Funland (BBC2); The Worst Jobs In History (C4); The Booze Cruise III: The Scattering (ITV1): Any programme will be hard pushed to be as bizarre and freak-showish as Big Brother promises to be, but Funland is heading down the right alley.

The second episode of this dark thriller did little to illuminate what had been happening to make a gorilla jump off Blackpool Tower. Perhaps it was the thought of this landmark becoming the world's largest lapdancing emporium by the local lady mobster Mercy Woolf.

Carter Krantz has arrived in town seeking revenge for an incident seen in flashback that appears to involve a bedridden old lady and a chainsaw. Meanwhile, Mercy is trying to win over councillors for her lapdancing club.

The mayor denounces her dancers for the brevity of their thongs, condemning them as being "of an inappropriate width, size and coverage - a clear incitement to lust, drunkenness and impropriety".

Most of the characters populating Funland need no artificial stimulus to pursue their baser instincts - apart perhaps from Ambrose Chapel, a lover of taxidermy and blue Y-fronts. He's played by Mark Gatiss, one of the League of Gentleman, whose fourth, unseen, member, Jeremy Dyson, has written Funland with Simon Ashdown.

Alas, Ambrose was absent from the second episode. Jason Watkins, as Bradley Stainer, owner of the Elegance Studios, was a more than adequate substitute as we were exposed to his grubby little photographic business in which amateur cameramen pay to take glamour shots of his girls.

The script is as crammed as a male stripper's posing pouch with a mix of black comedy, bizarre characters and dialogue with a Joe Orton turn of phrase about it.

The cast are embracing the rich language with obvious pleasure from Judy Parfitt as show-no-Mercy to Francis Barber's rival as she demands to have a baby with the words: "I'm a woman, I want to suckle."

Tony Robinson was being sinful as the latest edition of The Worst Jobs In History focused on rural work. He discovered the work of the sin eater, promptly labelling it the "strangest worst job ever".

It started in medieval times and was still being recorded in 1881. A sin eater would eat bread and salt off a corpse, a ritual connected with religion and folk magic. The acting of eating absorbed the dead person's sins. The reward was sixpence and a bowl of beer - and being shunned because the eater was now riddled with sin.

The third Booze Cruise comedy was notable for not featuring a cruise and very little booze as the group of bickering friends headed for Yorkshire to scatter the ashes of Grace's mother on the moors.

The jokes, of which there were far too few, were hardly original, from the dead woman's choice of music at her cremation - Smoke Gets In Your Eyes - to the inevitable accidental spilling of the ashes.

The saving grace was the excellent cast, including Neil Pearson, Anne Reid and Mark Benton, who actually made some of the tired old gags and situations amusing.