Nancy Banks-Smith

They Think It's All Over (BBC1) is like watching little lads in the playground. You wonder fondly if they will ever tire of whacking each other.

Gobble, Ian Hislop and Nick Newman's overblown comedy about a food scare, was intended for Christmas but postponed as people were actually dying at the time as a result of E coli. It is a difficult play to place. Today, for instance, the entertainingly named Hogg is defending his handling of mad cow disease in the Commons. At any old time, Gobble seems to be in encouragingly poor taste.

Common as Muck (BBC1) ended not so much with a bang as a fusillade. [...] The cast was so strong you got the impression of admirable actors, all jammed in a revolving door, which threw one at every episode. It was very much [g=6179]a man's story, cemented with matiness. For that reason I particularly admired Kathy Burke's shining performance as Sharon.

My eyelids seemed to be glued together with tears. Brass Eye (Channel 4) was showing celebrities vast, virulently yellow pills, claiming they were a new killer drug from Czechoslovakia called cake. They looked like monstrous bath sponges or, of course, Victoria sponges.

The Preventers (Carlton) is the sort of spoof that gets knocked up at Christmas. You do hope there will be no unfortunate consequences like a series.

The 10%ers (Carlton) is a very metropolitan comedy. Table Eleven was about Pretentious Moi, a fashionable restaurant where you are only as good as your last voice-over. God knows what they make of it in Grampian. But anyone who has found a nasty surprise in a trendy sandwich or watched a film about a plasticine man whose head keeps falling off will consider it excellent satire and long overdue.

Murder Most Horrid (BBC2), no great favourite of mine, turned up trumps with the story of Daisy (Dawn French), a soft-hearted abbatoir worker, who is mistaken for an executioner in South America. For reasons too curly to disentangle, she executes the entire government by mistake. Live on TV. This, as you might anticipate, is a roaring ratings success. As Daisy says "There hasn't been anything worth watching on telly recently."

I had the highest hopes of The Lord Of Misrule (BBC1). At this ominous tail rattle, everyone involved in it should stop reading. [...] It looked lovely. It cost a few bob. It was profoundly depressing. [...] I recorded my first smile as the Prime Minister and the editor of The Comet flailed damply at each other in a duck-pond. Timed about one hour and twenty minutes after the start of transmission.

The Liver Birds (BBC1) by Carla Lane, returning after more than 20 years, looks promising and the most promising thing was Beryl's passionate tears when she was alone at the end. It is not like Beryl to cry. She had told Sandra she had no children, but she has a brutishly vacant son in Borstal. "You're spoiling my life" she whispered, but he was wearing his personal stereo and didn't hear her.

Over Here (BBC1) is about the British and American fliers on the same air-base. And, before you say you've heard that one, you haven't heard John Sullivan, who wrote Only Fools And Horses, tell it. It's funny with black flashes.