Television Review

For about 30 years, I have been unable to see the point of eating fish. It's a personal thing, but I know I'm not a taste leper because I occasionally come across someone else in the same boat. This seems worth mentioning here because in the last year or so I've bumped into a parallel case in television. Harry Hill (C4, Fri). Is it just me? Or are there others who don't get the joke?

The joke, now that Hill has graduated from radio to television, seems to be largely about television itself. In last night's second episode, the humour was even more parochial than that, consisting of a series of gags about Channel 4. It was like watching a parasite feasting on the entrails of a host organism. Hill sacked his regular badger act and employed a team of owls, incorporating a Denise van Outen owl and a Johnny Vaughan owl. He then did an impersonation of Rory Bremner. In one running gag, he extracted as much mileage as possible out of the concept of Eel Night, an evening of programming on Channel 4 devoted entirely to said fish. I kept waiting for the jokes about Jon Snow, Drop the Dead Donkey, ER, Cutting Edge, Friends, Frasier, old Antoine de Caunes et al. Maybe they are being held back for later in the series.

This stock of reflexive, double-jointed witticisms would no doubt go down exceptionally well at Channel 4's Christmas party. But even Hill's constituency of admirers must crave something more meaty than what amounts to a supply of office jokes. Last night, we even met the head of Channel 4, portrayed as a wooden hand-puppet seduced by surveys of audience profile. Any similarity to Michael Jackson is no doubt entirely coincidental.

At the launch of the new winter schedule this week, Jackson announced that he wanted to make Channel 4 more "ironic and sophisticated". In other words, exactly like BBC2 when Jackson was its controller. It may well be that some television controllers are as stylistically inflexible as football managers. From the moment he was made editor of The Late Show, 10 years ago, Jackson has erected a career on a platform of irony in the same way that George Graham has built his on iron. Isn't it time for the leopard to change his spots? Harry Hill is the logical result of an unvarying diet of irony: a dark place where the ironist holds a mirror not up to nature but up his own fundament. I look forward to Channel 4's ironic and sophisticated take on test cricket.

To be fair to Hill, he did widen his brief enough to embrace jokes about the BBC - EastEnders, Rory McGrath and, in the let's-humiliate-an-old- TV-face-who-probably-needs-the-money department, Jan Leeming singing M People. If you switched over, you could watch REM singing REM on Later With Jools Holland (BBC2). While we know that the band like to keep fans on their toes by doing small surprise club dates, this was still a significant coup. You could have wished that Michael Stipe didn't sound knackered from the first song to the last. But there are times when it's enough simply to get the gig, and this was one of them.

This is turning into an exceptional autumn for BBC2. First The Royle Family, a work of comic genius in which irony was a mere minor seasoning rather than the whole dish, then The Cold War and, starting last week, Nurse, Jenny Abbott's beautifully detailed and compassionate piece of filming baked in a slow oven for four years. Later this month comes Naked, a four-part series in which people of all ages discuss their own bodies with Lucy Blakstad, a peerless maker of lovingly observational documentaries. And, at the other end of the aesthetic spectrum there's Robot Wars (BBC2), which returned for a second series.

Borrowed from an American format, Robot Wars does exactly what it says in the title. Mobile, armed robots pit their strength against one another and the programme's own house robots. Although Jonathan Pearce's turbo- charged commentary gives the show a knowing, tongue-in-cheek flavour, there is a curious purity, even innocence, to the contests which stems from the fact that clever enthusiasts have actually had to build these machines. It's so good you can enjoy it even though it's now presented by Craig Charles.