TV preview, Walliams & Friend – an uneven sort of sketch show

Looking ahead to Walliams & Friend (BBC1, Friday 9.30pm), Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC1, Thursday 8pm), The Royal Variety Performance (ITV, Tuesday 7.30pm, The BBC Music Awards 2016 (BBC1, Monday 8.30pm), Planet Earth II (BBC1, Sunday 8pm) and Rillington Place (BBC1, Tuesday 9pm)

David Walliams (left) is joined by Meera Syal and Mike Wozniak in his new sketch series (BBC)

To use a seasonal Dickensian expression, albeit a bit of a cliché, I’m afraid that next week’s viewing is rather thin gruel on the whole. It’s the time of year when the broadcasters save their best treats for Christmas week, and thus we have to make do with some fairly ordinary offerings in the period immediately before, when of course we’re distracted anyway by work parties, shopping and arguments with spouses spiralling way out of control. You might even be preparing for the annual self-assessment tax return to HMRC.

Whatever, as one of his characters might say, next week sees another episode of Walliams & Friend. This, in case you’ve not caught it, is a sketch show, a genre that comes and goes in TV fashion. The late 1960s were a bit of a golden era, with That Was the Week That Was, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Marty Feldman and Dick Emery, the decade’s satires climaxing with Monty Python, of course.

David Walliams, with Matt Lucas, should be credited for a spirited revival of the sketch in Little Britain, but now, without Lucas, Walliams has to borrow some other talented actors and comedians, and the results are a little uneven. Meera Syal, this week’s partner, lifts proceedings, has also done her bit for the sketch through Goodness Gracious Me (who can forget the Indians asking for the “blandest dish you have” when visiting an English restaurant?). Still, I’m not sure another golden age for the sketch show is yet arrived.

I’ve lost track of what surname Cheryl is supposed to have, so I’ll just go with Cheryl for now. A bit of a handicap, though, for someone tracing her family tree on Who Do You Think You Are?, so she has to revert to being Cheryl Tweedy for the exercise. I’m never sure about why we should find the stories in these ancestral ramblings compelling or moving.

Cheryl’s family of solid Northern stock is a case in point. “Old Man Ridley”, who sounds a lively type, for example, did have a remarkable tale to tell (though, as ever, it was left untold by the old soldier) as he served with the Durham light Infantry all the way though the Great War as a “pioneer”, ie digging trenches and the like. And yet his experience, though special in one sense to later generations, was nothing unusual for those men born anywhere in the UK between about 1890 and 1925 – war followed, if they were unlucky, by another war, with poverty for many in between before the welfare state arrived to deliver them, at last, to a land fit for heroes. For Cheryl, the main thing she’s interested in, and duly impressed by, is how damn handsome so many of her relatives have been over so many generations. Good genes, then.

In ‘Rillington Place’, Nico Mirallegro (centre) plays Timothy Evans, who was hanged for the murder of his daughter, a crime in fact committed by John Christie (BBC)

For something that approaches a Chstrmas treat, you’ll have to resort to the Royal Variety Show, which you can no more object to than the monarchy, given that no matter how wrong the things sometimes goes it seemingly has a divine right to exist forever. Alternatively there’s the BBC Music Awards 2016, hosted by Fearne Cotton and Claudia Winkleman; I'll allow you to decide if that’s a sexist or liberating presenting configuration. Planet Earth II, a reliable Sunday night adventure, sadly ends its run. As I say, things are getting a bit thin.

The one drama I can wholeheartedly recommend is the final episode of Rillington Place, the gruesomely addictive series chronicling the murderous activities of “Reg” Christie. Tim Roth is superb as the monster; maybe the BBC should have saved Rillington Place for Christmas. I’m not too sure there are that many televisual treats in store for us over the holidays.