COMPARING Channel 4’s new drama Any Human Heart (Sundays, 9pm) to Forest Gump is akin to saying that Downton Abbey is a bit like Upstairs Downstairs. It sort of is, but it’s not.

For there is an undeniable similarity between this immensely watchable adaptation of William Boyd’s best-selling novel and the 1994 Oscar-winning film starring Tom Hanks in that, in order to portray and comment on sweeping social changes of the last century, both the lead characters wander through life unwittingly becoming embroiled in momentous and historical events.

Our Gump is Logan Mountstuart, who we first encounter as a young Oxford student in the 1920s who is obsessed with losing his virginity and becoming a great novelist, in that order.

A funny yet moving tale, it flows seamlessly back and forth through his unpredictable life and so we have three ages of Logan, played by Jim Broadbent, Matthew Macfadyen and Sam Claflin.

All are utterly convincing, especially the ancient-looking, reclusive Broadbent, as Mountsutart in his twilight years, shuffling about among both the physical and psychological detritus of his past.

Throughout, Mountstuart’s character is refreshingly non-conformist. He’s neither good nor bad, not an out-and-out cad but certainly no hero either, so one minute you’re championing him and the next you’re thinking what an utter bastard he is. No, he’s not that likeable, but he is endlessly interesting and that’s why you keep watching.

This week’s first episode, with its storyline of juggling women, wife and wine and dazzling little cameos from the likes of Gillian Anderson (spot on as Wallis Simpson, mincing about a French golf course in high heels) and Tom Hollander as her lover, the Prince of Wales, in enormous plus-fours, left me with that odd feeling, rarely experienced outside the realms of Doctor Who and Downton Abbey, of dying to find out what happens next.

If you missed the first episode, it’s worth catching up, you’ll love it.

There’s a bit of pardon me vicar-type hanky panky, fascinating insights into the great and the good of the times (he also bumped into Churchill, Ernest Hemmingway and Mr Debonair himself, Ian Fleming) and a load of lovely locations as he travels the globe searching for his muse – which he does in the fabulous Freya, a femme fatale with lips redder than a re-sprayed Ford Escort – and to escape his poor neglected, but it has to be said, irritating wife, Lottie. Where, for the characters in Forest Gump, “life was like a box of chocolates” in Any Human Heart, it’s more like a large tin of assorted teatime favourite biscuits, so diverse and quintessentially English is it – in a glorious, Brideshead Revisted during hard times kind of way.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. At time of going to press, the greater shrieking McKeith was still fainting and flapping its way through the trees on I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! (ITV1 most nights, 9pm).

I suggested last week that the woman someone described as looking like a goose, might be playing a clever game and now it’s bleeding obvious. By folding up like one of those collapsable retro wooden toys every time she sees, well, absolutely anything, especially Shaun Ryder, and screaming like a castrated tomcat impersonating a young Aled Jones, she’s hogging all the attention so we don’t ever get to see much of the others.

Making it hardly worth watching, if it wasn’t for Ant and Dec.

So, thank goodness for the King of Telly, Mr Harry Hill, to whom we all owe a huge debt of gratitude, for he sifts through this and the other dross of the week’s TV and brings tasty, bite-sized nibbles of the best (well, the worst) of it for us to savour in TV Burp (ITV1, Saturday, 7.15pm).

And, as an added bonus, he is utterly hilarious. Those asides to camera are every bit as funny as when he first started doing them a gazillion years ago plus his daft take on highlights of the week and his love of ordinary people make this the best watch of the week, every week.

The frankly terrifying Wagbo thread “It’s stolen Katie’s hair and made a nest of it as it prepares to spawn!” has made me cry with laughter more than once, but it’s worth watching purely for his breathless updates on Nigella’s Kitchen, during which he wiggles a huge pair of floppy, stocking-clad legs about to the tune of The Stripper.

His face, when the goddess of guzzling leered straight to camera and said that she needed somewhere to park her batter bag was one of the funniest clips of the year.

No wonder everyone is wild about Harry.