American Life

As you might suspect from the title, Glee is pretty happy with itself. It's caught in the same smugly camp cartoon irony mode as Desperate Housewives and Ugly Betty, though so far with no signs of the tedious overcomplications of the former or the unchanging format of the latter. But it shares their black humour and reliance on grotesque female monsters to drive the plot.

In this instance the monster is Jane Lynch's Sue Sylvester, a character somewhere between Heathers, Donnie Darko and The Royal Tenenbaums. All of the cliches of American high school dramas are here: the horny, dumb jocks, the bitchy cheerleaders, the embarrassing nerds, etc. It's amazing how flexible these shorthand tics are: ever since John Hughes, Clueless and Election, the high school has taken over from the Western as the primary metaphor for American life. Here you have hope, fear, laws and lawlessness, emotional distress, cruelty and inspiration, role models and villains, and an endless cast of schoolkids and teachers to draw on for further issues and twists.

At the moment it's great fun – and it knows it. So far my favourite character by far is OCD emotional wreck (and obviously school guidance counsellor) Emma Pillsbury, whose Bridget Jones-style sobbing in a rain-soaked car to All By Myself in a tiny comic aside as she attempts to offer advice to a student did make me yelp with laughter. It's fun and silly and – oh yes, has songs (Goldigger being the only goodie so far) and I'm sure to get bored some way through this season as I always do with these invariably bloated and overlong American seasons.

Interesting to read the slew of homophobic comments from woolly liberals on the Guardian website under a piece about the show a few weeks back – it's like it was an opportunity for a lot of HBO fans to say 'that sounds soooo gay' over and over again. And, frankly, if it's annoying them then it's definitely doing something right.

Anti-omnishambles

This series of The Thick of It has been amazing. Way beyond what we have come to expect from a political comedy in the last twenty years. There are the beautiful characters and performances (Rebecca Front being mad and angry has been a revelation, Chris Addison's Ollie is a detailed study in annoying, James Smith plays Glenn Cullen with the battered dignity of a knackered old satchel and Joanna Scanlan is quietly worrying as disinterested Terri). The storylines are inspired (party conference speech ruined by loudmouthed grieving widow on Twitter, Radio 5 Live interviews derailed by phone-in revelations, etc) and each one showcases another desperately shallow and botched attempt at professional politics in Britain today.

Malcolm Tucker is the obvious giant of the show, a creature so monstrous and yet thoroughly understandable that you can't quite hate him. The amazing meltdown scene with Terri where she tells him he's wrong and he actually demonstrates some kind of self-knowledge, seeing himself for what he is to her shallow bafflement, is a truly standout scene, for my money the best in a wonderful series. We have been spoiled with eight weeks of artfully wrought political suicide and a portrait of life inside a dying government that in years to come will be taken as fact.

The insults are marvellous, my favourite being 'omnishambles' (almost as good as Tucker calling Toby in the film In the Loop 'Love Actually'). It's this level of inspired detail on top of the immense amount of research and across the board perfect performances that makes The Thick of It the best comedy on TV since Spaced. And we are living in an era of good sitcoms, it's a miracle. Outnumbered is a national treasure, The IT Crowd and The Inbetweeners are a new genre of nerdcom, people love Peep Show though I can't watch it because it makes my flesh crawl too much, and Gavin and Stacey is heartwarming and gorgeous in a way that old sitcoms used be – entirely because of the peripheral characters. Thank god the old cliche about Britain being shit at sitcoms has passed, and we can move on from Americanised trash like My Family. Watching something as good as The Thick of It makes you realise just how inspiring, truthful and funny a good comedy can be.

One of the best sketches of all time

'Maybe he's dressed as Pat Phoenix and wanking into a desk tidy.'

Repeats of The Thick of It specials in the wake of the success of In the Loop have given me the opportunity to snigger all over again at the verbal extremities and staggeringly believable performances.

Best bit: terrifying Jamie locks himself in a stationery cupboard with potential leadership candidate Claire Ballantine and emerges moments later revealing that 'She's addicted to online poker', which leads to my favourite line from the entire series: 'You know what they're calling her already? Ugly Betty'.

Reggie Perrin

Oh no.

Mike Leigh Night

Nuts in May. It has the same kind of merciless, appalling, flesh-creeping quality as a Martin Amis novel or The Office (especially when they reach for their guitars...). I find it quite hard to watch because it's so excruciatingly embarrassing in places (mostly when Keith is talking, which is the majority of the film).

I prefer Mike Leigh's middle period to his earlier or later stuff - especially High Hopes, Life is Sweet and Career Girls. They're a bit kinder to their characters than the early ones, and feel slightly more realistic than his later films. He's taken on 'big themes' more recently, with historical dramas like Vera Drake or rants like Naked. I remember an episode of A Bit of Fry and Laurie where Fry snarls 'Tonight's theme is: THEMES. WHAT GOOD ARE THEY?'. I feel a bit like that about Mike Leigh's stuff. When they wear their meaning lightly I think they work best.

Brainwipe

Newswipe is a bit of a shock, isn't it? The news media is so absurd these days that you'd think it was beyond satire. But then Newswipe is beyond being satirical in the conventional John Stewart sense. Instead it's more despairing and philosophical. Yes, there's the odd montage of cheap jokes at the expense of animal-based news stories, etc., but the thing that makes it particularly good is that Charlie Brooker never takes the easy line on anything. He's quite happy to run long pieces which discuss serious and complex issues without cheapening them with gags and gimmicks. Which is more than you get on Newsnight these days.

His Jade Goody piece this evening was fantastic, highlighting the ugly spite and sycophancy which has come tumbling out on news reports and message boards throughout her career, and the difficulty of processing the story of her death amid the sheer overload of polarised information. I know that when people have asked me what I think about Jade I feel sad and then I feel confused. He captured that odd, conflicted feeling so well, when he needn't have bothered, because there was tons of more obvious jokes to be had about it if he'd wanted to do them. There's something much more humane going on here, and that seems to be the idea behind Newswipe, to contrast the hysterical stylised news agenda with real human thought and experience. And how wonderful and unexpected is that as a project?

His reminder that Gordon Brown only commented on the Jade Goody story because he was asked by journalists was the kind of thoughtful little aside that makes his analysis so interesting. The easy Have I Got News For You win would have been to slag Gordon – you can hear Ian Hislop trotting out his usual line in eye-rolling and sneering to much smug applause. It's so refreshing to have someone not do that, to point out the construction behind the soundbite and not just regurgitate a second hand news story as fact.

I'm really interested to see where this show goes. I reckon Brooker's going to end up as the new A. J. Ayer and Newswipe will be replaced with Brainwipe, where he deconstructs the very fabric of our being. Or maybe he'll just do some more jokes about Hole in the Wall.