Rebecca Front

It's still really hard to tell where reality ends and TV begins in the second series of Simon Amstell's domestic sitcom.

And that's because this week Simon's trying to celebrate the fact that the BBC has commissioned a series in which he'll be playing himself.

"They're going to let you act on TV? Why?" gasps his mother, played by Rebecca Front of The Thick Of It fame.

Getting in the way of Simon's joyous mood is his sour-faced Auntie Liz and his very young one-night stand, who point blank refuses to go home.

It must be hard work making comedy look this laid-back.

Simon Amstell's self-referential sitcom returns for a second six-part run. Tonight, the plots sees Amstell landing an acting role in a TV drama, giving rise to more jokes about him being a bad actor. Certainly, Amstell's uneasy, smirking presence shows up sharply against the bold comic performances of Rebecca Front and Linda Bassett as his mother and grandma. (Grandpa has been written out after actor Geoffrey Hutchings died last year.) But the premise of a squabbling family played for laughs generally works well.

The second series of Simon Amstell's meta comedy takes it up a notch by introducing a new fictional comedy show written by Simon, about his family. The farcical elements remain sharp, as Simon wakes up next to a man who insists on referring to him only as Simon Amstell, and the supporting cast is impeccable, particularly Samantha Spiro's angry aunt and Rebecca Front as Amstell's mother: "You're back on telly!" she beams. "I don't care if it's absolute shit."

Simon Amstell's dysfunctional family sitcom, Grandma's House, returns for another run of gently serrated farce, in which the lapsed tormentor of pop buffoons plays an undisguised version of himself struggling to escape from his abrasive public image.

Last time he was trying to achieve something more meaningful with his life and craft - in reality, of course, he made Grandma's House - and as we reconvene he's finally been given a self-penned TV pilot. Which sounds a lot like Grandma's House. His proudly forthright Jewish mother - played by the great Rebecca Front - is naturally delighted, especially since Simon's career slump means he now lives in grandma's box room. "I can feel the shame lifting, can you?" she beams.

Like a more populous variation on Roger and Val Have Just Got In, each episode unfolds entirely within the titular abode, with the intensely self-aware Simon a perpetually mortified victim of his family's eccentricity. As before it's all very likeable, witty and controlled and Amstell has thankfully improved as an actor following a painfully self-conscious start during the first series. Indeed, they've developed his shortcomings into a running gag within the show itself - episode one is titled "The day Simon officially became a very good and totally employable actor."

The death of actor Geoffrey Hutchings, who played Simon's granddad in the first series, is deftly handled (you won't find overbearing schmaltz in this show), with his absence quietly underpinning an otherwise typically chucklesome episode in which our discomfited protagonist deals with the fall-out from a one night stand and fails to mend a possibly symbolic leak.

If I have a criticism it's that Samantha Spiro as Simon's embittered aunt is still too broad at times, although James Smith - coincidentally Front's co-star in The Thick Of It - continues to judge his performance perfectly as mum's hopeless ex-fiancée. Also, apropos motherly concern, a brief topless scene reveals that Amstell has the body of an emaciated alien. Eat, man, eat!

The many sides of Rebecca Front

The comic actress Rebecca Front is one of our most underrated stars, as this selection of her best television roles shows.

I am still a little worried that Harvey Easter, the indefatigably cheery protaganist of Mr Blue Sky, will someday soon rip the mask of optimism from his face and go on a killing rampage, starting with his live-in son-in-law-to-be. As this young man, a grimestep DJ who is paid in energy drinks and therefore returns to the Easter household at 5am on a Red Bull high, is called Kill-R, it will give Harvey the opportunity to snarl: "Who's the killer now?" as he takes aim.

When I reviewed last year's first series of Andrew Collins' slow-burning hit comedy, I thought Harvey was bound to 'reverse into gloom' at some stage. The second series opened with his entire family kidnapped and replaced almost wholesale by the cast of TV's Outnumbered, but plucky old Harvey just got on with the job of being happy.

So Mark Benton's Harvey, a performance which is an essay in finely nuanced felicity (and how much harder must this be to play than the sobs of a broken man?) didn't falter even though the detached irony of Rebecca Front, last year's Mrs E, was replaced by Claire Skinner bringing with her Tyger Drew-Honey, both from Outnumbered. Skinner is the leading exponent of wringing comedic value out of the middle-class mum, determined never to yell "Because I said so." And I'm sure I'll get used to her in this, but for now I can't imagine her without chiselled-jawed, puppy-eyed Hugh Dennis as the husband who is a perpetual disappointment.

Tyger took over the role of 16-year-old Robbie with aplomb, asking for money to buy fruit - street slang for drugs - while their older child and bride-to-be, Charlie, was played by Rosamund Hanson with a quirkiness heightened by what was either a speech impediment or a plethora of tongue piercings. The darkness in this solidly engineered comedy, it transpires, is not embedded in Harvey's alter-ego, but swirls all around him as he attempts to hold it back like the tone-deaf, out-of-condition superhero he is.

John Prescott was once so rude to me when I was a reporter on a local newspaper that, even 25 years later, I can still hear him screaming. He will definitely go into my Room 101.

Lord Prescott, as he is now, of course, wants to dispose of gurning press pictures of himself that make him look stupid, and footballers' silly goal-celebration dances. Oh, and the title "Lord".

Rebecca Front doubtless speaks for good-mannered people across the land when she says she would banish other people's music (leaky headphones, cab drivers playing power-ballad music stations), while Micky Flanagan can't stand celebrity chefs and Americanisms.

Dilemma (Radio 4, 7.45pm) is a new panel show, hosted by inescapable Sue Perkins, a sort of Moral Maze for the lace-loosened, in which comedians Dave Gorman and Richard Herring, actress and writer Rebecca Front and pithy columnist Dominic Lawson discuss such questions as "Would you provide an alibi for someone you hate?" Sketch show comedy and topical satire have so far not exactly flourished in this slot. Management fingers will be crossed for this, hoping that the audience hasn't already scuttled off to other channels.

First episode of a terrific comedy series starring Jack Docherty, Gordon Kennedy, Rebecca Front and David Haig. Andrew Merrin, visiting professor of anthropology at the University of the West of Scotland (formerly Partick Polytechnic) is embarking on a project to introduce to the modern world two Jacobite soldiers - Macdonald, the chief of the clan, and Rab, his bard - who have been holed up in a Perthshire cave since the mid 18th century.

First lesson: what is patriotism? The search for an answer involves a trip to an Edinburgh souvenir shop and a pep talk on football from Tess McNair from Radio Peebles, followed by a real match: Scotland v the Dickson Isles (like the Faroes but smaller) in a World Cup qualifier - a comic tour de force that had me howling with laughter.

Two Jacobite soldiers from 1745, a clan chief and his bard, have been found alive and well in a cave. A visiting English academic (of no great status but hopes of it) leaps at the chance to integrate them into modern Scottish society. Carl Gorham (of Stressed Eric cultish fame) is the author and this is very funny, especially if you (as I do) like Scotsmen plus a bustling conjunction of the real with the surreal. There's a marvellous cast too, David Haig, Gordon Kennedy (who also directs), Jack Docherty, Moray Hunter, Morwenna Banks and Rebecca Front.