Granted, The Simpsons has been off the boil for about five years, but there are enough decent, older episodes in circulation to keep everyone happy. There's masses of goodwill about for Ricky Gervais too, just as there was masses of goodwill for him when people switched on to his first post-Office project, Extras, last year. Viewers soon discovered that it wasn't very funny, and that it was quite clunkily written. But there was a warmth about it, and the goodwill saw Gervais through, so that by the end, while he might not have been Britain's funniest man anymore (I think that title passed, in a big awards ceremony in London, to Jimmy Carr at the time), he at least became Britain's most loveable funnyman. Today, despite their faults, The Simpsons and Ricky Gervais remain two of the most popular things, in any genus or genre you can think of, in the world.

There were high hopes then that this collaboration would be even more than the sum of its parts, that each of the partners would make up for the other's deficiencies. Oh boy. I can honestly say that, for the first time ever in my Simpsons-viewing experience, I sat stony-faced through the episode, like I was watching a documentary on rabbits or Canada or something.

It's hard to say which was the chief culprit in the mess. None of the writing was funny, but it may well have been that Gervais sent Matt Groening and co a load of really good jokes that got clipped and squashed to fit the format.

The fact remains that Ricky Gervais is still a funny bloke, as the ads for this episode demonstrated, but the programme made you realise just how much of Gervais's humour is physical. Ricky Gervais is the voice plus the look. He's The Office's David Brent with the pleading glances to camera. He's Extras' Andy Millman with the slicked-back hair and the shaving rash and the crap tracksuit top.

Put his disembodied voice over a Matt Groening approximation of Ricky Gervais and you just get a posh Englishman. In the absence of funny material, there wasn't even anything here to remind you of how funny Gervais can be.

Extras cruised along on its Office reminders. Eagle-eyed Office fans might have spotted, in the tour of the Fox studios that took place in the episode, a visual reference to a programme called 'Dwarf or Midget: America Decides'. It wasn't enough. If anything, this experiment (it was the first time a Simpsons episode had been left in the hands of a guest writer) made you appreciate all the more the talents of Matt Groening and his team, and what they can come up with on their own.

There was an illustration of what a tightly knit unit can do on Dynasties (Wednesday, RTE One).

Last week's instalment, groansomely sub-titled 'Chips Off the Old Block', was about the Irish branch of the Borza family, famed for its chain of Dublin fastfood shops. It told its story through members of two generations of the family: brother and sister Barbato Borza and Teresa Di Nardi, and Teresa's daughter Assumta. It also made use of footage that was taken of the family in the '70s. Strictly speaking, it did what it said on the tin, relating the tale of a dynasty.

Still, you wished a more general history could have emerged. I would have liked to know more about the Italian community in Dublin, the inter-relationships among different families. I would also have liked it if they'd gone into the relationships between the chippers and the locales they serve.

The most obvious topic for exploration . . . the reason that the Italian community in Dublin came to be so associated with the fish-and-chip business . . . was touched on but wasn't satisfactorily developed: "I think it originated in Wales, " offered Barbato, and it was more or less left at that. Really though: what is it that makes certain immigrant communities, in any society, settle on certain trades? Why is it that only Somalians tend wine cellars in restaurants?

Channel 4 went big on Italians last week too, helping to reinforce stereotypes with The Real Goodfellas, The Godfather and the Mob and The Real Sopranos. It also did its bit for Britain's Burberrywearing youth, with Michael Carroll: King of Chavs (Tuesday, Channel 4), a documentary about a 19-year-old self-confessed lout who won the British lottery a few years ago and proceeded to horrify people by continuing to act like a lout. He's such a lout that it's even alleged the IRA have had words with him. There was a fascinating subject here, but presenter Keith Allen wasn't really interested in it. Between an annoying stream-ofconsciousness narration (delivered in Allen's natural, quite-posh tones) and his few interviews with Carroll himself (in which Allen spoke in an unconvincing Cockney accent), the presenter tried to convince us that Carroll was a diamond geezer and, like, va' 'e woz down wiv 'im, innit?

There was a kick over the closing credits, however. Since the programme was made, we were told, Carroll has got involved in a string of offences, including beating up his girlfriend. So Allen seemed finally confounded, his argument confused, the whole show completely pointless anyway, with the net result that both he and Carroll looked like twats.