We've said this a hundred times (circa.) on TVScoop but it remains true: the live comedy scene is booming in the UK, but television just isn't getting in on the act as it should be - there's a vast amount of talent out there which TV could be reaching out to, but when stand-ups do eventually get their five minutes on the small screen, the format very often lets them down, and it's a rather flat experience. Stand up has worked on telly before, on Friday Night Live, say, so why not now?

The makers of Comedy Cuts have come up with the idea of taking out the middle man - ie, the studio audience - and having the comedians either talk directly to the camera, or perform a sketch in the appropriate setting, as if it's really happening. What this means is that it isn't, in fact, a stand-up show at all, but a sketch show - and a good one, at that.

The main success of the show, of course, is that it has managed to attract the very best comics on the live circuit - not ones you've necessarily seen plying their trade on screen all that often, maybe, but ones who have really honed their stand-up skills by driving up and down the country and playing every single scuzzy comedu venue they come across. Now comedians seen here such as Rhod Gilbert, Andrew Maxwell and Tom Basden really are considered the best of the best.

Not every skit works of course; Count Arthur Strong's pieces especially simply don't have the time to get across the pathos and melancholy which is integral to his stage work as a fading music hall star. But the most successful sketches are enjoyable simply because they are being performed by a really engaging comic, obviously relaxed in what they're doing. Andrew Maxwell and Alun Cochrane, who just performed straight monologues, both fell into that category.

There was one sketch troupe featured this week, the Dutch Elm Conservatoire. Their first sketch about coming up with greetings cards messages has been done before and better by Mitchell and Webb (though on the theme of 'what else can we put on a toothbrush'), but the second sketch, where a businessman is brutally honest about the life new recruits have chosen, hit the mark.

While comic ventriloquist Nina Conti made some allusions to her surroundings, it was only really the Dutch Elm Conservatoire and Tom Basden who gained something from being taken off the stage. Basden performed a piano ballad about killing his friend with a champagne cork in white tie and tails, watched respectfully by a small crowd in glittering masquerade ball masks. It looked fantastic, and the distance between the surroundings and the content of the song really gave the whole sketch a lift.

As always there are bits which you like more than others, but this sketch show is aided by the quality of the contributers, and the fact that it is clearly made by people who know their comedy.