As for last night Sally (Olivia Colman), personal assistant to Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville), head of deliverance at the Olympic Deliverance Commission in the always amusing and sporadically very funny Twenty Twelve, I yearned for the happy ending that she herself seemed to yearn for, a meaningful clinch with her boss. Alas, the final episode didn't yield the romantic encounter it had promised, despite Sally continuing to show much more devotion to Ian than he got at home from his needy, nagging, pixellated wife.

It's hard to think of a spoof documentary that has been more fortuitously timed than Twenty Twelve. The first episode poked fun at the Olympic countdown clock, and within less than a day the real clock had malfunctioned. Since then, there's been no end of argy-bargy concerning the future use of the Olympic stadium, with the decision to hand it to West Ham United robustly challenged by Tottenham Hotspur and Leyton Orient. Oh, and marathon man David Bedford has resigned, citing general ineptitude. So it has taken only a very small leap of the imagination into the fictional world of the ODC, whose head of sustainability (Amelia Bullmore) was last night confronted by a man from the London Wildlife Stag Beetle Outreach Project, worried that clearing an area of tree stumps would wreak devastation among his beloved beetles.

Similarly outraged was Tony Ward (Tim McInnerny), a volatile film-maker aghast at the deployment of Greenwich Park for the equestrian events, and the probable daily invasion of "20,000 pubescent girls from second-rate public schools in Surrey with dreadful aspirational mothers". To demonstrate his opposition, Ward had a large pile of horse manure dumped outside the ODC offices, which Fletcher agreed to deal with to "keep it from Seb".

I don't think that's another example of art and life colliding, but it easily could be. Indeed, Ward and Roberts finally came face to face in the Today programme studio, where they were asked a succinct question by James Naughtie, just about the only truly unlikely turn of events in the entire half-hour.

The 2012 team engages ex-athlete Dave Wellbeck (Darren Boyd) to front their Raising the Bar scheme to inspire young people. Unfortunately, his school assembly presentations in Basingstoke and Warwick soon establish the silver medallist now only bores for Britain. If you're a connoisseur of that tranche of comedy that deals in excruciating embarrassment, you may lap this up. Otherwise, I fear you'll find this week's Olympian effort limp hobbling towards lame. Hugh Bonneville remains peerless as a sort of modern-day Ronnie Barker, and we could do with a bit more screen time for Olivia Colman as Sally, Ian's scuttling, "not a problem" PA.

Siobhan and Ian have another pointless meeting. Jessica Hynes really nails dead-eyed ennui as the half-wit PR consultant and Hugh Bonneville is perfectly pitched as the pleasant but ineffectual executive. And tonight, the superb Darren Boyd plays ex-athlete Dave Wellbeck, now an "Official 2012 Hero" charged with inspiring the nation's youth about sport. Olivia Colman continues to be consummately understated as Ian's PA, Sally. The writing is up there with Morton's other wondrous work, People Like Us, and wholly deserves primetime BBC2, not this hidden nook on digital. Perfection.

As the Olympic clock tick tocks its way down to the big event, this new comedy couldn't be more timely. This six partner stars Jessica Hynes, Hugh Bonneville, Amelia Bullmore and Olivia Colman who form the team who have to troubleshoot their way to the opening ceremony. Some of the challenges they face may seem utterly unconnected to watching Sir Chris Hoy bombing round on his fancy BMX, but if there isn't enough wind to move the wind turbines or properly phased traffic lights, the whole event would be a disaster. Written by and directed by People Like Us writer John Morton, we expect it may not be as traumatic as the real Olympics in a year's time.

Only Fools And Horses went downhill when Del and Raquel had a baby; will the same happen to our beloved Peep Show? Not likely, judging by this new series opener. While Mark (David Mitchell) waits anxiously in hospital for the birth of his unwanted progeny with Sophie (Olivia Colman), Jeremy (Robert Webb) swiftly gets over Elena when he meets Zahra, whose boyfriend is in a coma. Noooo!

So Mark and Jez are back with the seventh series of Channel 4's longest-running sitcom - which means we've all got something amusing to talk about that doesn't involve people eating kangaroos' bums. Of course, we know exactly what to expect from the socially awkward duo by now - but seven years on, you'd think they might be forced to face up to a few more responsibilities as well.

Sure enough, last night's Peep Show opener saw Mark (David Mitchell) overwhelmed at becoming a father for the first time. But more importantly, in Mark's eyes at least, a burst boiler at home turned out to have been less catastrophic than originally feared. "Minimal water damage!" he exclaimed joyfully on hearing the news, while cradling his newborn baby in his arms.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Prior to the birth, we saw Mark trying - and failing - to support ex-girlfriend Sophie (Olivia Colman) in the maternity ward. Meanwhile, Jez (Robert Webb) trundled off round the hospital and fell in lust with Zahra (Camilla Beeput), who was visiting her comatose boyfriend. In a bid to impress her, he agreed to read out passages from FHM to her unconscious partner - providing just one of the episode's many laugh-out-loud moments.

Still, my favourite moment came when Jez promised Mark he'd find someone to fix the boiler. This could only mean one thing. Sure enough, Super Hans (Matt King) showed up with a "mate who knows a bit about plumbing" - but found time to offer Mark some words of wisdom about childbirth. "Stay away from the goal end," he advised. "And trip your nuts off."

In real life, you'd probably run a mile to avoid Mark and Jez. But seeing the 21st century's version of The Likely Lads return to the small screen is one of the most welcome sights on TV.

Islam and lap-dancing. Not two subjects you'd usually expect to find rubbing shoulders in the same sitcom but then the life of a modern London vicar is nothing if not rich and varied.

Tonight's episode sees the Rev opening his church to a children's Muslim prayer class and visiting the local gentleman's club with Lucy Liemann's sexy headmistress - purely in the interests of research, of course.

There are plans to open a lap-dancing club right next to the C of E school and before Adam objects he needs to have first-hand knowledge of what it is he's opposed to exactly. That it doesn't even occur to his wife Alex (Olivia Colman) to object to either the lap-dancing or the headmistress tells you everything you need to know about Adam's wholegrain moral fibre.

His unique selling point is his "well­­meaningness" and Tom Hollander portrays him beautifully.

If I said that Rev was better than The Vicar of Dibley it would raise to a disgraceful new level of felony the crime of damning with faint praise, like saying Le Gavroche was "better" than a place with the word carvery in its title. The comparison is going to be made, however, because both are - I'm taking much of this on trust rather than memory, having watched the few bits of the Dibley thing I saw with my mouth hanging open like a guppy, knocked punchy by its violent mediocrity, and I think some of my brain escaped - about, yes, vicars, dropped into new surroundings.

Where Dibley relied for laughs on, oh, I don't know, I assume someone fell into a jelly-cake at the fete every week, or there was a misunderstanding about a local spy or werewolf or some such with hilarious consequences, Rev doesn't. It relies on characters, and writing, and the laughs come along as do zephyrs on these hot muggy parkland days: welcome, but not absolutely necessary.

Tom Hollander stars as the Rev Adam Smallbone, who has come from rural-land right into a mouldering parish in east London. The rain, the lorries, the endless bollards: oh, London looks truly horrid. Adam's parish is that of St Saviour's-in-the-Marshes - even the name's smart (wouldn't the one marsh have been enough?) - and the church is not, as a less adroit production might have had it, one of those squat blue prefabs tagged onto a council scheme and built identically to the knifers' pub round the other corner. Instead, it's a broken piece of once-sepulchred glory, standing proud and apart in its dirty-white marbled "formerness", ignored by the cranes, the drizzle, the people: a fine pathetic fallacy for the church today.

Adam drinks too much, and soon meets the rag-tag regulars, from the devout to the desperate to the borderline criminal, and discusses them in cheerily humanly bitchy fashion with his solicitor wife, played by the ever-splendid Olivia Colman, who makes him take off his dog-collar before he even dares to come into the bedroom, which we'd never really thought about before, but you would, wouldn't you? Soon, too, he meets the new breed of churchgoer, the parents, the moneyed mean, flocking there after a rumour that the related faith school is about to get a fine Ofsted report.

Nominally, this opener was about a broken stained-glass window, but that's like saying The Great Gatsby was about a party. Even the broken window, incidentally, has character. We never need to see it, just its boarded-upness, but Miles Jupp as Nigel, the worryingly intense bearded polymath of a parish assistant, tells Adam of its Burne-Jones influences, of its strange "fauvist brutalism but with figurative depictions of the mentally ill", and you sort of know just the mad kind of mid-Victorian artsy window it was, and probably well broken. But that's just the window. It's really about, of course, the tensions within the church today: the need for everyday hypocrisies, the money worries, the secular appetites, the consequences for more mainstream British religions of rising Islamophobia, and, nicely, the continuing relevance of everyday kindnesses, even of the church itself. And, of course, the schools issue, turning the building into a pantheon to hypocrisy on the part of both church and parents. I worry, or rather hope, that Nigel will go quite loopso at some time in the series: somebody, surely, has to remember the sordidity of the moneylenders in the temple, and angrily kick over the tables. Hollander, curiously reminiscent in his boy-man features of Tom Hulce (Mozart in Amadeus, all those years ago), lets all the layers of frustration, disappointment, childish hope, sweep across his face like summer storms; his is a great expressive face to be left with pouches of sadness, and lines of glory.

What I'd love to see, later, in what I hope will be other series, is a walk-on part for Richard Dawkins. It's a very cleverly written (by James Wood) programme, this: I'd like to think he might just do it.

In a medium awash with lazy stereotypes, it's original thinking that stands out. The most compelling television provides a new perspective on an old story, and challenges the laziest of preconceptions with wit, humour and more than a dash of bravado.

BBC Two's new series Rev is pretty much a masterclass in how to pull this off. Take one fine actor (Tom Hollander), add an equally brilliant supporting cast (Olivia Colman, Steve Evets, Miles Jupp, Lucy Liemann, Simon McBurney, Ellen Thomas), choose a fraught subject (religion), throw in some punchy writing (James Wood) and get Peter Cattaneo (of The Full Monty fame) to direct the lot and what have you got? A damn fine reason to stay up late on Monday nights, that's what.

Firstly, the subject matter: religion, or more specifically, the Church of England. With the notable exception of Father Ted, comedies involving vicars tend to be soporifically safe. Not only is Rev travelling without seatbelts, it is also doing 90 miles an hour down country lanes with the roof off and the stereo on full blast. This is no gentle cake-and-cassock comedy; it's the story of an ordinary, fallible vicar living in a tough, brutal world who is trying to do something very extraordinary: stay true to his faith.

That the Reverend Adam Smallbone is an ordinary fellow we know from his behaviour. He is a man who jumps the lights on his bike, who gets nervous and drinks too much at parties, who tries (and fails) to have sex with his wife. His flawed but irresistibly likeable persona comes across loud and clear in just a few opening moments, brilliantly pinpointed by the direction, the writing and, of course, by Hollander himself, whose performance is outstanding.

The themes, too, are unrelentingly contemporary. Smallbone is in charge of St Saviours, a grand, dilapidated church in a run-down inner-city area of London with a confusingly mixed catchment. There are the regulars, a rag-tag collection of locals led by Colin, the neighbourhood ne'er do well, who has a fond affection for the "vicarage"; and there are the newcomers, in the shape of the arrogant, urbane middle classes, led by the local MP, played as a modern-day social Flashman by Alexander Armstrong. Simon McBurney is deliciously oily as the Archbishop, who Smallbone only ever seems to encounter in the back of a taxi, all black leather gloves and dark threats.

The opening theme is current and controversial: "On your knees, avoid the fees", chirps Armstrong's villainous MP, as he horse-trades a place for his delinquent son in exchange for cash to repair the broken stained glass window of St Saviours. It's a merciless commentary on modern life; but it also has a surprisingly strong moral, dare I say thoughtfully theological, core. The temptations that assail Smallbone may be very contemporary in their nature; but they are as eternal as the themes of the Bible itself: right v wrong, truth v corruption, the poor v the rich.

As to the comedy, it's of the organic kind, not the obvious gag kind. Outside the church, the Reverend and Colin share a bottle of beer and discuss Richard Dawkins (as you do). "If I met him I'd kick him in the bollocks," says Colin, with customary frankness. Earlier Smallbone, confronted for the nth time by a group of sneering builders and their spectacularly unfunny jokes about choir boys, pauses. Slowly, and with a look of weary resignation, he removes his dog-collar. "Why don't you just f*** off," he says. The viewer punches the air with joy.

This intelligent new sitcom offers a much more gentle take on clerical comedy than Father Ted. Actor and co-creator Tom Hollander, who stars as the Reverend Adam Smallbone, was intrigued by the idea of a classic Church of England vicar being thrust into a parish in the unforgiving urban jungle of London.

The cast clearly had faith in Hollander's vision, because he's got the wonderful Olivia Colman (Green Wing, Peep Show) as his wife Alex and Lucy Liemann (Moving Wallpaper, Reggie Perrin) as the local headmistress, alongside Alexander Armstrong guesting hilariously this week as an MP.

With the London landmark of St Leonard's church in Shoreditch standing in for the fictional St Saviours in the Marshes, tonight the Rev is delighted to see the meagre ranks of his congregation swelling - until he discovers the parents are just trying to boost their religious credentials to get their kids into the good C of E school round the corner. And Adam faces a moral conundrum about whether he should award places in return for money.

The Archdeacon (a brilliant turn by Simon McBurney), who holds very unsentimental views about a vicar's role in the inner city, would undoubtedly think so. He seems to be constantly circling the capital in a black cab and there's a lot of mileage in this character, in every sense.

Rev's mission isn't to make you roll on the floor laughing. It's subtle and thoughtful, with heart and soul as well as a funny bone. I'll say Amen to that.