I didn't make it to the Edinburgh Television Festival this year, which was a shame, because we all need a laugh from time to time. I can't quite make out which was the funniest session, although it sounds as if it would have taken a strong man not to weep with mirth at the euphoria that swamped the hall after ITV's new head boy, Peter Fincham, persuaded his fellow practitioners that ITV1 had mastered the art of entertaining the nation and that it would take only a funeral pyre of Ofcom rules for a phoenix of populist creativity to rise triumphant from Gray's Inn Road. This is the outfit whose sole ratings blunderbuss is now the talent show and which has failed to deliver a single workable new drama all year.

Even funnier must have been Armando Iannucci's suggestion that the BBC should launch a subscription channel in order for it to make programmes of the quality and intelligence of The Sopranos, The Wire and Mad Men. And there was I thinking that we all paid a subscription, a compulsory one, to the BBC already and that according to this arrangement it did not labour under the same ratings pressures as the rest of the industry and was, therefore, free to attempt just such projects. At least Iannucci is a professional satirist. I take his modest proposal in the same spirit in which Jonathan Swift issued his.

Yet I share his frustration. Aside from period pieces, most BBC drama is undemandingly entertaining at best. There is, of course, an art to undemanding entertainment and a need for it. As readers have made clear to me when I have scoffed, the ageing, in both senses, detective show New Tricks is much loved. But increasingly it feels as if the BBC has narrowed its contemporary dramatic range down to two genres: the grisly thriller and the hedging-its-bets comedy-drama.

Mutual Friends, which began last night (on Friday in Scotland), is an example of the second. It started with a suicide but ended with a fire engine. Carl's suicide was the writers' device with which to bring together his surviving friends, Martin, played by Marc Warren, and Patrick (Alexander Armstrong). Martin was the worrying type and he had loads to worry about: not only was he about to lose his job as a solicitor but his wife, Jen (Keeley Hawes), announced that she had slept with Carl and that their marriage was in trouble (all Martin's fault).

Patrick also had his problems: a personal financial crisis had got his E-Type Jag repossessed and one of his business partners was edging him out of his own Boden-style catalogue company while edging himself into his former girlfriend's knickers. The worrying thing about Patrick, buoyed along by ego and testosterone, was his inability to worry. Yet this follicly challenged Lothario was not, it transpired, irredeemably self-centred. It was he, after all, who was responsible for the fire engine's comical appearance - called not to hose a conflagration but to fulfil Martin's disgruntled young son's ambition to ride on one.

Warren, Armstrong and Hawes are watchable actors but you couldn't help but wish their parts had been occupied by Jimmy Nesbitt, Robert Bathurst and Helen Baxendale and that, as in Cold Feet, there had been room for a genuinely funny subplot (as regularly supplied by the actors Fay Ripley and John Thomson). Nor could you fail to spot how inspiration was running out even as early as episode one. Martin, for instance, kept being overheard saying things that he shouldn't by the people he was badmouthing. Only once could you accuse the programme of inventiveness and that was in the character of Carl's widow Leigh, played with cheerful understatement by Claire Rushbrook, who had clearly lost her how-to-grieve manual and went round saying how “cross” she was with him.

My hunch is that Mutual Friends will keep its audience, not least because it is unusual in putting at its centre male rather than female friendships. But how, even as I watched its titles as ripped off from Mad Men, I wished for more subtlety, more black humour, more depth of emotion! And how furious I will be if I have to pay a further subscription to the BBC before it supplies it.

The good news is that Hugo Blick made a strong return to form in his second of The Last Word Monologues, Six Days One June. Here Rhys Ifans proved what an accomplished actor he can be as he played a lonely Welsh farmer recording a video diary for a dating agency. The monologue's strength lay between its lines, as we realised before the farmer did that he hated his mother and was gay. There were inappropriate shades of Brokeback Mountain here and a murderous ending that did not quite convince, but this was a funny, touching half hour that recalled, in a good way, that peculiar sprit of Welsh forbearance exemplified in Gavin and Stacey and, of course, by Blick in Marion and Geoff.

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