been written only by an insider and much of the jollity comes from sharing an in-joke. One of the writers was Tira Shubart, a producer and journalist who lived with John Simpson for ten years.

A cold-hearted sitcom brutally ribbing something close to the Beeb's heart: the producers, stringers and reporters in war zones itching to get their three minutes on News At Ten. The script for this opener, set in a conflict-ridden African backwater, is not quite as zinging as its obvious point of comparison, Drop The Dead Donkey, but there are at least plenty of heroes and villains, including Doon Mackichan's stressed-out producer and Martin Jarvis's lazy, big-shot reporter.