Vic Reeves

While we're on the subject of wilful stupidity, BBC2 was celebrating the legacy of Shooting Stars, the Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer game show. Shooting Stars: the Inside Story was an engaging retrospective, which made it clear how much fun everybody had at the time (and wasn't Ulrika pretty?). It made me annoyed at not having watched it more regularly. But then along came All New Shooting Stars, a strained attempt to revive the fun, with everybody looking older and tireder, and a depressing sense that entertaining the audience came a long way down the list of priorities.

Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer first hosted their anarchic celebrity quiz show in 1993. The first of two programmes marking the show's 15th anniversary tonight is a documentary about the making of it - and, like Shooting Stars itself, the film is funny, eccentric and a little self-indulgent. Interspersed with interviews with some of the celebrities who found themselves subjected to Reeves' and Mortimer's particular kind of comedy (which veered from the surreal to the mildly offensive), the presenters themselves play various crew members reminiscing about their time working behind the scenes. This is a suitably unique way to contemplate a programme which Martine McCutcheon calls 'bizarre' and of which Larry Hagman said, "I've done some loony shows in my time but this is certainly the one."

Shooting Stars launched the career of Matt Lucas - who played scorekeeper George Dawes before he went on to global fame with David Walliams in Little Britain - and latterly also co-starred the often self-confessedly drunken comic Johnny Vegas.

The Best... Shooting Stars moments

The Radio Times picks its eight favourite moments from Shooting Stars. Each is accompanied by a clip.

Shooting Stars back for one-off special

BBC Two has confirmed that comedy gameshow Shooting Stars is to return for a Christmas special and a festive 'best of' compilation special has also been ordered, featuring behind the scenes gossip and out-takes.

Jimmy Carr returns with the sixth - yes, sixth - series of this consistently funny panel game, sitting smugly between the announcement of who's getting kicked out of the Big Brother house and the first evictee's chat with Davina.

Comedians Sean Lock and Jason Manford are still in the team captains' chairs and tonight they'll be joined by repeat guests (also known as show stalkers) Vic Reeves and David Walliams, who have appeared more than 10 times between them.

The inessential comedy panel show returns for an astonishing sixth series, with Jimmy Carr again marshalling six comedians as they recite jokes based on surveys and statistics. Returning as team captains are Sean Lock, generally the best spontaneous contributor by far, and Peter Kay-ish Manchester comic Jason Manford.

It's all a bit stilted and choppily edited, but it can attract decent guests (Vic Reeves and Griff Rhys Jones were on last year - David Walliams appears tonight) and will do well in the ratings.

There has been heated debate on internet forums this week regarding the BBC3 programme When Comedy Changed Forever. This one-off, 60 minuter put forward the thesis that modern television comedy owes an enormous debt to Vic Reeves Big Night Out. Taking this assumption as its intellectual starting point, the rest of the programme was then bolted round the idea, and presented to us via some ugly graphics that were meant to denote the different ages of TV comedy as distinct geographical locations.

Vic Reeves Big Night Out: Series One

Reeves and Mortimer have never been afraid to turn their hands to different formats - a game show, Shooting Stars; a comedy drama, Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased); a surreal sitcom, Catterick - but they have never really topped the inspired lunacy of their first television series.

Being more 'daft' than 'dark' (good news for anyone who enjoys laughing at jokes), [and] containing admirably stupid performances and hilariously baffling visual asides, Catterick is the most promising new series so far this year.

Vegas is clearly passionate about his art, and, although he uses it for comic effect in his own shows, Reeves's desire to undermine and denigrate it was as distasteful as it was unfunny.