Rachel Aroesti

The storytelling show's second series begins with Vic Reeves and the late Rik Mayall as resident raconteurs. Reeves tells a tale about a cleaning lady who finds herself aboard a mission to Mars, while Mayall's story concerns a local weatherman who is able to control the elements. With his madcap delivery never flagging, Mayall injects every line with what seems - poignantly - like an endless reserve of triumphant comic timing: his posthumous appearance a tribute to his own incomparable presence.

Have you been watching ... The Trip to Italy?

Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan's mockumentary sees the comedians impersonating Michael Caine and Roger Moore to humorous effect - but it's their take on their own personas that is most compulsive viewing.

Tim Key: living-room poetry jams to comedy ubiquity

Best known as Alan Partridge's Sidekick Simon, the self-proclaimed Single White Slut has found a keen audience for his weird, unsettling comedy.

Alfie tries to resurrect his fledgling romance with Michelle after abandoning her for ex-fiance Carly, who, unbeknown to him, has been seeing Prop Maartie (Rufus Jones), Alfie's aggressively South African boss. Alfie's dad (Michael Smiley) is also back in town, flashy as ever, and this time apparently flush, too. But when he decides to raid Gary and Gary's anniversary celebration kitty, the facade starts to crumble. Robert Evans's B&B-set comedy pootles on amusingly, but plays it far too safe to ever broach real hilarity.

Jonathan returns with wife Polly (Sarah Alexander) for a fifth series and he's quickly absorbed in the mystery of an actor stabbed in a locked room. It's a strangely sad case, making Creek's work experience boy, Sherlock-obsessive Ridley, and his extremely weak powers of deduction about the most entertaining aspect here. Better are the uncanny goings-on in Polly's family home after the death of her father, both debunked and given real-life meaning by Creek's enthusiastic cynicism.

After her disastrous first day at college, Rae's been skiving - and trying not to suffocate under an avalanche of self-doubt. Told by firmly-in-the-closet friend Archie that college means staying under the radar, she attempts to duck and dive out of the way of Finn - whom consensus has deemed the school fitty - lest anyone realise he's her boyfriend. Funny, but painfully so; Sharon Rooney's Rae is one of the most likable characters on TV, meaning the intensity of her unhappiness is sometimes hard to bear.

Childhood sweethearts Alfie (Blake Harrison) and Carly are getting married, but when the latter bottles it at the altar, Alfie is flung back into the arms of his B&B-running family. Created by Stella scribe Robert Evans, everything from Alfie's outrageous grandma to Adrian Scarborough's presence as Uncle Gary, is a reminder that this is neither as sharp nor as winning as the very similar Gavin And Stacey, but the performances lift it beyond mediocrity.

In the final part of James Wood's and Rupert Walters' comedy-drama, the embassy is faced with a potential "Tazbek spring", along with a visit from the president's filthy rich pop-star daughter. The characters' arch observations about diplomatic life in central Asia suggest thorough research, but as arch observations about diplomatic life in central Asia aren't something most of us will howl in recognition at, the whole thing feels like a Mitchell and Webb sketch gone awry: an hour of groundwork-laying and no punchline.

The final part of Mathew Baynton and James Corden's action-movie-spoof-com begins with the fugitive pair backed into a corner, an unlikely Hollywood plot device their only hope of escape. But escape they do, just as they grasp that the (not entirely intelligible) plot they're caught up in is linked to Berkshire Country Council, the boys' hitherto dullsville workplace. The friction between comedy and thriller has produced sparks of brilliance in this series, mainly in the magnificent incongruity of Corden's lovable loser Phil.

Not so much comedy as watered-down drama, with David Mitchell as the British ambassador to fictional-stan Tazbekistan and Robert Webb as his deputy. In this first episode, the pair rescue an arrested human rights activist and try selling helicopters to the president. Worryingly, this seems like the sort of thing Alan Partridge might write and star in if given the chance, full of eccentric foreigners, eye-wateringly awkward banter and competent, judicious Brits abroad fancying themselves as slightly less violent Bond types.