Happiness BBC2
Teachers C4
The Hunt ITV
Silent Witness BBC1

When not hurtling down alpine pistes and sliding headfirst into conveniently situated vats of gluhwein, the week before last I read John O'Farrell's novel, The Best a Man Can Get.

Towards the end of the book, the narrator/anti-hero Michael, a TV commercial jingles writer whose marriage has fallen apart through no fault but his own, is struggling to adapt Ken Dodd's 'Happiness' without breaching copyright, all the better to sell new Butterness: 'Butterness! Butterness! It tastes like butter but the fat is less.'

Weeks, months, even years can go by without Ken Dodd impinging greatly on my consciousness, then last week he was to be found providing the irony soundtrack for Paul Whitehouse's new comedy drama, Happiness, or Butterness as I am now necessarily conditioned to call it.

Coincidentally, Whitehouse's character, Danny, and O' Farrell's Michael both suffer from similar modern male-aises, jobs in which being professionally cheerful serve to exacerbate the emotional vacuity of their off-duty lives. In Whitehouse's case, this is, literally, the unbearable lightness of being a bear - providing the voice for Dexter (described as an 'animated kung-fu nurse bear'; a brief scene-stealingly realised by Wallace and Gromit creators, Aardman) shortly before attending his wife's funeral.

But funny though this was, it wasn't even meant to be the funny bit; the show's comedic sting lies in the fact that Danny just isn't as cut up about his wife's death as he feels he should be. 'It hasn't sunk in yet,' observed all his friends pityingly, but, of course, Danny suspected that it had.

Happiness has received some ferociously bad reviews, while even the gentler ones have said, in effect, 'Happiness! Happiness! It should be funny but the laughs are less'. Personally, I think it just hasn't sunk in yet; it's not The Fast Show but why on earth should it be?

Whitehouse has, heroically, given almost all of the best lines away to the rest of his (excellent) cast, leaving himself as a kind of lugubrious comedy punchbag - one half Claymation bear ('I am Dexter'), one half hopelessly guilty, middle-aged, miserablist ('I've got a slow trundle into drool, piss and impotence at 40'), albeit with a very nice house.

Happiness 's humour consistently disarms by switching deftly from dour pathos to slapstick to grimace-out-loud black comedy and, as a bonus, features an inspired compilation soundtrack. Where else on TV could one be taken on a journey from Ken Dodd to Elvis Costello via 'Angels' and 'Misty Blue' in a mere 29 minutes? Mmmm, nice!

It was a good week in which to judge a series by its covers. Entirely befitting its self-conscious tilt at hipness, Teachers opted for a selection of semi-familiar jangly geetar toons that I couldn't quite place (Suede, maybe, plus some other bands that came and went in the charts of 1993), which provided the soundtrack for Andrew Lincoln's Simon (This Life 's Egg) and his kidult teacher colleagues. Teachers has, in effect, only one joke, but it's an entertaining one - teachers aren't grown-ups, they just pretend to be! They drink, they swear, they steal, they have casual sex, they smoke in the loos - and thankfully the sum total of the square root of the action was more Grange Hill than Hope and Glory .

Still, it seems you can't be a TV teacher without, deep-down, dreaming of running the state-subsidised branch of the Dead Poet's Society. Simon might have an earring, be called by his first name in class and teach Romeo and Juliet with reference to Ryan Giggs, but underneath he's just another old-fashioned mentor who needs must, despite himself, coax wannabe teenage mothers and nascent glue-sniffers to fight their demons and find themselves in literature, whatever the fuck it takes. And in Teachers, it takes a fuck of a lot of 'fucks'.

So to ITV's deliriously rubbishy and utterly addictive The Hunt, a rural romplet filling an important dramatic niche somewhere between Jilly Cooper and Joanna Trollope. Here, the only Suede to be found was on the seat of one's Hermès saddle and the 'fucks' flew fast but never glottally-stoppered.

Soundtrack-wise - mysteriously, mischievously? - The Hunt included Queen's 'Fat Bottomed Girls' in the scene during which Adrian Lukis, as Hugh, a deliciously lascivious country squire, first eyed-up Amanda Holden's pert posterior on horseback.

Holden's Sarah is a townie, an expensive blonde who refuses to let the hunt ride over her land and for whom foot and mouth is a problem best dealt with in Bond and Harley Streets, married to rich mockney pop promoter, Rob (the woefully underused Philip Glenister). Sarah falls for Hugh for no reason other than that this provides Holden (otherwise known as Mrs Les Dennis, who last year famously had a fling with Neil Morrissey) with the excuse to get drunk and say the potentially ratings-grabbing line: 'I don't want to talk about my husband at the moment, thank you very much.'

The plot, the script, the scenes in drawing-rooms that started abruptly with the tinkle of cut-crystal laughter, were all treats and everybody acted their cashmere socks off with dialogue that could have come straight from Crossroads . Here, for example, is the exchange between the (dis)honourably smouldering Hugh and Fiona, his local, lower-class bit on the side:

'Things have run their natural course, Fiona.' (Cool, dispassionate.)

'But you're the one thing that makes me feel special.' (Desperate.)

'I'm sorry, I really think it's better this way.' (Turns away.)

'You can't just throw me away like some piece of rubbish!' (Anguished.)

'You knew exactly what I had to offer.' (Distancing himself now.)

'Hugh! I need you!' (Hugh, gimlet-eyed, callously stubs out a cigarette on Fiona's filthy, feckless, working-class plates before caddishly turning on his Achilles heel, leaving her to the inevitable wrath of her cuckolded husband, Clem, who might actually be a poacher and certainly has a shotgun and who has, anyway, already spotted Hugh and the missus up to no good in Hugh's 4x4 etc.)

I loved every minute of The Hunt and regret only that it finishes this week and that any future ban on the sport will presumably put paid to credits thanking the Vale of Aylesbury Hunt, whose hounds and followers starred. Hopefully, however, a few old hunts (no, not a typographical error) will survive for purely dramatic purposes, kept in carcasses, stirrup-cups, new horns and pink coats by the makers of addictively glossy rural tosh, a fine television tradition that no right-thinking British viewer will ever want to see die out, I'm sure.

Siiii-lent! Wiiit-ness! The plots are good but the prof's a mess: 'I think it would be dangerous to encourage optimism in a situation like this,' said Professor Sam Ryan's doctor gravely, while he studied her X-rays in last week's Silent Witness. No danger of that, Doc, given that Ryan is never optimistic about anything other than her ability to pinpoint the exact time and cause of other people's death.

Though, even by Sam's standards, last week's events took a particularly downbeat turn: a dark shadow had clouded Sam's lungs even as the habitual cloud of intense doom shadowed her Spock-ish brow. In the grand scheme of Sam's emotions, this news suggested that she might be a wee bit snappier and somewhat slammier-of-doors than usual. And, lo, it came to pass.

The doctor's suggestion of a holiday was easy for Sam to ignore. Instead of popping round to a mate's for a cup of tea and a bit of a 'woe-is-me' before booking herself a fortnight in Jamaica at Hedonism 2, she made a quick visit to the scene of a high-profile shotgun suicide before slamming a door and departing for a gloom-laden seaside mini-break in a grim guest house, with the uniquely fun-laden opportunity to disinter a beatified, mummified nun who needed just one more miracle to her name in order to be canonised.

Odd really, if not mildly miraculous, that Sam's creators have allowed her to grapple with the prospect of losing her life without ever having given her one to lose in the first place. Still, if the prognosis for the show's long-term survival looks increasingly slim, Sam would make a suitably miserable cameo wife for Paul Whitehouse.