Frankie Howerd: Rather you than me
 BBC4, 9pm

Sadly, there's been a wearying sameness to BBC4's Curse of Comedy real-life drama mini-season, which concluded its four-part biographical examination of assorted post-war British laughter-mongers with Frankie Howerd: Rather You Than Me. In every case, these funnymen's tales have followed a near-identical trajectory, with each of the clowns depicted - Tony Hancock, Hughie Green, Harry H Corbett, Wilfrid Brambell - being shown to be of the tragic, crying-on-the-inside variety.

Moreover, all have belied their cheery public personas with off-stage behaviour characterised by senseless rages, corrosive bouts of self-loathing and cruel impulses to serial infidelity, each of these tendencies occasionally exacerbated by a hellish dependence on drink and drugs. All these propensities could indeed constitute the ideal emotional CV for a top-class comic - (don't all queue at once, aspirant chucklemasters! - but viewed in play after play, they've made for turgidly repetitive viewing. Note to BBC4 commissioners: there's still plenty of material for another Curse of Comedy series (the roster ranges from Tommy Cooper to Peter Sellers via Kenneth Williams), but couldn't you try leavening it week by week with a Curse of Tragedy offshoot?

I can picture it now: the blameless, sun-dappled everyday lives of our favourite beetle-browed Shakespearean agonisers or soap serial-killers. Up to their knees in blood on stage and TV by night, they actually spent their days in chuckle-filled domestic harmony, creative fulfilment and with recourse to only the occasional Christmas cigarillo or snifter of sweet sherry.

But I digress. At least Rather You Than Me ended its familiar gloomy yarn on an upbeat note of hopeful resolution as Frankie H exited one of his final engagements, at the Oxford University Union in 1990, with an affectionate declaration of love for his long-suffering life-partner, Dennis Heymer. That's not what it had actually been like throughout long periods during the couple's pained relationship, of course. Lord knows what Heymer - an honest, unreflective prole well portrayed by Rafe Spall - ever saw in the havering master of the orotund double entendre. As played by Little Britain co-star David Walliams, Howerd was a wig-wearing monster of selfishness, depression, self-disgust and rampant promiscuity.

Funny, too, but with a stinging cynicism that was all too quickly expressed, as when Howerd told Heymer, then a poorly paid young waiter, that he knew exactly what it was that had piqued his amorous interest: Howerd's fame and money as Britain's highest-paid comedy star of the 1950s. If so, Heymer certainly earned his dosh during their 37-year personal and professional partnership. Throughout it, Howerd was most in love with himself. This became all too plain once Walliams had eased himself out of giving us a baroque caricature of a man who essentially was a baroque caricature. For Howerd was horribly preoccupied with himself and his own sense of unhappiness, spending lost weekends in primitive sessions of psychiatric therapy. He viewed his own homosexuality as dirty, while at the same time brusquely importuning almost every man he met, gay or straight.

Rather You Than Me offered one indicative exchange in its central duo's shared home. It arose when Heymer voiced a mild complaint about the infrequent nature of their physical liaisons - the last of which, he pointed out, had occurred on his birthday.

Howerd's self-absorption signalled itself in his reply: "When was that?"

Titter ye not: an apt motto when it came to examining the life of Frankie Howerd.