Sarah Millican - View from the Sofa

We've just started recording the second series of my TV show so life is very busy and scary. Every day in the studio is terrifying.

The Sarah Millican Television Programme review

Sarah Millican is both warm and friendly while simultaneously mischievously quick and sharp.

This week, the jocular Geordie turns her attention to the worlds of entertainment and sports shows. Guests include sports presenter Clare Balding, whom we'll no doubt be seeing plenty of during the summer, and Dancing on Ice's Louie Spence, whom we could all do with seeing a little less of.

Here's a bold idea; get Sarah Millican to take over Harry Hill's now-vacant chair on TV Burp. She'd be perfect, she can see all that is both fun and ridiculous about television and she's quick on her comedy feet. Though of course she'd have to tone down the saucy bits. In between a routine about her abandoned sex toys (Sex Toy Story 4) she gets her own back after being patronised by fashion designer Julien Macdonald of Britain's Next Top Model and grills a very game Robert Peston about his domestic austerity measures.

Sarah Millican Television Programme: safe but charming

The Sarah Millican Television Programme breaks no boundary with its alternating interview and stand-up format, but its well-observed and self-deprecating humour is sure to charm audiences.

There's something of Mrs Merton in the way Sarah Millican asks questions that aren't really meant to be answered, just to get a cheeky laugh. So when one of her guests is "weather legend" John Kettley, she asks him innocently, "Is it possible for the sun to actually shine out of someone's a***?" Only a comic as seemingly sweet as Millican could carry it off, but she knows exactly how far she can go in a 10pm show, and goes there, a lot.

How do you transfer stand-up comedians from stage to screen? I can't say it's a question which pre-occupies me, but surely you just stick them in Moss Bros' finest and wire up a microphone. After all, that worked for Frank Carson. Ah, but he was funny. Comics now aren't, or at least not funny-funny. And viewers these days demand more than just gags which, as Eamon Holmes (not a comedian) clumsily put it after Carson's funeral service, are every bit as rat-tat-tat as the gunfire which once echoed round Belfast's streets. Thus, for our more sophisticated tastes, we get The Sarah Millican Television Programme. Oh dear.

The title sequence of spinning TV sets ("I absolutely love telly," Millican will inform us) is itself a relic, though maybe this is irony (ha bloody ha). The canned laughter is too loud. There are interviews (the first one was stilted and went on too long) and there is acting. This should be covered by a warning, like strobe effects are, because apart from Jack Whitehall in Fresh Meat, comedians can't act. Millican was trying to pick up men in a bar after coaching from a sexpert and it was awful. The thing is, she's funny - and filthy. She should have just donned a dinner suit for some of the old rat-tat-tat.

Comedian Sarah Millican's new show is a jumble of stand-up, sketches and chat, but it serves her talents well. Tonight she swaps banter with actor Simon Callow, weatherman John Kettley, and Downton Abbey's Phyllis Logan. She seems that unlikeliest of creatures, a happy clown, and her jokes hit more than miss. On why Millican never watches Top Gear: "If I wanted to watch slightly racist middle-aged men driving, I'd just take a cab."