Phil Hogan

Director Michael Winterbottom conjured a pleasing blur of fact and fiction in The Trip, an improvised new comedy starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as versions of themselves on a tour of rural northern restaurants, supposedly for The Observer's magazine. Trying to keep it real made for a flattish sort of badinage to start with, but their personalities were eventually set jousting, Brydon with his impersonation of Ronnie Corbett over the scallops and soup, the antsy, sardonic Coogan mulish in his refusal to be amused.

Temperamentally, Coogan belongs to that class of comedian who would rather be thought a genius than a clown, but it wasn't long before the pair were into a rampant contest for best Michael Caine impression ("Shall I prepare the Batmobile, master Bruce?"). Coogan won it on finesse and followed up with a superb Anthony Hopkins as Captain Bligh, but you couldn't stop Brydon, who now hilariously had his teeth into Al Pacino (in Heat the movie and, less congruously, Heat the magazine) before morphing into a staccato Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. Even Coogan was smiling.

I could have watched more, but they had the other diners to think about. Were they real or were they actors? The food looked real and the restaurant - the Inn at Whitewell, near Clitheroe - is real. It's even true (according to my wife, whose friend Jackie frequently sneaks off there for a quiet coffee) that you can't get a mobile signal. In an unexpectedly touching moment, we saw Coogan tramping up the darkening hill in the cold to phone his girlfriend, who was supposed to have come with him on the trip ("I wanted to show her the north - a piece of me...") but had gone home to America instead. I don't think she was real, though I could have believed she was. Perhaps he'll find happiness with Rob. They're an odd couple but quite perfect in a way.

Virtue has been rewarded with a return to the schedules for BBC4's dark and unglamorous hospital comedy Getting On, launched last year with three superbly measured episodes of low-key wit and broad hilarity. Who (of the 19 people who saw it) can forget the fun had with the self-important Dr Moore's faecal stool research programme or the eloquently brief wrangling over the ethics of eating a dead woman's birthday cake, or those oases of tedium, ticking with wicked purpose.

The first thing I noticed, though - even as the great Richard Hawley title song lulled us into the new series - was how healthily Daz blue everything looked. Here came the familiar cameras, zooming and retreating in homage to The Thick of It (courtesy of director Peter Capaldi), but where was the bilious washed-out decor and bad complexions and air of neglect? Had the MRSA police been in with the Mr Muscle and a lick of paint? Had someone been ironing the uniforms?

It soon began to ooze some of the old malodorous promise with the arrival of a comatose female of no fixed abode smelling like "an every-orifice cocktail", as dogsbody nurse Kim (mistress of droll, Jo Brand) put it, vying with ward sister Den (Joanna Scanlan) for best evocative observation of human pungency. Something was rotten down there...

There was more laughter to be milked out of it with the entrance of no-nonsense consultant Dr Moore (the excellent Vicki Pepperdine), blind to preposterousness as she urged her retinue of horrified dimwit trainees to peer into the poor woman's back passage and see a valuable learning opportunity. "So... perineal abscess? Rectal prolapse? Anal fistulae?" It was funny, but it did start to dribble away into a dull scene about the new gerontology wing, only to be picked up again by Donald the porter, trying to offload the offending patient on other unwilling departments, his gurney journeying back and forth with diminishing comic power. By the time he parked it in the corridor the only smell I could detect was the new lino.

To be fair there were entertaining skirmishes but they lacked the friction that gave the last series its crackling energy. Den has lost her fear of the officious Dr Moore. Sexually bi-curious matron Hilary - a monster of neuroses held in check by self-help psychobabble - has been stripped of his menace (like Samson before him, I believe) by the blowjob Den gave him in the back of a taxi. And where were the delicious lingual infelicities, the absurdities of NHS jargon, the workplace correctness that left Kim floundering in useless common sense - the whole pickle of moral compromise without which drama can be neither funny nor tragic? Perhaps it will all be back next week. I hope so.

I've never found Alan Davies as hilarious as he finds himself on QI, but I did laugh at his new sitcom Whites, in which he played Roland, the bored genius head chef of a country-house restaurant, lazing about dictating a memoir about his love for offal instead of getting on with some work. Admittedly, it wasn't great that he started with a joke from the back of the fridge ("If God didn't want us to eat animals he wouldn't have made them out of meat"), but he made up for it with sharper asides as he sparred likably with demanding colleagues, notably front of house manager Caroline (the great Katherine Parkinson from The IT Crowd) who thought Roland ought to do more vegetarian, and frazzled sous chef Bib (Darren Boyd), who thought Roland ought to do more of anything.

The plot - turning on the arrival of a top publisher who might take an interest in his book - kept hope and disappointment simmering nicely, while the arrival of an intense young apprentice (please don't let him turn out to be a vampire) offered slower intrigue. With Marco Pierre White's unruly hair and Jay Rayner's beard, Roland seems a composite of the sort of modern foodie we associate with frantic TV kitchens full of effing and blinding, so it was refreshing the way he suffered his fools - dim waitress Kiki, butterfingered Axel ("Careful with the plates - you're not at a Greek wedding") - like children with learning difficulties. Even the food looked real.

Miranda Hart: Whatever you do, don't call me 'sir'

Miranda Hart finds being a 6ft 1in woman has its downside, even if it does provide plenty of comic material.

I'm guessing there'll be some crossover appeal between Glee and Material Girl, BBC1's new early-evening drama set in the preposterous world of fashion. Lenora Crichlow as hot young frock designer Ali looked more like someone who might work at Next, but perhaps she's meant to represent wholesome values amid the preening, cut-throat, candyfloss-haired twits she's up against.

If anything was going to put you off your Ferrero Rochers over Christmas, it had to be The Fattest Man in Britain, ITV's comedy drama about a man in an orthopaedic armchair eating himself to merry hell. Timothy Spall looked dangerously at home in the title role as Georgie, with comedian Bobby Ball admirably cast as his "manager", Morris, turning up with a cabful of Japanese tourists eager to take pictures and lay their hands on the big man's folds. "I would ask you to respect Georgie's private zones," said Morris (though, frankly, you imagined these people might get enough blubber at home). Frances Barber completed the homely trio as Janice, who came in every day to shovel Georgie's meals together and grease his legs, which was as attractive as it sounds.

With Caroline Aherne co-scripting, there was as much pleasing northern drollery as you'd expect amid the ill-lit claustrophobic clutter and junk food and trash TV familiar from The Royle Family, though admittedly the oxygen tank looked ominous.

Things took a turn when a crew of youths was sent by the social services to tidy the garden and Amy - a pregnant teenager on the run from a violent boyfriend - ended up moving in. Aisling Loftus was excellent as the underfed, beaten waif looking for a father figure and finding it in kindly Georgie. There was a worrying moment, in his late mother's bedroom, when you wondered what kind of a comedy this was turning into... but no, Amy was soon settling in, cooking and tidying up, nibbling a dark chocolate Magnum with Georgie (not the classiest of product endorsements), helping Janice with his pig-sized legs and restyling his terrible 80s mullet - an early clue that he hadn't been out in 23 years. That's how long it had been since his mum died. "It's like I was eating for her," Georgie confided. "Like there was an angel on my fork."

All was well until a rival barrage balloon from Birmingham challenged Georgie to a TV weigh-in and Morris - aided by locals arriving with mountains of pizza and bakewell tarts - set to bulking him up for the contest. Amy - now almost as big as Georgie (well, not quite, but who remembered she was even pregnant?) - railed against the freak show that would surely kill him.

Events were channelled into a poignant denouement, but when the baby died and Amy called it a day with Georgie, it didn't feel like tragedy. Even when Georgie rose from his chair and struggled down the street to see her, it was more Love Actually than love. There was a late attempt at profundity with a short disquisition about the desire to make failure look like success. "If I'm not the fattest man in Britain, what am I?" cried Georgie. "I'm just a fat man!" It was a great line, but it just made me think that inside this broadly entertaining drama was a sharper, less funny one trying to get out.

Maths isn't an obvious subject for a laugh-a-minute romantic comedy, as amply demonstrated by Mister Eleven (ITV1), which starred Michelle Ryan as bonkers maths teacher Saz, a woman so obsessed by numbers that she talked herself into marrying precisely the 11th sexual partner in her life because, statistically speaking, that's what all women do. That way you were bound to marry Mr Right, right? Well, maybe, though it sounded to me more a formula for marrying Mr Average. But then it turned out new husband Dan wasn't number 11 anyway, because number nine - gorgeous Alex, appearing at the wedding reception - hadn't actually done it with her at all on the night in question, on account of Saz having being "so drunk that she thought he had". Which meant - Ohmigod! - she had just married Mr Ten, who of course equalled Mr Wrong! Dan foolishly wondered what was wrong about being Mr Ten (men, eh?) - and the newlyweds were soon having their first marital bust-up, or at least one of those hissing comedy arguments in front of bewildered strangers in the lift.

But now what? Dan buried himself in his work while Saz went back to her mum's to daydream and listen to soppy music and unwanted advice. Real life doesn't just "add up", said one friend. You do the math "joked" someone else. But what was the solution? Perhaps she should look back at numbers one to eight... perhaps she had been too hasty, rejecting the others for being the wrong numbers. But by now, number nine - gorgeous Alex - was sending yearnful texts and before long was snogging her in the carpark. The obvious thing now would be to shag him in episode two, thereby restoring Dan to his rightful spot at number 11. QED, though of course it's not the best start a marriage can have.

The Hi-de-Hi! fan in me wanted to like Big Top (BBC1), the unashamedly 70s-style sitcom with Amanda Holden and Ruth Madoc and John Thomson, but it was just unashamedly lame. Surely if you have a circus comedy, the challenge is to create the world's first funny clown? Would putting ferrets down his trousers help? No it wouldn't. I couldn't believe Tony Robinson (Erasmus, the odd-job man) spent all those years of training on Blackadder and those archaeology programmes for this.

Cast Offs is Channel 4's new late-night comedy drama about six disabled young people (played by disabled young people) marooned on an island for a reality TV show. It got off to a slowish start as Dan, a 26-year-old paraplegic, gave us perhaps too authentic a sense of how long it took to get a wheelchair up a sandy beach. But things perked up once he met his fellow castaways - Tom, a blind actor who was chronically lazy, Gabriella, a deaf woman who was not very nice to the others, Carrie, who had dwarfism and was also a bit oo-er missus on the sexual front. Yes - why be defined by your disability when you could be defined by something less "abnormal"! The show was created by some of the writers on Skins, so the chums were soon discussing genitalia and running naked into the waves. And what about Dan's disabled basketball team, out binge-drinking and falling over in public? What were we to think: that not being able to walk was no bar to being a public nuisance? Perhaps we were.

The BBC's hit comedy Gavin & Stacey was back with its winning formula of gooey romance, slapstick angst and recurring logistical challenge of getting a vast ensemble of Essex and Welsh people into the same room without it seeming odd. Perhaps that's its genius. This week they solved it with a christening party, adding yet more characters. Here was Nessa's dad and Smithy's mother (Pam Ferris, looking like she'd slept in a skip), and Ewan Kennedy was cracking as the new baby, Neil - strapped facing outwards on Nessa's back. "That's so I can smoke," she drawled.

The Welsh steal this show, led by Ruth Jones as Nessa - gnomic, brusque, experienced - alongside her spiritual opposite, Bryn (Rob Brydon), garrulous, sentimental and unworldly. I don't know about the Billericay element. Alison Steadman is a bit of a pantomime grotesque as Gavin's mum, and Smithy's Byronic laments for Gav - now installed in his new job in Cardiff - are fast losing their charm. I'm all in favour of a man expressing his feelings but if Smithy were my best mate I think I'd have to move farther than Wales.