The Mighty Boosh are such a good idea, aren’t they? A tall man who looks like an unwashed sleepy weasel. A short man who looks like a shark wearing lipstick – with fashion-risk hair. Doing random things. In vintage. On prime time. In our lifetime. What a result.

When Steve Coogan – whose production company makes Boosh – sold them to the BBC with the line “If we were young, we’d want to be them”, he nailed it. Being in the Boosh looks a blast. I mean, if you have to write a sitcom, you’d want to do it Boosh-style: what with their homemade puppets, and deadly serious musical numbers, and getting Noel Fielding’s brother, who can’t act for toffee, to play a key character, just because they want him around. With the Boosh’s hypnopompic reasoning, you can follow a classic, formally structured gag (“There’s no smoke without fire.” “What about smoke machines?”) with a sequence in which Julian Barratt gets sucked into a Cockney’s top hat, and then dances with a dead woman.

The freedom and scope is, like, wheeeee!

The idea that you could write a sitcom in any other way – getting Zoë Wanamaker to play a “wacky” mum, for instance – seems bizarre: like some Victorian throwback. Do people still make comedies about semidetached houses, and sulky teenagers, and marginal instances of essentially nugatory social embarrassment? With actors? And a studio audience? And no pink octopus sorceror on a flying carpet? How old-fashioned. How...1987.

Still, however odd the Boosh’s logic is, it’s not as skewed as the BBC’s. Apparently, this new series of Boosh was given a smaller budget than the last one. Eh? How does that work, then? You sign up the cutting edge of comedy, broadcast a show that’s critically acclaimed – and then cut the budget? The Boosh is obviously the kind of thing that will still be repeated in ten years’ time. It’s clearly the kind of thing talking heads will be quacking about on I Love 2007. Any idiot would tell you that that’s where you’d invest your money. That, and in any roofing repairs. Once you’ve paid to put the scaffolding up, it’s a false economy to do a bodge job. You might as well get craftsmen in. And do the guttering at the same time.

Anyway, the new series. This time around, Howard Moon (Julian Barratt, looking more unwashed and sleep-deprived than ever – you can practically smell the sebum and sleepy dust) and Vince Noir (Noel Fielding, wearing a new silver jump-suit that makes his considerable genitals look like a massive draught excluder in the shape of a snake) are running a shop. Within minutes of it opening, a Cockney turns up and threatens them with a magic eel, and Howard Moon, as mentioned before, gets sucked into a top hat, and dances with a dead ballerina. Essentially, it’s Open All Hours, as painted by Richard Dadd.

Elsewhere, Noel Fielding’s brother is on a stag night with a load of enchanted freaks on a flying carpet (“We are super magic men/ We stay up till 5am”), and the wonderful Richard Ayoade gets to wear a silly beard and say “Cleft” in a satisfying way. And by the end of the show, the Boosh have, unexpectedly, illustrated exactly the circumstances that lead to the Shamen writing Ebeneezer Goode. Amazing. I wonder what it would have been like with a bigger budget?

Lead Balloon, that sitcom with Jack Dee in it, also returns, still posing the same question: can a sitcom about a man with a spacious, duck-egg blue kitchen and a wry, well-educated, emotionally available wife be funny? The answer remains “Yes – but you will feel a bit odd watching a comedy almost solely based on someone bitching about their grumpy Eastern European au pair.”

Actually, “funny” is too strong a word for Lead Balloon. There needs to be a new word, which would encompass “being noticeably not awful, but also very unlikely to make you laugh, and so obviously a rip-off of Curb Your Enthusiasm (grumpy, wealthy showbiz man rails at small problems) that you feel a bit hot and itchy watching it”.

Lead Balloon is the sitcom Wait-rose would make, if it opened a “Sit Com” aisle. I’d always thought Wait-rose making anything would be a great idea, but now, on reflection, we are better off with The Mighty Boosh’s Lidl-budget show, instead.

The Mighty Boosh, Thur, BBC Three, 10.30pm; Lead Balloon, Thur, BBC Two, 9.30pm

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