Television - The best comedy mixes sex with class, race and Bovril. By Andrew Billen Tittybangbang (BBC3) Swinging (Channel 5)

The most excruciating moments on television last week were provided by a disturbing sketch in BBC Comedy's bright new hope, Tittybangbang (Tuesdays, 9.30pm). Don, a bald, badly shaven, waxy-skinned bachelor in a pointy-collared shirt, answers the door of his desperately dingy flat (probably originally his mother's) to greet the kind of foul-looking prostitute that only this country seems to produce. She offers her cheek and he licks rather than kisses it, apologising if his tongue is "beefy" from the Bovril. He takes a stab at her age, estimating it at 56 or 57. She is a little younger, but there's "a lot of wear and tear", he says appreciatively. He hopes she knows his preference: "I do like to have a little wee-wee on my ladies."

Deborah is not fazed by this - there is, after all, £20 under the ashtray in it for her - but looks more worried by his sudden paroxysm of self-blame when he realises he has not offered her a Cuppa Soup. "How bad of me is that? How fucking bad of me is that?" In an effort to generate sexual "electricity", he does a robot-man dance to an old record. His job, he explains mysteriously, is making "the springs used for callipers" (?). Deborah is concerned by now, but draws the line only when Don produces a plate of raw ox-tongue. She doesn't, she explains, do tongue.

Let us forget the punchline, which is there only because, some time back, writers forgot that Monty Python gave them permission not to write punchlines. This is three minutes of black comedy as acutely observed and hauntingly awful as you could want. But two things make the sketch remarkable. First, it was written by a woman, Jill Parker, yet the agony she primarily focuses on is the man's. Second, the man in question, Don, with his narrow shoulders and slightly too full bottom, is played, to perfection, by a woman, Lucy Montgomery.

Tittybangbang, which is being trumpeted as an all-woman comedy show - which should piss off Tony Way, the exemplary male foil in many of the sketches - makes Smack the Pony look about as edgy as Victoria Wood. The shorter sketches are not particularly distinguished, relying on the kind of comedic twist you can see coming a mile off (the old white geezer at the bus stop can speak gangsta rap with the best of them, a working-class mother is upset by her adopted daughter's virtue because it means she will never be invited on Trisha).

But Montgomery and her equally talented partner Debbie Chazen (previously seen in The Smoking Room) have pulled off the only feat that matters in sketch comedy and created fleshed-out characters who will recur not only through a series, but in our minds. These include: Paula, a bull-like but incompetent captain of a northern darts team; a randy pathologist who, taking advantage of her stiffs' stiffies, has sex with corpses; an eastern European victim of cosmetic surgery who turns heads but can no longer turn her own; and an Italian maid working in a stately home who flaunts her body at visitors and comes complete with her very own catchphrase: "Don't look at me. I'm so boring."

Somewhere down the line, sex has replaced class as the great engine of British comedy. Somewhere further along it, writers and performers will realise that it is a less rich subject. But at least, despite its title, Tittybangbang tends to present sex in a class or ethnic context. Swinging, Channel 5's latest hit-and-miss retort to Channel 4's Friday-night comedy zone (10pm), is a sketch show whose subject is, simply, sex. Like an obsessive, it barely strays from it. We are offered a sex therapist who does not know where babies come from, a wife who will not be tricked into having anal sex, a school art teacher who wants to photograph her pupils nude, and a Brit in a Spanish jail who finds his beefy jail mates rather more fun than he does his loyal wife. A typical joke in Swinging would be:

She, post-coitally, to her partner, in bed: "You don't have to tell me, but how many people do you think you have slept with?" He: "What? Ever? Or since I met you?"

Two recurring characters in Swinging happen to confront the question of what we Brits find funny: class or sex. These are the middle-aged snobs Tabitha and George, who go to sex parties but only to meet doctors. Parked in a car park, they will "dog" before the driver of a Land-Rover but not of a Fiat. The sketches with Tabitha and George tell us that even in bed, class matters, although I am not too sure how much it really does to the generation these shows are aimed at. What people want, even more than filth, are characters and catchphrases that can be replicated in the playground. Swinging has too few of them, although this flaw, I notice, is not delaying the release of a DVD of the first series next month. I assume the DVD of Tittybangbang will not be long behind it because my review copy came with a little label warning me not to sell it (what touching faith they have in us). DVDs of comedy sketch shows will be this Christmas's great stand-by present, I warn you now. Little Britain's success has a lot to answer for. Now then, what about exhuming the sitcom?

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times

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