In the first two episodes, the gap left by the departed Tim Vine's character was filled with farcical plots. Tonight, things calm down and we veer as close to emotion as this endearingly flippant series gets. Lucy is doing night classes in psychotherapy, so Lee (Lee Mack, a Graham Norton guest tonight) mocks the whole idea - before submitting to counselling himself. Perhaps his failure with relationships has roots in his upbringing?

Enter Bobby Ball as Lee's dad. There are deeper waters than usual under the gags, but dim friend Daisy keeps it light. Daisy: "You said you wanted to damage the bike!" Lucy: "No, I said I wanted to break the cycle."

he big difference this time around is that Tim Vine has now left, meaning that Lee Mack has no comic foil. Tim's disappearance was explained early on in this episode as he is apparently on a work placement in Germany. Meanwhile Tim's sister Lucy (Sally Breton) had a dilemma when she ran over the rabbit of a client's daughter after a successful business meeting. As this was Not Going Out, Lucy did the most illogical thing namely to get Lee to return the body of the rabbit to its owner. However due to a number of misunderstandings, Lee ends up returning the wrong rabbit and so the usual string of comic capers begin.

To be fair, not much has changed in the world of Not Going Out and I have to say I really didn't miss Tim Vine all that much. I feel by this point Mack and Breton to have enough chemistry to carry a sitcom together and this episode really demonstrated it. Thankfully Katy Wix's Daisy is still around and in this first episode had some great one-liners though I'd like to see her be the focus of a few more storylines now she's one of the major players.

Not Going Out may not be the most original comedy around but there's no denying that it's still funny after six years. Mack knows how to both write and deliver a funny line while his two female co-stars are also excellent at bouncing of him. So far 2013 has been a dire year for UK sitcoms so I'm glad that there's finally something on TV that at least makes me laugh once in a while.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: to lose one scene-stealing support player is unfortunate but to lose two could be considered careless. So can the sitcom that helped launch the career of Miranda Hart - and survived - pull off the same trick now Tim Vine is absent from the sixth series? All eyes are on Lee Mack, still firmly at the centre of this universe, with puns and misfortune whirling around him like dysfunctional satellites as Lucy (Sally Bretton) plays Watership Down with a brace of innocent rabbits and Daisy (Katy Wix) strides in to make matters worse.

At the launch of the sixth series of Not Going Out, its star Lee Mack said the absent Tim Vine - who played Tim, Not Going Out's good-natured voice of reason and a perfect foil for Mack - would be replaced by an "abstract concept". What he meant was there'd be a lot more plot and story to make up for the Vine-sized gap. You'll be able to see what he was getting at in a very farcical opening episode involving dead rabbits.

All the usual Not Going Out tent-poles are in place; the quick-fire gags at which Mack is the unsurpassable master, the silly situations (very silly, as it turns out) and the excellent Sally Bretton and Katy Wix as Lucy and Daisy. It's frantic, frequently funny and refreshingly unpretentious. But you'll miss Tim Vine. I do.

The return of Not Going Out

Lee Mack's Not Going Out returns to the BBC for its sixth series this evening, with an episode that proves there is life after Tim Vine...

Lee Mack's reliably straightforward sitcom returns for a sixth series with Lee reluctantly coming to the aid of flatmate Lucy after she runs over a potential client's pet rabbit. Complications follow in the form of mistaken identity, a troublemaking parrot and some car keys falling down a drain. It's nothing new, yet it feels oddly novel: long-running, über-traditional sitcoms are currently few and far between.

Judging by the first half of this opener, that might not seem like a great loss. Laboured witticisms come at the expense of proper dialogue, with jokes and puns of wildly varying quality crowbarred into the script at any opportunity. But in those moments when the action builds to almost perfectly constructed silliness, Mack's wooden acting, the stock plot, incessant recaps and broadly etched set-up (Tim Vine's exit from the show is explained with thundering lack of subtlety seconds in) start to gel. Nowadays, we might prefer our farce in more coherent and intelligent surroundings, but you'd have to be pretty serious about comedy to begrudge this steadfast sitcom its enduring success.

Lee Mack's gag-packed, innuendo-laden creation is now on its sixth series, and has been sold to 120 countries. Set in London's Docklands, it follows happy-go-lucky slacker Lee (Mack himself) who has a crush on his flatmate Lucy (Sally Bretton), while Katy Wix (Anna & Katy) plays their dim-witted hairdresser friend Daisy. This eight-part run is the first without Mack's co-star and punning partner Tim Vine and begins with head-hunter Lucy going for dinner at a client's house in an attempt to secure a lucrative contract.

Lee Mack interview

TV Choice met Lee Mack to chat about the new series and life after Tim Vine...

The former chief exec of Channel 4 goes in search of the origins of the joke and attempts to discover its earliest example. So he starts in Liverpool with comedy legend Ken Dodd. Trawling history for evidence of what tickled our ancestors, Grade discovers it was basically the same mother-in-law gags and references to anal wind we all love so much now. Interesting contributions come from Tim Vine and the ever-sharp Barry Cryer. Seriously, he must sleep in an amber cave.

A jape, a jest, a gag, even a jewel or trinket in Old English. There are many ways to describe a joke, but pinning down why a joke works is about as easy as nailing jelly to the wall.

Here the jovial Michael Grade does a pretty good job of getting that jelly on the wall - with the help of esteemed gagmeisters Ken Dodd, Barry Cryer and Tim Vine.

His scholastic peregrinations in search of the world's oldest known joke prove we've always laughed at the same things - except we're not so fond of lettuce and herniated eunuch gags nowadays - while the scholarly analysis is tempered by a barrage of one-liners.