Will Dean

TV review - Mel Smith: I've Sort of Done Things

A spirited tribute to a hell-raising comic who was a master of playing it by ear.

In an act of a solidarity with the millions of you forced to sit through hours of TV you don't want to watch (and the fact that the BBC wouldn't let me watch Dr Who in advance), I thought it would only be proper to end this review with a few words on the last show I would want to spend Christmas evening watching... Mrs Brown's Boys Christmas Special (Christmas Day, BBC One).

It may have been the sherry, it may have been the wine, it might have been the clever metatextual moment when Brendan O'Carroll asked a workman to say something - "You've got a speaking part now, they'll have to pay you extra. Merry Christmas son!" - but I almost made it all the way through. Almost. So here are my six words on Mrs Brown's Boys Christmas Special: "I really miss The Royle Family".

A certain Christmas spirit was in abundance on Man Down here thanks to Rik Mayall's demented turn as a father whose festive regimen focused solely on terrorising his son, including shoving Greg Davies's Dan headfirst into a Christmas tree and rigging his car with a rowdy seagull. That's my kind of Christmas spirit, right there. And any show which can come up with a kids' school nativity called Scrooge 3000 (sample lyric: "Look at the tasty futuristic geese/ you can't afford a goose to eat") is all right in my book.

A w-w-worthy effort - but there's only one Arkwright

With Ronnie Barker gone, it was TV as Garfunkel without Simon, Wise without Morecambe, Hale and Pace without one of Pace or Hale.

The Reading List: Stand-up comedy

Last week UK comics voted Daniel Kitson the funniest man in Britain. But what books should budding stand-ups not put down?

The second episode of the US/UK development-hell sitcom in which Matt LeBlanc is cast as the star against show creators Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan's will. This time the two Brits meet LeBlanc at a dinner party at the home of their obnoxiously equivocating network boss Merc, managing to offend their new star, as he tries to convince them of his ability to un-Joey himself.

Doing for rambling what Rev did for inner-city religion, The Great Outdoors debuted on BBC4 last autumn and now BBC2 is repeating the three episodes. Andy Riley and Kevin Cecil's charming sitcom meets a group of walkers led by Mark Heap just as they're joined by pushy new member Ruth Jones, who tries to make the gang go her way. Often literally. Also rambling are Katherine Parkinson, Steve Edge and Stephen "Skoose from Whites" Wight.

Matt LeBlanc curbs his enthusiasm, playing himself alongside Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig in this comedy about two British TV writers whose award-winning show about a charming, erudite English headmaster is picked up for a US remake by a boorish US producer who immediately inserts LeBlanc into the lead role. It lacks big laughs, but has a similar charm to another Mangan vehicle, Free Agents.

Mr Brooker's Wipe strand gets a promotion from BBC4 to terrestrial with his inimitable review of the year in news, telly, politics, games and film. The whole caboodle. Chipping in to help Charlie out are brilliant comic misanthrope Doug Stanhope, who'll be looking at the BP gulf oil disaster; Britain's best comic poet, Tim Key, with some dark, topical verse and - another Guardian writer - Grace Dent will be getting her hands lathery with a review of the year's soaps.

First shown on Christmas Day, Matt Lucas and David Walliams's follow-up to Little Britain is a spoof of the various fly-on-the-flying-wall airport docs that littered our screens in the early 2000s. So far, so topical. The tight confines of the setting give the show a bit (a bit) more nuance than Little Britain and - depending on your thoughts on rich white comedians blacking up as an African coffee stall employee and a young Asian rudeboy - there are some laughs. Take budget airline boss Omar, who boasts: "I've not had a plane crash since Tuesday", and mismatched married couple Geoff and Sue, who carry more than a hint of The Fast Show's Roy and Renée.