Comedy crisis? Pass me the underpants and two pencils...

At least that's how one of the creators of Blackadder seems to view modern telly comedy.

To be fair to John Lloyd, if I'd created the cleverest and funniest time-spanning sitcom ever screened, I'd probably want to stick my underpants on my head,shove a couple of pencils up my nose and say 'wibble' to some of the dross that gets commissioned.

He warns that 'so few people' know how to do comedy anymore and that the decision-making all gets put in the hands of executives drawn from 'scheduling, marketing and car parking'.

He might as well have used the immortal line from his own show: 'we're in the stickiest situation since Sticky the Stick Insect got stuck on a sticky bun.'

Lloyd, who was awarded a CBE for his services making the likes of Not The Nine O'Clock News and QI, has a point. BBC bureaucracy is so crazy that Auntie even commissioned a sitcom, W1A to ridicule itself.

"TV used to be world beating," he said. "We used to be brilliant at it and we're not anymore. Comedy is a disaster in television and it is more acute in comedy than anything else because so few people know how to do it."

I'm sorry, I don't mean to come across as a thicky Baldrick character who would look on a turnip as though it is the most precious thing in all creation, but I think there's been some fantastic stuff on the box.

The problem with comedy is you have to look for the good stuff. Nothing that the TV schedulers tell you that you'll find funny turns out to be so.

This was the very topic Ricky Gervais addressed in the semi-autobiographical Extras.

In the series, Gervais played a character called Andy Millman, who wrote a sitcom called When The Whistle Blows which got picked up straight away for mainstream BBC One and dumbed down by executives trying to satisfy a mass audience with catchphrases, wigs and silly glasses.

Millman's struggle in Extras was Gervais thought would have happened to him, had he peaked too soon and had his work hacked to pieces.

The most successful comedies have to be things that the writers themselves find hilarious and just hope we share their sense of humour, not an attempt merely to pander to what they think the executives want.

That's the point Lloyd makes, even if he thinks things are bit bleaker than they really are.

Half the fun of Mrs Brown's Boys (yes, I think it's hilarious, sue me) is Brendan O'Carroll messing around and the cast being constantly on the verge of wetting themselves.

Laughter is contagious. I had only ever watched Mrs Brown for a couple of minutes on my own and thought it was drivel. Then on Christmas Day, a few beers inside me and the in-laws guffawing, I roared like a tipsy tiger.

Meanwhile time will tell if Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer keep up their recent good work in the second series of House of Fools.

Their sitcom was complete and utter gibberish and all the better for it. Here were two blokes who clearly haven't grown up a day since Shooting Stars, being unashamedly silly and slapstick because they thought that was funny.

The overgrown child that is Miranda Hart, in her eponymous sitcom, irritates the hell out of me by insisting on staring at the camera after every joke, like she's looking for approval. But that's just my opinion. Millions of people tune in and adore her. John Lloyd cannot possibly think they are wrong, can he?

Comedy can even be serious.

Rev, the story of an inner city vicar whose church is constantly on the verge of folding, was a heartbreaking story of a man struggling with temptation, getting betrayed and then carrying his cross through the streets before being given a new chance at life (you can see where they were going). And yet it was oddly more uplifting than it was funny. The scene where Liam Neeson appears as someone who might or might not be God and enjoys the borderline-crazy vicar's dancing atop a hill brought little prickles to my eyes.

The star of Rev, Tom Hollander, has been in the movie version of The Thick of It, another product of brave TV commissioning that started off small and snowballed into a phenomenon. The foul-mouthed Government spin doctor Malcolm Tucker, played by Peter Capaldi, remains the stuff of nightmares but managed to show how there was a way to deal with the careerist omnishambles that are the Westminster elite - laugh at them.

All these and others - Gavin and Stacey, The Trip, The IT Crowd, Bad Education, Peep Show, Fresh Meat, Derek, An Idiot Abroad and many more I simply do not have the space to mention - have survived and thrived and pulled in the audiences.

John Lloyd reckons the commissioners have 'never done five minutes of stand-up, couldn't write a sitcom, have never written a funny line, but they are in the department and it's their job to decide what the people will see'.

He might be right but I don't think we do too badly.

And his solution is simply 'find good people at producer level and give them a chance to get it right by learning on the job'.

That's it? That's worse even than one of Baldrick's cunning plans.