Phil Hogan

Funny Business, narrated by Radio 4 newsman Eddie Mair, showed us what comedians were doing when they weren't monopolising television - to wit selling their souls at lucrative corporate dinners. Here was the menu - half an hour of Michael McIntyre for £40,000, Ricky Gervais for £25,000. Lesser lights got less, but how could you resist? You were right there in the shop window prostituting your art. One lavish event, the Real Variety Show, with its audience of hardnosed business types, could land you 30 other corporate gigs. Jo Brand and Arthur Smith bared their shame but took the money. Everyone had experience of being ignored on stage. Rhod Gilbert was visibly distressed as he relived the night he found himself talking to the back of Sir Alex Ferguson's head at a footballers' beano in Mayfair.

It was revealing but long-winded, and I found myself wondering how much Eddie Mair was getting paid as we drifted into the overvisited realm of vintage advertising with its (yawn) clips of Fry and Laurie selling cigars and John Cleese being zany in the service of Schweppes. "Wherever you look now, money's spoiled it," said Cleese from his Monte Carlo apartment.

I realise BBC3 comedies are not aimed at the more considered grown-up, but nothing will stop me from saying: "Dead Boss? Dead loss, more like." This was a prison sitcom, with one normal person (Sharon Horgan as a woman wrongly convicted of murder) surrounded by pantomime fools. The stars of Porridge will be turning in their graves. Admittedly, Jennifer Saunders was good value as the governor and there was the odd decent line (a misunderstanding involving "cellmate" and "soulmate" made me laugh), but the overall effect was flatter than a long stretch in Norfolk. It had one of those ill-advised plinky "light" jazz scores (think Dirk Gently) designed to accentuate the absence of laughter. By the end of the second episode, I was rattling the bars myself.

Simon Amstell returned with a second series of his very funny sitcom, Grandma's House, in which he plays a version of himself as a neurotic, gay, Jewish ex-TV presenter. Has his acting improved or do I just mind less this time around? The writing was as pointed as ever and the cast still first class, in particular Rebecca Front and James Smith (both alumni of The Thick of It), respectively playing the pushy mother Tanya and her blundering twit of an ex-beau, Clive.

This nicely rambling opener started with Simon waking up next to a 16-year-old boy and ended with Grandpa's armchair going up in flames. It takes a rare comic eye to join those dots with so little obvious effort. Those who saw his self-flagellating stand-up on TV recently will be wondering why he hates himself so much.

Are the Goons still funny in 2012? I wouldn't have thought so, but it was a question John Sergeant seemed determined to answer in the affirmative in Sergeant on Spike (ITV1), even if it meant forcing a class of primary schoolchildren to sit through half an hour of them. Sergeant's verdict - that they were all laughing their heads off by the end - didn't quite chime with the puzzled looks on my TV - but heigh-ho. Sergeant, out and about in a tweed bucket hat, was amusing in his own right, walking backwards in Marylebone station (with Spike's I'm Walking Backwards for Christmas playing in his head) to the visible concern of commuters. Much of the programme was about Spike Milligan's zany genius, but also how difficult he could be. Did Spike's own children find him funny? There was no word from them.

We shouldn't assume that Ricky Gervais spends too much time worrying about bad PR, but his latest outing in Derek - a one-off mockumentary about a care-home worker with learning difficulties - went some way to appease critics of his cheerfully ironic slant on differently abled people. Well, further, shall we say, than his sitcom about dwarves.

Gervais's talent for creating mischief offstage increasingly makes it difficult to view him through fresh eyes when he's on it. But there were no "mong" moments here. And if his chin-thrusting gurn in the role of the slow-moving Derek impressed more as a feat of endurance than dramatic ingenuity over the 35 minutes (the threat of lockjaw surely loomed over this production), that was no reason to doubt his sincerity. Derek bobbed eagerly among the old folk, hogging the roving camera like a child with a favourite uncle to entertain. It didn't take long to see his world of small pleasures and mutual give and take.

It's true that Gervais found room for a little light slapstick - once Derek had contrived to sit in his own rhubarb and custard it was only a matter of time before he toppled into the fishpond - but you didn't get the idea that we were there to poke fun at him. Derek was dim but he was kind and won kindness in return. And there was only one side to be on when he was baited in the pub by "chavs" (as they were described in the credits; Gervais hasn't quite lost his appetite for tweaking the noses of Guardian types), though the tone wobbled into farce when Hannah - manager of the home, and Derek's minder - was required to deliver justice with an unlikely comedy headbutt.

There was a gentle romantic subplot featuring Hannah - a familiar tongue-tied man-yearner in her 30s - and a handsome visitor, while Gervais's pet idiot-philosopher Karl Pilkington (handyman-bus driver Dougie) in a bad wig offered his usual baleful observations. But not much could halt the drift towards sentimentality, which started with Derek going off to buy a lottery ticket for a much-loved frail, elderly resident accompanied by the sort of plaintive piano that could only signal bad news. Derek tugged too importunately at the heartstrings to achieve pathos but I suppose there are worse crimes than trying too hard.

If you're a glutton for Dickens (and you'll need to be, with the BBC already stuffing its schedules with the forthcoming bicentenary of his birth), jolly spoofery abounds in The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff, which features Robert Webb as an upstanding Victorian retailer of nonsense items thrown into sudden penury by bewhiskered evil Stephen Fry in a stovepipe hat. Ah, what larks, trying to out-grotesque the master, though the irrepressible, unending fun of it can jam your parody receptors after a while.

No one should miss the Christmas Rev, a brilliant end to the series, with ever-embattled Adam (the great Tom Hollander) having to conduct Midnight Mass with a black eye and trying to persuade uptight God pedant Nigel (Miles Jupp) that the season of goodwill is big enough to embrace Jesus and giant Toblerones. Alex's lugubrious father (who else but Geoffrey Palmer?) turns up to add woe and mischief. It takes a stony heart not to cheer at the TV when Adam finally gets the present he deserves. Joyful and (as the song goes) triumphant.

A nation's youth roared as one for the return of Misfits, an everyday tale of asbo superheroes giving something back to south-east London. The show has been "refreshed" somewhat with the gobby Irish one, Nathan, now replaced by Rudy (Woody from This is England), whose special power, it turned out - more of a liability, really - was to burst into two versions of himself at inconvenient moments, one timid and sensitive and the other a pain in the arse with, as it happened, a fixation with anal sex. There was bound to be girl trouble and before you could say: "It wasn't me!" Rudy was up to his neck in the sea of shagging, coarse language, gore and hideous deaths that viewers of discernment have come to love and expect from E4's finest.

But what of the others? Well, it was new powers all round - courtesy of Seth, sinister giver of power - with gormless chavgirl Kelly (the excellent Lauren Socha) now fully skilled up as a rocket scientist and Curtis able to turn into a polite young woman. Say what you like about community service but it works wonders for your CV.

Holy Flying Circus, a comedy drama based on the furore that surrounded the release of Monty Python's Life of Brian in 1979 was bold but disappointing. The decision to go for the full Monty, as it were - the programme erupted with animations, fantasy and sketches, amid multiple warring sitcoms featuring feckless church hall Christians, wacky TV executives and bantering Python lookalikes - was a recipe for silliness, but little else. The putative battle between freedom of expression and religious sensitivity rumbled lightly on, but you got the feeling that everyone was having too good a time to take it seriously. I'm not sure I was. The impersonations were quite uncanny - Darren Boyd as John Cleese (in Basil Fawlty mode) and Steve Punt as Eric Idle - but also quite unfunny. A homage to Monty Python is a hostage to unfavourable comparisons with the real thing (and following it up with Life of Brian on BBC4 wasn't the masterstroke it might have seemed), but more important, Pythonesque humour - its loud irony, its juxtaposition of opposites, its attack on the dullness of accountants, its gleeful anachronisms, its men dressed as women - has had its moment at the cutting edge. How else could Spamalot have happened? I had to put my fingers in my ears during some mirthless scenes with Michael Palin (the excellent Charles Edwards notwithstanding) in bed with his unattractive wife (supposedly Terry Jones in drag). As for the Christian protesters - should we still be depending on speech impediments for our laughs this far into the 21st century?

But in the spirit of saving the best till last, I should say there was a brilliant sword and lightsaber fight between Cleese and Palin, the pair of them flying about as puppets on sticks. If it's not on YouTube by the time you read this, I'll eat my parrot.

We see so little of The Comic Strip ensemble these days that it's easy to forget how long they've been in the trenches of British spoof, tossing out a grenade every now and then, as if cursed to spend the rest of their days striving to match the perfection of their hilarious first episode, "Five Go Mad in Dorset", which introduced high jinks to Channel 4's inaugural broadcast in 1982 and the term "lashings of ginger beer" to the cultural memory.

"The Hunt for Tony Blair" - a parodic splicing of noughties politics and 1950s British film noir (though what Herman's Hermits were doing on the soundtrack I don't know) - wasn't uproariously funny but it was handsomely made, with melodramatic shadows and enough money for fog, flat-footed policemen and steam trains. The plot, such as it was - a madcap chase across country, with the PM on the run for murder - threw up knockabout humour and vignettes from Blair's WMD fiasco, featuring a cast of the usual suspects: a languid Nigel Planer as Mandelson; Harry Enfield in East End shout mode as "Alastair"; the excellent Jennifer Saunders as Thatcher in her dotage (and full Barbara Cartland drag), watching footage of her Falklands triumphs from a chaise longue.

Director Peter Richardson, whose comic talents aren't seen enough on screen, played George Bush as a rasping B-movie Italian mobster ("I'm gonna get straight to the crotch of the matter here"). With the exception of impressionist Ronni Ancona (whose 10 seconds as Barbara Windsor seemed puzzlingly extraneous), no one went for a direct impersonation. Stephen Mangan didn't make a bad Blair, though he could have worked on the grin, and he couldn't quite make his mind up between feckless and reckless as he capered from one mishap to the next leaving a trail of bodies. Did Blair's moral insouciance ("Yet another unavoidable death, but, hey, shit happens") call for a look of idiocy or slipperiness?

The comedy had mischief at its heart in mooting that Blair had bumped off his predecessor, John Smith, and accidentally pushed Robin Cook off a Scottish mountain, while Robbie Coltrane's Inspector Hutton (aha!) tacitly invoked the spectre of Dr David Kelly (we never found out who Blair was charged with murdering). But it was hard to squeeze fresh satire from the overfamiliar stodge of the politics ("Tell Gordon to run the country and trust the bankers"). Mangan was at his funniest hiding among sheep in the back of a truck or kicking Ross Noble (playing an old socialist) off a speeding train, though there was amusement elsewhere. I had to laugh at variety theatre act Professor Predictor, shoehorned into the story to enable Rik Mayall in a bald wig and boffin glasses to answer questions from the audience. Would the Beatles still be at No 1 in 50 years' time?

"No. The Beatles will no longer exist. But Paul McCartney will marry a woman with one leg."

How the audience roared. "Pull the other one," someone shouted. Arf, arf.