Stephen K Amos: Murder, he wrote

He once joked that British TV couldn't cope with more than one black comedian at a time - now Stephen K Amos is getting his own BBC series. And he hasn't even had to kill Lenny Henry, he explains.

The urbane Lee continues to do his bit to redress the shortage of stand-up comedy on TV. We're overrun with panel shows in which comics slice and dice their stand-up ideas into witty chunks but we get fewer full-length routines.

What Lee shows over the course of a half-hour programme is how a longer time frame lets him toy with an idea, stretch it to breaking point, and play on preconceptions so that by the end you almost feel part of an unusually witty sociology seminar.

Having said all that, tonight's edition isn't as thick with laugh-out-loud moments as it might be. Some of the better jokes are in the sketches: look out for the spoof Hitler speeches ("And you can't even hit your kids any more!" he rants in German) and Stephen K Amos lifting an otherwise daft joke about Kofi Annan.

A new panel game, Act Your Age, ostensibly pitting comics from different generations against each other, sounded like a poor man's Mock the Week, with the six contestants, including Lucy Porter, Stephen K Amos and Barry Cryer, vying to come up with the funniest jokes or anecdotes. It wouldn't have mattered that chairman Simon Mayo's scoring was fashionably arbitrary if he'd made a wittier contribution, or helped the contestants out when they were floundering. Any panel game that is reduced to knock-knock jokes in its first outing is going to struggle to find an audience.

They act their age, but they're not funny

I can remember laughing only once, and even that was spitefully. Stephen K Amos, Lucy Porter, Barry Cryer and, bizarrely, Roy Walker had pitched up to pick up a cheque by not trying very hard.