Rachel Cooke

Keen to enjoy some legit giggling, I tuned into Craig Brown's Lost Diaries. Brown's Private Eye diaries make me laugh more than anything else in print. But they seem not to work on radio, in spite of the brilliant impressionists (Alistair McGowan, Jan Ravens) who perform them. Perhaps it's that topicality has been lost; Edwina Currie and John Major appeared and, for a moment, I struggled to remember that they once had - oh my God! - an affair.

Then again, any programme that does not take Harold Pinter's egregious "poetry" (or his widow Antonia Fraser's extreme reverence for it) seriously is performing an important service.

Is Simon Amstell quite as clever as he thinks?

I think people are mighty strange, and relish anything that acknowledges this truth. But I've no idea whether I'll still be with this show come September. I worry that Amstell is not quite as clever as he thinks he is.

The New Statesman Review

It made me laugh out loud twice, which is more than can be said for virtually all the new comedy I've seen in two years.

New Statesman Review

I'm not sure it's a goer as a series. It has a great cast and the production values are high quality. It's well written, too. The way it combines fantasy and 21st-century dialogue can be funny. The trouble is that, once you have seen half an hour, you've seen it all.

Too much of a good thing

This Gavin and Stacey spin-off is long on fat jokes but short on belly laughs.

New Statesman Review

Russell Brand's Ponderland is the latest attempt by Channel 4 to find a vehicle for the station's outrageous star. However fast Brand talks, however many rude words he uses, it's still a teased pompadour of perfection, every line worked to within an inch of its life by its writers. This is not to say that it's not funny, because it is. But with its use of a studio audience whose titters sound weirdly like a laugh track (were they so timid that Channel 4 had to overdub them afterwards?) and its Clive James-style use of archive film, it has a manufactured quality that is somewhat at odds with Brand's increasingly worked-up Frankie-Howerd-meets-Ozzy-Osbourne persona.

If, like me, you travel in hope and still tune in to 5 Live, only to spend the next six hours banging your head on your desk, let me suggest a balm: Marcus Brigstocke. I have an aural crush on the mild-mannered, laconic comedian, who stars in several Radio 4 shows, not least the very jolly Giles Wemmbley Hogg Goes Off, in which he plays a kind-hearted but tragically thick Sloane.