Nancy Banks-Smith

Christmas Is Coming was a fleeting, festive affair between light entertainment and science, a sort of Rowan and Martin's Laugh In with government health warnings. As Dr Stoppard had already mentioned, a fizzy mixer speeds up alcohol absorption. This fizz was unusually well-written, fine and flowing, and the whole show went dizzyingly and delightfully over your head.

James Bolam has a wonderful gift for looking dilapidated. His seediness would make a pomegranate peeved. As Alan Plater put it in The Beiderbecke Tapes: "He's scruffy, he's round-shouldered, he walks badly and he needs a haircut". I have always been sorry I missed Bolam's Macbeth. The ravelled sleeve of care, the fraying kilt, the Oxfam sporran.

Yes, Prime Minister (BBC2) is a slight variation of the Bertie Wooster and Jeeves format. The servant rules the roost, and the rooster and the Wooster. Bertie will never wear that gaudy tie, amaze his friends on the banjo, never grow a moustache or marry Bobbie or Stiffie or Nobby or Corky. A shadow no bigger than a butler hangs over all these small attempts to brighten Mayfair life. They would not suit Jeeves.

Blackadder (BBC1) is back, this time in the Regency period as gentleman's gentleman to the first gentleman of Europe. Rather extravagant laughter from an audience of close friends, kookaburras and people whose vests tickle.

The cast is as rich as the menu: Ian Richardson, Charles Gray, Griff Rhys Jones and David Jason, whose galvanic twitches of the head look like an attempt to screw his bowler hat on firmly without using his hands.

Perhaps it is difficult these days to get a well-trained goat with a good head of steam. That is a pity because the goat would have provided what was patently lacking in Scoop (LWT): loud laughter and an urgent wish to know what was going to happen next.

It was a very slight play about the ache of adolescence and one was extremely grateful for the end not just because it was the end but because, in an unaccustomed rush of adrenaline, all the two-dimensional characters, the vicar and his twin daughters, the virgin with cornflower eyes, Clive in his Rover, Richard's father and mother and Mrs Argonaut and her dog, Hamlet, all descended like a pack of playing cards on Richard and the girl who did what she wanted as they did what they wanted in the bracken.

After Pilkington by Simon Gray, beautifully directed by Christopher Morahan, was a murderously funny mix of Wodehouse and Hitchcock, a sort of What Ho! Psycho.

Coast To Coast (BBC2), allegedly a comedy thriller, was, I thought, exhaustingly unfunny. I can quite see how someone, the scriptwriter for instance, thought, "We'll have these two guys in an ice cream van running away from two heavies and it'll be amazingly hilarious." But why does no one ever stop in the middle of something like this and say, "Look lads, it's not working is it? Farewell and may the force go with you."

Always excluding Monty Python's parrot, I have never seen anything so comprehensively defunct. Picking up one joke gingerly, there are probably three dozen tolerably funny answers to: "There are three million unemployed out there," but "That's not my fault," isn't one of them.