And you should see the way people have been looking at me on public transport these last few weeks.

There have been so many duff sketch shows over the years that it instinctively feels wrong to be raving about another one. It feels strange even to be lauding another Harry Enfield series after his last, catastrophically bad, solo show on Sky One, which seemed to confirm the creative bankruptcy of a once great comic talent. Now he's back with Whitehouse, his comedy partner from the '90s, and although comebacks of this kind don't usually work, this one does. It even seems funnier and . . . dare I say it . . . more relevant than anything they've done before.

Without wishing to appear pretentious about something that probably its creators don't take seriously, there's a lot here which speaks to me about life in the 2000s. In the same way that Enfield's 'Loadsamoney' character practically defined the age of material excess in the late '80s, and Smashy and Nicey encapsulated the creakiness of BBC Radio One in the early '90s, so this new series is bang-on-the money about modern Britain (whose cultural life, for good or for ill, Ireland is locked into), full of references to Chelsea football club, South African and Polish immigrants, and post-modern obsessions with old stuff.

Which, of course, would all appear merely dutiful if it weren't put together in one laugh-a-second package, but I think that comedy, like all art, works best when it makes you shake your head and go, "Genius, genius. That's so true."

I'm loath to isolate favourite moments or characters from this series lest I come across as some breathless schoolboy tugging his mate's sleeve saying, "And remember the bit when. . .", but as far as I'm concerned, Pik the neanderthal South African, the High-Ranking Surgeons and the 'I Saw You Coming' retrofurniture-shop owner are among the greatest TV comedy creations ever.

But what would I know about humour? I think Viz comic is the funniest thing in the world and I watched Mind Your F***ing Language in the vain hope that ex-Viz editor Simon Donald might start spouting Roger Irrelevant or Black Bag the Faithful Border Bin-liner quotes. Donald was roped in to help curb the bad language rampant among the pupils of a typical English comprehensive.

Or at least channel it in some way, being of the view that cursing "is one of the most interesting, diverse and vibrant parts of language and I'd like to teach [the pupils] to use it more imaginatively".

Donald, it must be said, has contributed more than most to the diversity and vibrancy of the pool-hall lexicon as the compiler of the wonderful Profanisaurus (sample entry: "Grumblemag . . . A gentleman's art pamphlet"). So it was his school of thought versus that of a woman called Anne Atkins, a Christian. In the end, Atkins' way won out, with the eventual support of Donald who I think was simply ground down by the depressing frequency and brutality of the obscenities he heard around him. Pity . . . it would have been funny to hear insults like "haemo-goblin" fly about the yard.

At this point in the column, I was going to review Soupy Norman, a Polish soap opera dubbed with a new voice-sync to tell the story of a Buttevant girl who leaves home for Dublin.

However, it was pulled because of the Leaders' Debate, even though the Leaders' Debate was on RTE One and Soupy Norman was on RTE Two, which doesn't seem very democratic to me. So, to the other pan-European TV event of the last week, the Eurovision Song Contest. . .

John Waters' point that countries don't vote for political reasons was borne out not only by the fact that the most despised country in Europe, Serbia, won . . . even gaining votes from its former Yugoslav neighbours . . . but that the Irish song, which was about the Prague Spring of 1968, failed to get a vote even from the Czech Republic.

Really, John . . . archipelagic icicles indeed.

Reviewed
Ruddy Hell! It's Harry And Paul Friday, Monday, BBC2
Mind Your F***ing Language Tuesday, Channel 4
Eurovision Song Contest Saturday, RTE One, BBC1