Victor Lewis-Smith

Giblets and war were two basic ingredients of The Saturday Night Armistice, a show described at the outset by Armando Iannucci as "a sort of Pets Win Prizes during a cull". The man behind two of last year's most original series (The Day Today and Knowing Me, Knowing You) was making his debut as a presenter and, as so often happens when producers succumb to the temptation to get in front of the cameras, it was all going disastrously wrong.

Last night on Tharg, the new series of Men Behaving Badly (BBC1) very probably bombed, but in this solar system it went off with a big bang, shooting meteorically across the night sky (rather like an overextended metaphor). Itself the very antithesis of the dire Game On (which briefly disgraced our screens earlier in the year), this superb chronicle of the sordid joys of bachelor existence never lost its momentum for a second, hitting the screen running, and ducking and diving right up to the closing credits.

There were plenty of reverse-balding-syndrome sufferers on view last night in Paul Merton's Life of Comedy (BBC1), a fascinating six-part trawl through the LE archives. As a member of the first generation to be raised from birth with television, Merton confessed at the outset that "TV comedy seems as real to me as my own life", and the series blurs that distinction further, blending vintage footage with spurious autobiography. Adding funny links to funny clips is a dangerous game to play (usually, you prefer one and wish the other wasn't there at all) but he brings off the double act superbly - so effortlessly, in fact, that a huge effort must have gone into preparing the apparently unstructured format.

And I watched the first episode of Next of Kin (BBC1) where Ms Keith, having doubtless considered the hundreds of different ways she might enact Maggie (her latest role), had yet again opted for the persona of a snooty, humourless, unemotional bossyboots. [...] No one expects, or even desires a sitcom to be true to life - if we wanted realism we'd all have mirrors in our rooms instead of TV sets - but the minimum requirements are surely escapism and entertainment. Jan Etherington and Gavin Petrie's pitiful script provided neither, merely ineptly cashing in on the current vogue for Third-Age sitcoms pioneered by the excellent One Foot In The Grave.

Last night's Omnibus (BBC1) looked at the other great sitcom partnership of that generation, Jimmy Perry and David Croft, creators of Dad's Army, It Ain't Half Hot Mum, and Hi-de-Hi! [...] Of the talking heads who'd queued up to pay homage, only Bob Monkhouse spoke with insight and eloquence, noting how jokes were tailor-made for the characters, and how the duo "bring such extraordinarily opposing views of comedy and blend them together so perfectly that the result is seamless".

I'm all in favour of scatology, when it's used to deflate pomposity or to prevent art from falling into pretentiousness but, for the past six weeks, Game On (BBC2) has been using the full Viz vocabulary without displaying even a glimmer of the Viz wit that might justify it.

Old whines in new bottles

A series called Bubble might succeed, but Absolutely Fabulous is now a precocious, overtired child who, for everyone's good, needs to be sent off to bed. In addition to talent and hard work, success in any field requires a large dose of luck, and the first series had that in abundance. But there's another quality that's just as important, which John Cleese had with Fawlty Towers, but which this team doesn't possess. Knowing when to stop.

Peter Richardson (the least-known but most influential member of The Comic Strip) has spent three years assembling what he describes as "a comic on TV, inspired by Viz and that sense of the absurd" and he's created a frenetic and gloriously incoherent series which makes The Fast Show look like a Fifties kittens-in-beermugs interlude.

The show revolves around Gary Sparrow, a televisual 4-D Jones who can step in and out of the space-time continuum at will. He conducts parallel lives in 1941 and the present day, a brilliantly original idea except that Back to the Future and The Terminator (and several thousand other movies) flogged such notions to death a decade ago. [...] Since Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran (the creators of the first-class Birds of a Feather) are credited as "writers and supervising producers", I can only assume that some sort of head injury has occurred (writers always risk collision when pacing the floor for inspiration).

All hail to the king of comedy

During my brief stint at TV reviewing, few programmes have provoked a sharp intake of breath, but this documentary left me pretty well hyperventilating. Dazzlingly directed by Peter Lydon, it worked superbly on many levels - biographical, historical, psychological.