Phil Hogan

Everyone knows what they're getting with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, whose new comedy House of Fools - an absurdist spoof of 70s sitcoms played to a fashionably live audience - kicked off on BBC2. Would Bob get the peace and quiet he needed to invite his date round to watch Conan the Barbarian on TV? Or would Vic get stuck in a hole drilled through the wall to next door while their booming-voiced friend Beef (crazy Matt Berry in a role familiar to that seen in his recent Toast of London) defecated in a cereal box? Amid the chaos and rude slapstick there was much pleasing drollness, not least Bob's cri de coeur at Vic's promise to change his ways: "You can't change, you're fully realised."

The first series of Sky's A Young Doctor's Notebook - a stagey comedy drama set in a rural Russian hospital in 1917 and starring Daniel Radcliffe and Mad Men's Jon Hamm - plunged from cheerful if gory slapstick (cue wheezy accordions and balalaikas) to the sort of black despair familiar from even the sunniest Russian literature of the era (the plays are adapted from the stories by Mikhail Bulgakov). One moment Radcliffe (straight out of medical school) was happily yanking a tooth or sawing a peasant's leg off, the next he was a morphine addict peeing the bed, accompanied by an increasingly raddled-looking Hamm - Radcliffe's future self as a grownup medic flitting between reading his old diaries in the Stalinist 1930s and returning to his former haunts with a dazed expression and a needle in his arm. It's not Call the Midwife.

Amazingly, Hamm was off the drugs in this opening to series two (thanks to a bracing spell in a municipal straitjacket), though Radcliffe wasn't, and was soon watering down the morphine for the benefit of a suspicious government inspector arriving imminently to do a stock count. Luckily the man arrived with three bullets in him, courtesy of the revolution raging outside, and if he ended up dying as a result... well, would it be the end of the world? For him it was of course. And so agonising. What was wrong with that morphine!

Sometimes, not knowing whether to laugh or cry, you end up doing neither. Even so, there is something compelling about this barmy pursuit of redemption - the figure of experience revisiting his innocent descent into hell, blaming his younger self for succumbing to temptation but also offering forgiveness.

It's been a thinnish week for drama but Last Tango in Halifax, Sally Wainwright's almost sugar-free romance about two pensioners - former lovestruck teenagers reunited by Facebook after 60 years - was back for a second series having won the nation's affection and a Bafta last time out.

We found the pair almost as we left them, with the excellent Derek Jacobi as Alan, recovering from a heart attack brought on by their hasty quarrel about the desirability of lesbianism in Harrogate and perhaps one too many respiratory struggles with glottal northernisms (the downfall of many a thespian). Much has been made of this septuagenarian double act, and Jacobi and Anne Reid, a natural as Celia, shone even when they were just gazing over t'moors and talking about dead people.

It would be a gentler story, though, without the complications whipped up by their clashing daughters - Gillian (Nicola Walker), a widowed single mum and grubby farmer with an impulsive sex drive, and freshly outed Caroline (Sarah Lancashire), snooty head teacher of a school that sings Jerusalem every morning - each conscious, amid declarations of love and alarm bells at the realisation that old people have minds of their own, of festering parental disapproval that recent events could only aggravate.

With Caroline's dalliance with a junior female colleague out in the open, it was Gillian's turn to stir the pot with revelations of a drunken shag with Caroline's multi-philandering husband John (a wonderfully furtive Tony Gardner). I couldn't say whether this was more transgressive than Gillian's earlier eye-opener - seeing her carrying on (Yorkshire for sexual intercourse) with a lad young enough to be her son from the local filling station - but it had Derek Jacobi shaking his head. "You pillock," he said, a word that wasn't quite equal to his disappointment (he was thinking of the shame she had brought upon the house as a pregnant 15-year-old), but served to draw a line under the affair before he had another heart attack. In the end we left the lovebirds understandably sloping off to the register office for a deserved quiet wedding. But will they get it? Tune in Tuesday.

Crackanory was an adult version of the children's storytelling show Jackanory, which I remember from my own 1960s boyhood as a cue to go upstairs and lick the paint off my lead soldiers. This, though, was inspired, featuring Jack Dee being glum and Sally Phillips twinkling with irony, each taking the armchair to tell a story illustrated with filmed action and bits of animation.

The narratives - one a modern fable about a man who idly tweeted something about a pop star and wished he hadn't, the second a twisted tale about a genius toymaker who died and had himself stuffed so that his family could enjoy him staring at them at dinner - were fun, engaging and highly crafted. Nice one, Dave, I felt like saying.

Toast of London is a crazy new comedy about a booming-voiced thespian about town. Matt Berry (the booming-voiced boss in The IT Crowd) is as compelling as you might expect as the crazy Steven Toast and Doon Mackichan is crazy enough as his crazy agent - seen in her office last week being pleasured by a muscular unclothed masseur with his genitals pixelated. Toast's flatmate is a bit crazy and Toast has a roster of crazy girlfriends. Last week's crazy plot in which Toast (surrounded by crazy military types) foiled a plan to blow up a nuclear submarine was... well, let's say I wasn't crazy about it.

Kevin Eldon has been the Mr Whatsisname of countless knowing comedies down the years (Brass Eye, Smack the Pony, Big Train), so it was nice to see him turning up in It's Kevin, his own smart show. It wouldn't be subtle, he warned us (after the longest song-and-dance-based opening sequence since Family Guy), though the glee that went into covering a woman - a "fly psychologist" - in strawberry mousse, feathers and balloons was more Bob and Vic than Ant and Dec. A lot of the humour arrived in inverted commas, pulling the rug from under itself, sending up comedic tropes, pre-empting the viewer's response. Some of it was just nicely silly. There was a poke at popular science documentaries ("Sandwiches. They're everywhere...") and a brilliant reimagining of Hitler with the voice of Beatles producer George Martin, reminiscing about taking Austria by storm in 1939 ("I immediately knew we were on to something big..."). Characters are Eldon's big strength. I liked his cloth-capped Stanley Dewthorpe, who announced himself as "a fictional man from the north of England" before unleashing a stream of finely honed nonsense that juxtaposed (possibly for the first time on terrestrial television) Colin Cowdrey, Dettol and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. That Kevin Eldon is a crazy guy.

Partial though I'm not to the word "quirky", Channel 4's new midweek sitcom, The Mimic, made a special plea for it, perhaps along with "gentle" and also, at times, "funny". Here was Martin Hurdle (Terry Mynott), a man with a dull job amusing himself by doing impressions. Wogan and Ronnie Corbett have become too standardised to impress but you had to laugh at his Al Pacino and his James Earl Jones quibbling with Morgan Freeman. The show didn't entirely depend on mimicry and there was strong support from Jo Hartley as his live-in friend Jean and Neil Maskell (arch psychopath from Utopia) turned up as a compellingly neurotic newsagent.

The first episode found an anxious Martin meeting up with an old flame's 18-year-old son for a burger followed by a DNA test. "If I'm not your dad, we can still be friends," he said. It was droll but unexpectedly touching. When it came back positive, I almost had to stop eating my biscuit.

If it's Ricky Gervais's curse to be judged against the success of The Office, I can't see his new comedy series, Derek, helping, being neither funny nor clever enough. Set in a retirement home and starring Gervais as a man with learning difficulties, it was a half-hour fight between caricatures of sentimentality and coarseness. I had hoped Gervais's performance as bobbing, gurning Derek might have become more nuanced since last year's pilot but it hadn't. Karl Pilkington fared well enough as the janitor but his bad wig spoke for the whole enterprise.

By far the longest scene of the week arrived courtesy of the new (but unimproved) version of 80s sitcom Yes Prime Minister (G.O.L.D.), which was surely - and admittedly I may have dozed off for a moment - just one endless sentence. I'm sure fans of nostalgia thrilled to the new Sir Humphrey (Henry Goodman) Appleby's familiar mastery of verbal bamboozling as he led coalition leader Jim Hacker (David Haig) up the garden path towards the euro via some Byzantine shenanigans concerning an oil-rich former soviet republic. Writers Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn have lost none of their genius for the marathon one-liner - or indeed their other formula, in which Bernard innocently feeds the master a line about democracy only to receive a homily on the dangers of allowing politicians to think they are clever enough to run the country. But it seemed woefully out of date, in its staginess and jokes that were old when Paul Eddington was alive. It isn't just that Britain has moved on, dragging politicians with it (here we had the absurdity of Jim Hacker talking about "wops", "frogs" and "dagoes" while the other two exchanged Latin epigrams), but that comedy has. Certainly I preferred David Haig in The Thick of It.

A pig eating cake was the most amusing thing about BBC1's Sunday teatime comedy Blandings, which can't have been the intention of PG Wodehouse, whose tales of upper-class twittery inspired this waste of half an hour. Timothy Spall gave good drawl as eccentric Lord Emsworth and Mark Williams was as solid as you'd expect as the long-suffering butler; but civilisation has come too far to put trouserless yokels cavorting on a table in the hope of laughter.