What Was The Name Of The Mother?

Thanks to a bout of unwellness that may or may not be pig-related, I've spent the day on the sofa like the unemployed layabout I already was. Of course, the natural thing to do in this situation would be to watch daytime television, or at the very least CBeebies, with a hot fruity drink, but we've run out of Lemsip and the novelty of the former is rather lost when you're at home all day looking for jobs anyway. Our still-novel broadband offers untaxing amusement for the nap-gaps, but by teatime I felt I really hadn't done enough detached gawping to do my role justice. Flicking through iPlayer, The Cell and Only Connect seemed a bit ambitious for my germful brain – but if there's one programme that should only have been enhanced by it, it was the new Shooting Stars.

Now, I don't want to say it was terrible. That wouldn't really be true and, worse, you'd have read through a fairly dull paragraph about how I'm a bit poorly with nothing to show for it but the usual moaning about ill-advised comebacks. In fact, it seemed to me to be up to pretty much the same standard as it always was (although I did miss my old favourite running gag, Vic Reeves's bombing joke). But I wasn't laughing.

Shooting Stars started when I was five and finished when I was nine and I don't think I've grown up that much in the years since. But for me, that means that the show feels as old as any comedy but Danger Mouse. Perfectly able though I might be to arrange the Lumberjack Song, Four Candles and the "The Stripper" breakfast sketch on some hypothetical Timeline of Hilarity, I had heard songs in the club style before I saw any of them. So when Reeves and Mortimer bounded back in HD, really no better or worse than they always were, their very distinctiveness turned back on them. To my mind, and unfairly, they don't sound like comedians: they sound like the tedious friend who thinks quoting Monty Python is immediately and unquestionably funny, or Joe Pasquale.

I worried about this realisation for a little while. Have I been too harsh on the last decade of the Simpsons, on Red Dwarf VIII or on The Krypton Factor's Super Round?

Don't be silly. I'm not that poorly.