Victor Lewis-Smith

Victor Lewis-Smith on Creature Comforts

Beautifully cut, with every breath and inflection on the soundtrack painstakingly reproduced in pictures, and with an astonishing degree of expressivity and pathos (especially in the eyes), this is wonderful television that could and should be repeated many times.

But either I was wrong (that's a strong possibility, and certainly wouldn't be the first time), or the pair have got a lot better over the past couple of years, because their Rock Profiles series revealed a comedic deftness of touch that had hitherto seemed absent from their work. And with the arrival of Little Britain (which began last night on BBC3), there's ample evidence that the erstwhile untalented Walliams and unfunny Lucas are now two of the hottest properties on television. Now will somebody remove this sword from me?

Victor Lewis-Smith on QI

This ingenious and avowedly untopical quiz (devised and produced by the brilliant John Lloyd) is aimed at the same audience who enjoy Have I Got News For You (Lloyd was initially involved in that too), and would by rights be scheduled at prime time on BBC1, were it not for that channel's current shameful contempt for any format that requires brains.

Channel 4's previous ventures into hoaxing have often been successful. Trigger Happy TV pulled off some delightfully surreal stunts with genuinely bemused celebrities, while The Mark Thomas Comedy Product (although never knowingly funny) at least used weak practical jokes to expose government hypocrisy, but The Pilot Show has no humour and no purpose, so it humiliates and demeans without reason or justification.

However, it seems there's a moribund reality show that's already hit the screen like a stinking corpse, and its name is My New Best Friend (C4). In a bid to win £10,000, members of the public (or "punters" as they're patronisingly called in Tellyland) agree to spend a weekend pretending to friends and family that actor Marc Wootton is now their closest pal, and the resulting programme is just as lifeless and humour-free as that unpromising scenario might suggest.

A generation ago, television bristled with imaginative and quirky one-off stories like these (in memorable series like Out of the Unknown and Tales of the Unexpected), and in an era when most drama departments now churn out nothing but multi-part thrillers, the Spine Chiller srand is proving that

Francis (in case you're unfamiliar with the name) is the man behind C4's Bo' Selecta!, a gloriously irreverent look at the world of celebrity, in which he plays Transylvanian immigrant Avid Merrion, a sort of comedic Fred West with a name that's half video editing suite and half Leeds shopping centre.

Victor Lewis-Smith on Comedy From Merton To Enfield

This was a first-class programme that dealt generously with Enfield's early career, but bluntly concluded that "his recent programmes have not been popular".

But I needn't have worried, because in Ali G in da USAiii (C4) he's reached new levels of hilarity, and I simply cannot understand why British critics haven't been praising the series to the rafters.

An identical 1980s answerphone loomed large in last night's Grease Monkeys, and its clapped-out appearance was in keeping with the generally clapped-out feel of this "comedy drama". As we all know, "comedy drama" is the usual billing for a show that's neither funny nor thrilling, and it was certainly an accurate summary of the first episode of what was described as "a surreal collection of stories about a dysfunctional Asian family".