NOT BEING particularly fond of the sort of sweety you find in tartan tins adorned with slogans like 'It's braw tasty, ye ken]', I found The Tales of Para Handy (BBC 1) something of a burden on the spirit. But I had a bad conscience while watching it. How could one decently object, after all? No violence, no bad language, folksy comedy and some lovely set-dressing (one scene, in particular, looked as if it had been shot at an unusually prosperous transport museum); if my critical faculties were prepared to lie back and surrender to Love on a Branch Line, what grounds for an affronted resistance here?

I'M A BIG fan of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, I think they've done some of the most interesting stuff in comedy in the last few years. But I hate praising them in print, so I'll add that they are a couple of complete bastards in real life. I was script editor on their first series, which basically involved telling them not to get drunk and to face the cameras.

'THEY say laughter is the best medicine,' Frank Skinner said to the Gagtag (BBC 1) audience, 'but no, you had to choose Valium.' This made me laugh, like a number of the things he said in the programme, but the thought isn't a bad one, really. Watching new comedy programmes these days can be an agitating, stressful experience. If the BBC can offer its staff trauma-counselling after working on programmes with distressing content, then perhaps they might issue the odd tranquilliser along with their press releases. Last Saturday, Danny Baker was at pains to point out that no cruelty had been visited upon the contestants in Pets Win Prizes (BBC 1, yes, honest . . . No, it wasn't Carlton . . . I'm not making it up. Look, check the bloody Radio Times if you don't believe me). It is surely time that this tender principle was extended to audiences, even if it takes pharmaceuticals to do it.

FRANK SKINNER BA Hons, MA, WBA fan, Warwickshire CCC member, Sun reader and comedian, makes the short walk from Soho to his rented office in Mayfair, where he will spend all day writing material for a 57-date national tour. No one bats an eyelid as he passes, pink-faced after a day in the sun at Lord's. In T-shirt, trainers and backpack (containing the stand-up's standbys: script, cigarettes and a change of underwear), he could be any old out-of-towner.

THE MEN from the BBC are in the process of redecorating the weekend - putting up new paper here, freshening the paintwork there. Last week Terry Wogan took the wraps off a British version of Brazil's favourite television programme (isn't it meant to work the other way around?) and this week we were given first sight of Felicity Kendal's new comedy series, Honey for Tea, of Richard Griffiths in Pie in the Sky and of the DIY broadcasting of Video Nation. As a rival to the charms of Imogen Stubbs in Anna Lee (ITV) you might think that Richard Griffiths was lacking something physically (surrounding airspace, basically) but there is real mischief in the timing. Pie in the Sky nibbles into the first five minutes of the main ITV Sunday offering, thus increasing the chances that viewers will stick with the crowd-pleasing movie that Alan Yentob has decided to place against it.

THERE must be some people in Britain who still do not know what Fantasy Football is. But their number grows smaller by the day.

HALF-PAST five on a Thursday afternoon and the phone rings, and it's Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci on the other end: the photographer's there with the cast of The Day Today, a new television programme scheduled for transmission on BBC2 next year, and they're all a bit upset because he wants to take a group picture. They don't see themselves as a group and they don't want to be labelled one - they just happen to be making a programme together and to have made a fair number of other programmes together - and anyway Doon's on holiday and it wouldn't be fair, so couldn't they just have one photo each? Twenty-five minutes of reasoning, cajoling and outright pleading later, and they're still not happy with the concept of being photographed together, still arguing, and Morris refuses point- blank to be shot with the others. So, just to get the record straight: Steve Coogan, Rebecca Front, Armando Iannucci, Patrick Marber, Chris Morris and David Schneider are not a team. They are individuals, with their own projects, their own ambitions, their own hopes and dreams and fears. So is Doon, who was on holiday. And now, perhaps we can get on with it?

WATCHING Jude Kelly's new production of Trevor Griffiths' Comedians, in which the comedian Eddie Waters runs an evening class for aspiring stand-ups, I began to realise how Claudius must have felt when the players started to re-enact his killing of Old Hamlet.

Four years ago Frank Skinner was teaching a class of mechanics, salesmen, pensioners and dropouts how to be funny, and frankly he had a bit of a cheek. If you detected, as I did, covering it for the Independent, a slight note of desperation in his voice as he passed on the tricks of the trade - 'If you get on to the stage quickly enough,' he told his gaping students, 'you can pick up some of the previous act's applause' - then you might have put it down to Skinner's lack of credentials. A teacher by day at a West Midlands adult education centre (and an unqualified one at that), he'd had some experience of stealing applause by moonlighting on the London comedy circuit, but little in the way of earning it. As he waved a stick at his trainee comedians, you had the distinct impression of the blind leading the blind.