Having recently endured a colonoscopy in real life, Hugh Dennis must have thought he'd heard all possible jokes about bums and cameras. But Ramona and Ben dream up some more tonight when his character Pete is due to have the same procedure.

Tonight's theme - if this collection of non-sequiturs can claim a theme - is Why It's Wrong To Treat Women As Sex Objects Or Domestic Servants. But there's more comedy in the bit with Ramona re-enacting The Apprentice with her stuffed toys.

Speaking of TV, Jake and his dad have very different tastes as Pete moans about Making Of... shows. "TV shows are like pork pies," moans Pete. "They're fantastic but you don't want to know what goes in them." Which might explain why he now needs to have a camera shoved up his insides.

Passion is a word that's bandied about a lot on reality TV programmes. But I've never seen anyone so tirelessly dedicated to putting that passion into action as I have in this show.

I saw Hugh Dennis once, carrying an enormous backpack and walking down Regent Street a few days before Christmas. Actually, I had to check to see if there were cameras following him, so much like his Outnumbered character, flustered dad-of-three Pete, did he appear. I think he caught my gawping, because he pulled that face he does on Mock the Week - lip curled, eyebrow up, face deadpan - so I looked away. Still don't know if there were cameras.

I get the impression this happens a lot. Because, after all, Outnumbered is a lot like real life. It's not the script that does it - that's good, though, like any of these two point four children sitcoms, a little cheesy too. No, it's the children. They don't seem to be acting at all. Take last night, when they thought they'd won half a million pounds from Reader's Digest. "We can buy school and close it down!" yelled Ben. "We could save the polar bears!" yelled Karen. On and on they went with their shopping list. Were they making it up as they went along? That's what it looked like. It's a little frightening, really. Children, I mean. They're monstrous, aren't they? Monstrous but also quite funny, especially for those of us who don't have them for real. It's a form of war tourism: look how Karen makes her granny squirm with her questions about weight! Isn't it awful? Thank god I don't have one. Phew.

One of the boys has been downloading "inappropriate" images of their teacher, which leads to an awkward family discussion about the meaning of inappropriate. But Dad (Hugh Dennis) tries not to worry. "They're just teenage boys," he tells his wife (Claire Skinner). "They're like baboons on heat. In school uniforms." Elsewhere in the house, five-year-old Karen (Ramona Marquez) is busy writing letters to President Obama. "I am beginning to lose my patience . . ." she begins. She is also developing a tough-love approach to prison reform. Prisoners, she says, should be put in holes in the ground. Occasionally soup should be poured in, forcing them to scoop it up in their hands. The trouble with children is that they don't appreciate the value of political correctness.

Another terrific episode. We're used to the way Karen's button nose and ringlets hide a lethal gift: she runs rings around adults for fun. Given half an opening, she sniffs out the hypocrisies of the grown-up world like a bloodhound. This week it's her grandmother who gets the treatment as they discuss being fat. "A woman can be any size or shape she wants," Gran reassures her. Karen ponders this. "What about..." she replies, "a hexagon?" Just as well worked is the bit where she plays with her cuddly toys, acting out Britain's Got Talent. ("I'm going to eat all the chocolate I can eat in memory of my mother," says plush Hippo.) Basically, any scene she's in is funny. As are all the other scenes, in fact. Look out for Ben's Darth Vader impression.

Outnumbered leaves the joke on parents everywhere

The Brockman family are successful, even smug, living in a nice neighbourhood in London, with a nice, safe job (teaching history), with three smart, super-cute kids. On the surface, it's all nice, nice, nice, nice, nice. Now in its third series, some of this has become cloying.

Outnumbered success relies on the partly improvised dialogue derived from the interaction of the three children and their screen parents in various situations: in last week's episode, a trip round London with dad Pete's mother in tow. The youngest, Karen (Ramona Marquez), nine, is the star, her dialogue pursuing paths of childish logic to which Pete (Hugh Dennis) reacts with probably real bafflement. In previous series the adults had more of the screen; here they are pulled into the background more as feeds for the self-confident kids, no doubt ruminating on the phrase attributed to WC Fields, "Never act with children or animals".

Last night's TV: Outnumbered

I reckon the smartypants kids in Outnumbered need a good thrashing.

Outnumbered, BBC One, review

The award-laden family sitcom Outnumbered returns - but it's starting to look tired.

Few TV shows make me want to kick in the TV screen with quite the unfettered anger that Outnumbered manages to provoke.

Just two minutes in the company of those precocious brats and their pathetic parents really pushes the rage buttons: it's the televisual equivalent of guilt therapy for inadequate white middle-class types who turn themselves into human doormats the minute they pop one out. The problem is, Outnumbered gets showered with awards because it's those self-same inadequate white middleclass parents who are in charge of handing out the awards. But what gets lauded as cute just strikes me as contrived, an endless babble of knowing nonsense spouted by irritating kids who should have been told - long, long ago - to put a flaming lid on it.

The first in the latest series had jokes (if that's the word) about counting chavs, using disabled toilets - 'desperation is a temporary form of disability' - and confusing lesbian and Lebanese that were so lame they needed shooting and putting out of their misery. The whole thing was like one of those half-baked panel shows where all the off-the-cuff quips sound laboured and scripted. But just thinking about it makes me too angry to type any more. I blame the parents.

Last Night's TV - Outnumbered

I'd never watched Outnumbered before last night, and that's because when it first made its appearance on our screens, I thought "oh, another formulaic, cliched sitcom", so I didn't bother tuning in. But last night, for want of anything better to do, I did tune in, and it rapidly became obvious that I'd been spot on in my pre-emptive assumptions. It was formulaic and it was clichéd.