Watching The Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle (BBC Two), longtime fans of Jennifer Saunders might have been puzzled. It was funny and serious, a satire and also a sermon. Why was she watering down a potentially fantastic new grotesque creation in the first episode? Why the vague whiff of sanctimony? The excesses of Absolutely Fabulous’s Edina Monsoon told us all we needed to know about the vacuous worlds of fashion and public relations, without characters saying: “The worlds of fashion and PR are really vacuous.”

Vyle is a daytime chat show host, a more extreme Jeremy Kyle than Jeremy Kyle, and Saunders could have played her as a TV monster – dragonish ego, utterly unfeeling – and made her show a circus of damaged, thuggish guests. This is a genre dripping with potential for vicious parody.

But Saunders and her co-writer Dr Tanya Byron, a Times columnist and herself a reality TV ringmaster (The House of Tiny Tearaways), balanced, unevenly, what you guessed was Saunders’s bent for the comic and outlandish with Byron’s more sober interrogation of the methods of confrontational presenters such as Kyle. The critique was laid on as thick as heavily buttered toast.

The camera first zoomed slowly in on Vyle as she peered into misted glass which proved to be a mirror. She was preparing for another show – “My Son Calls the Wrong Man Daddy” - and around her was assembled a plausibly dysfunctional supporting cast: the slacker assistant floor manager with the near-inaudible voice, the insane producer played wonderfully by Natasha Richardson with bug-eyed fervour. “Lights up on the pond life,” she instructed – “pond life” meaning the audience.

These elements of the satire were well-observed: just like Kyle and Springer, Vyle played to her audience when confronting her guest, while backstage another assistant wound up the guest’s partner to violent rage so that when he emerged, he could only spit insults at her. But we know these shows are exploitative bearpits. Good satire, as Absolutely Fabulous proved, skilfully skewers its target when it reveals something new. The laughs in Vivienne Vyle are easy because most people recognise that Jeremy Kyleis an extreme of its kind. It almost doesn’t need satirising.

After a fracas, a security guard fell on Vyle; that moment was hilarious because no one does physical comedy better than Saunders, sometimes in the smallest of tics, sometimes when she thrashes her whole body about. In hospital Vyle’s life flashed before her. She wanted children suddenly, so she decided to use her dead former husband’s sperm. Her new husband – gay, her best friend, it’s a marriage of convenience though loving – thought that buying a pug might help.

In hospital, the doctor diagnosed the problem with The Vivienne Vyle Show: “I think that if what you do is take people apart in public, then not give them back anything to replace what they’ve lost, then it’s only a matter of time before someone turns around and punches you in the face.” Again, you thought, yes (Dr Byron) spot-on, we know that. But this is the first episode. The journey to self-realisation for a character such as Vyle should unfold. Anyway, she was soon back to being a foul-mouthed hag.

The doctor has been employed to be a voice in Vivienne’s ear during the show. Will his softly-softly emphasis on “open questioning” win out over Vyle’s infinitely funnier pantomime, abusing transsexual, drug-addicted rentboys (on-screen caption: “I Want a Vagina But Can’t Kick the Crack”). This might prove an intriguing struggle, but the first episode felt like a patronising lesson on why the likes of Jeremy Kyle are bad news. Saunders’s talent for fleshing out precisely observed and detail-rich characters was lacking. Now that we’ve established that daytime shock-jocks are terrible people, can we have more of Vyle getting her hand stuck on the frozen canister containing her dead exhusband’s sperm?

After this sermonising, The Peter Serafinowicz Show (BBC Two) welcomingly delivered well-written and well-performed humour. From brilliant mock advertisements – “Do you like elephants? Do you like trains? Then you’ll love Elephants and Trains magazine” – to a ludicrously silly subversion of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? (Heads or Tails?), Serafinowicz proved comedy is sometimes just about making us laugh. Like drains.

Out of the box

— For those Dawson’s Creek fans who really thought The OC LIKE TOTALLY SUCKED – no Pacey’n’Joey, no point to Sundays – any new drama from the show’s creator Kevin Williamson is to be welcomed. Or is it? Wild Palms (Sky One) was canned after eight episodes and last night’s pilot showed, possibly, why. It featured yet another sweet kid in a weird community that had a veneer of respectability. He hides a secret tragedy. There’s a Lolita with a mountain of curls and a girl geek who really wants to wear lipstick. Seen it all before. Naturally I’m hooked.

— Wedding disasters approach in EastEnders and Coronation Street. Happy ever after for Bradley and Stacey and Jason and Sarah? Yes, of course. And watch out for that pig overhead.

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