What's happened to TV comedy?

In that, he was both wrong and right. There are dozens and dozens of comedians on television at the moment, but with little of what you might call, medically, laughter. Comedians now fall into two categories: wiseacres, known as wisenheimers in America; and smartarses (clever fannies in the USA). And they all appear on made-up, who-gives-a-monkey's? quiz shows: the wiseacres v the smartarses, overseen by a presenter who does GCSE banter. After the watershed, comedy TV looks like a job centre for stand-ups waiting to do businessmen's awards shows. They lounge about being rude, playing surreal similes. It's the Pringles version of comedy, and it doesn't make you laugh; in fact, laughter, the old-fashioned, boom-boom big laugh, is a bit de trop, like it's trying too hard, some northern-racist-bastard guffaw. It's far cooler to get a quick-fire selection of knowing smirks. Irony is so much more right-on.

I'm happy to admit that a bit of this may be down to me. It's a well-known fact that as you get older, you're less susceptible to laughter. You grow a taste for wit - and wit is to comedy what gardening is to sex. The problem is that television has lost its sense of humour. What it has instead is one-line salty cleverness: the Pringle.

Show me a funny indigenous comedy series; show me one that has been made in the past five years, other than Green Wing. The absence of a good sitcom is really serious for ITV. Sitcoms are its heart and soul. The lovable character with wide appeal, and a warm setup that pulls in the audience and the advertising, is what pays the rent. Most attempts at comedy today are aimed at kids who don't watch television or drunks who can't remember watching television.

Last week saw the start of three comedies, each of which fails to produce a bankable harvest of laughter, for different reasons. Kröd Mändoon is a spoof, a difficult thing to pull off because the humour is limited to the range of the drama it's sending up. Mändoon is a Dungeons & Dragons fantasy, a bit Robin Hood, a bit Lord of the Rings, a bit Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess. What it most resembles is a cartoon-like Shrek. It has a good cast and a remarkably generous set and costume budget. It all looks as if it has been performed in some tax-deductible bit of eastern Europe. Everyone turns in a perfectly fine performance, though Kröd himself has the hardest time, being both a hunk and an idiot. Playing a fool isn't the same as being a fool. Then there's Roger Allam, who seems to be going for the TV record for inappropriate casting. At any moment, I expect him to turn up in Hollyoaks.

What kills Kröd stone dead before he's out of the first episode, what makes this a long hour of desperate, rictus tedium, is the script. The quick-fire, don't-draw-a-breath, rat-a-tat-tat wit and repartee of this god-awful script is solely and exclusively made up of single entendres about sex. Brilliant juvenile dirty sex talk is one of my favourite things, but this, this woeful, repetitive, telegraphed, winking, prudish smut, was just dire. Here was a great invented fantasy world, full of comic potential, but the script unerringly missed it for the state-of-the-arse joke of least resistance.

Hope Springs has a terribly contorted title, particularly as it's supposed to be a made-up place in the Highlands, where neither hope nor springs are likely. This is a vehicle for Alex Kingston, a talented and powerful actor whom you probably remember from ER. It's the story of a gang of former con women on the run with the loot. It's written by three women whose names skimmed past the credits before I could write them down, but I suspect they haven't written for television before. Now, if I'm wrong, I apologise; I just wonder that anyone employed them to do it twice. This is a grand pastiche of a dozen hoary, ancient, clichéd stories. There's a lot of Ealing here, a bit of Whisky Galore, Thelma and Louise, The Ladykillers, some of Monarch of the Glen, a splash of Hamish Macbeth, and on and on. The characters are barely drawn at all; only Kingston stands out as having been written with anything more substantial than lipstick on the mirror.

What stops all the laughter escaping your mouth is that you know what's going to happen before the writers do. Every clunky old plot twist and McGuffin and red herring turns up like clockwork, as predestined as Evensong. Didn't anyone older than 15 bother to read this before they made it, and say, hang about, perhaps the comfort of the old and familiar is not what all our viewers want?

Perhaps we could do something to surprise them. Why don't we make one of the girls a vampire or a transvestite? Why don't we make it funny? Even poor old Scotland is dragged through all its ancient, peaty whim­sy, 100 years of patronage and stereotyping.

May Contain Nuts was the best of the crop: a strong, almost brilliant cast of comedy actors, rather than comedians; a subject that, while having been done before, was given a pleasantly contemporary makeover. It's the story of the adult who goes back to school, as in Vice Versa or Never Been Kissed. In this case, however, it has been tagged onto that subject for mockery, the middle-class obsession with getting their children into private schools. Though have you no­ticed that nobody ever makes a drama about how awful state education is? I suspect this is because all scriptwriters used to be teachers. Shirley Henderson is the mother who, because she's teeny-weeny and looks like a woodland creature, decides to take her daugh­ter's entrance exam to get into Chelsea Girls' School. The neighbours are an awful crowd of pushy women and tit-wit husbands. There is one funny scene at a sports day where the mothers attach reins to their children and drag them over the finishing line. Overall, though, it isn't very amusing, or as amusing as it ought to be, and that's not the fault of the plotting, the timing or the acting. It's down to the emphasis, its mission statement; it dithers between satire and comedy.

These are not the same thing, and they don't sit together. Satire is a posh spoof and has a short attention span. This series needed to commit to the humour. It's a shame, because you could tell everyone was gagging to go on and make this really hilarious, but it was stopped by the hand-wringing of its own liberal concerns - and that's one of the reasons there's not one sitcom worth a grin on television. The Tristrams are too frightened, too right-on, too even-handed to laugh at much. Laughter itself is suspicious; people might do it for the wrong reasons, might laugh at the wrong things. Laughter is so raucous, aggressive, judgmental. Isn't it much nicer, more acceptable, to smile and clap?

Ross Kemp isn't funny, he really isn't funny, there's not a funny muscle in Ross's face. He does, though, go from strength to strength as a committed and empathic reporter at the sharp end of events. Last week, he launched a troika of programmes on piracy, In Search of Pirates. This isn't gangs or banging out with the army, this is a current-affairs story, a news story that should be being covered by Panorama and the other current-affairs strands, but isn't, I expect because of budgets. Ross, though, did it with conviction, confidence and clarity. He delivers the longer bits of background information to camera with a pluck and panache he has got from experience. He is becoming one of the best - albeit it one of the few - committed duck-and-describe foreign correspondents, and that says a lot for him. It also says a lot about television's commitment to foreign-news coverage.

Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire (BBC2, Thursday)

Hope Springs (BBC1, Sunday)

May Contain Nuts (ITV1, Thursday)

In Search of Pirates (Sky1, Monday)