Memo to Auntie: PLEASE put some jokes in your new sitcom

Funny voice merchants are a problem. It isn’t enough to do a range of silly accents, however hilarious they are — there has to be an extra dimension to the comedy.

In the halcyon days of sketch shows, artists such as Dick Emery and Harry Enfield could don costume and create characters to match their myriad voices, then chuck in a barrowload of catchphrases and have a hit series.

But the death of sketch humour has left vocal gymnasts with an i dentity crisis. They could try i mpressions, but that niche is already crammed with established talent like Alistair McGowan and Rory Bremner.

Or they could attempt something ‘edgy’ for the ‘yoof audience’, which at best provides a firecracker career — one quick flare, and then a fizzle.

That’s what happened to Kayvan novak, who invented a weird hybrid of animation and prank calls in a Bafta-winning comedy series called Fonejacker nine years ago. Kayvan rang unsuspecting victims, bombarded them with oddball humour in a variety of daft accents, and patched the tapes to amateurish cartoons.

The show was spawned by a moment of frustration. In 2005, angry he couldn’t get work as an actor, Kayvan rang the BBC radio drama department and i mpersonated Hollywood superstar Kevin Spacey, demanding to perform Richard III.

The Beeb were thrilled . . . and then red-faced, when they realised they’d been had. Fonejacker was born. For a short while it was the big new concept in comedy. Then, inevitably, it became last year’s thing.

Kayvan has been struggling to find his next hit ever since. He doesn’t lack confidence: in an interview this week, he compared himself with Barry Humphries, the genius who created Dame Edna Everage.

And, to his credit, he didn’t do what most comedic one-hit wonders do, and turn to panel games for a lazy living. Instead, after a lot of dead ends and failed pitches, he has created a sitcom where he plays a master of disguises, bouncing from one character to the next.

SunTrap (BBC1) deserves a chance. It’s a clever idea: Kayvan is an undercover reporter, on the run from his editor after a botched investigation at Buckingham Palace, and hiding out in a Mediterranean beach shack owned by a washed-up former journo (Bradley Walsh).

Kayvan is desperate for SunTrap to be a success, and it shows. The whole thing is jangling with nerves — the dialogue comes much too fast, in a pell-mell clutter of lines, a nd many of t he gags are sub-par. Half of them are just stupid puns, or inane comments repeated back and forth.

Bradley looks bemused by the whole thing. He’s playing barowner Brutus as a sort of expat Arfur Daley, but there’s no swagger in the role, none of the relish you’d expect from such an experienced actor i f he was feeling confident.

I’m rooting for this show. I want it to get a grip, and I want it to work. But it’s off to a shaky start.

The funniest thing on telly last night by f ar was a financial barrister called David trying to explain to his cleaning lady that he’d left some extra shirts for her to iron, in Modern Times: The Secret Life Of Cleaners (BBC2).

It didn’t help that she was Bulgarian, and only understood English when she wanted, too. But the real difficulty was that David was too embarrassed to give orders to the hired help, and tied himself in knots as he blurted out his requests. In the end, as an apology, he set up the ironing board in front of the television, with War Horse i n the DVD player and the subtitles set to Bulgarian.

This one-off documentary purported to be an investigation into how Britain’s cleaners, most of them European i mmigrants, regard the well-off homeowners who pay them.

Since this was BBC2, there was an undercurrent of socialist grumbling about the gulf in living conditions between the Ladies Who Do and the Ladies Who Didn’t Have To.

But the real message that came across was what hard work it was to find anyone reliable to do the dusting. Much easier to grab a cloth and do it yourself.