Bellamy's People & Down The Line.

Here's a puzzle for you, in the style of Only Connect (more of which later). Points if you can name the connection between these four things.

Goodness Gracious Me; The Mighty Boosh; Little Britain; That Mitchell and Webb Look.

Obviously, it's not that they're all funny. Little Britain has never been funny. No, it's that they all successfully made the now-traditional trek from BBC Radio to BBC TV. And there's a new one come to join them, but it's got it all wrong. And yet also right, possibly.

Bellamy's People (Thursdays, 10pm, BBC2) is the TV extension of the truly wonderful Down The Line, a spoof Radio 4 phone-in show which first broadcast in 2006. In the radio show, Rhys Thomas plays Gary Bellamy, the host who's two parts slick'n'cheesy to one part hopeless'n'embarrassing. Many of his "callers" are voiced by dependable Fast Show alumni Higson and Whitehouse, and the rest of the cast are often even better, portraying a menagerie of absurd but just-believable characters, ad-libbing hilariously in an attempt to make the host lose his composure. You can often hear him corpse, and it's twice as funny as that is on telly. I was lucky enough to first hear it like it was intended, as an almost-real show that quickly dawns on you as a send-up. Fantastic.

And now it's made the leap to telly. "But how?", I hear you (i.e. me) say. "It's a phone-in show, that can't work!". Well, shut up, you (i.e. me). The BBC are clever, obviously. So, the show's format is that Bellamy is stepping out of the studio to meet his "public". He drives around in a Union Flag-painted oldster car (a nod to the radio show, where Bellamy can't quite ever keep his mild racism under the hood), visits his favourite callers, and engages in the familiar awkward banter with them, only this time face-to-face.

I'll say this now: it's not as funny as Down The Line. It couldn't really hope to be, seeing as that show made the most of a perfect format. However, it is very good, and utterly worth a watch. Highlights of the first episode were Early D, the Harlesden wideboy, who reacts badly to being told that his panther statue is not actually a "black lion", and Bellamy's biggest fan Trisha, a ditzy obsessive who giggles all over Gary while her strangely compliant husband smiles terrifyingly into the camera. Some characters don't quite work as well as on the wireless, but there are certainly more hits than misses.

Still, I'm a bit baffled as to why this series was made in the first place. The cast is superb, and it'll have an willing audience from the radio series, but the premise just seems weird if imagined as a first-time viewer. Never mind: at the very least, it should get a few more people enjoying Down The Line, and that's no bad thing.