Jugasaurus rex. Clunge. Muffwagon. Goodness, it’s been a long time since we’ve heard those creative expressions of male sexual frustration, and it's nice to hear them again, like old friends, or “Fwends” in this case. The Inbetweeners are back. Sort of.

Even by the usually self-congratulatory standards of tellyland, the total of four hours and 10 minutes of airtime devoted by Channel 4 to their 2008 hit The Inbetweeners is a tad self-indulgent, though it is one of the channel’s recent glories.

Hosted, inevitably, by the roughly contemporaneous Jimmy Carr, the first two hours of this teenage marathon, The Inbetweeners: Fwends Reunited, is given over to a sort of mix of This is Your Life, An Audience With..., and Radio 4’s The Reunion. That is followed by four full episodes of the series, mostly for the devotees, I imagine, as well as any stray viewers unfamiliar with this comedic landmark to judge this odyssey of pubic discovery, adolescence and embarrassment at first hand.

In all, The Inbetweeners ran to three series and two films, predominantly onanistic in tone, and most of the cast and creators turn up for this celebration of its 10th anniversary. The Fwends Reunited show is dominated, naturally, by the four sixth form virginal idiots a good shag would have probably sorted out, but who, fortunately for us, never got lucky. Simon Bird (as Will McKenzie), Joe Thomas (Simon Cooper), James Buckley (Jay Cartwright) and Blake Harrison (Neil Sutherland) confirm the impression that they were basically playing themselves in The Inbetweeners and haven’t changed much since the last piece was smut was propelled like a flying turd into the public’s consciousness in 2014. I just hope their real-time personas have managed to “plunge some clunge” as they approach early middle age. Not sure, though.

Given the vast prairie of time to fill, the producers plunder every known format to maintain some kind of momentum, and mostly to good effect, thanks to the timeless quality of the original gags. So there is a series of “Awards” for stuff like “best bodily malfunction”, and I for one will never tire of seeing Simon projectile vomiting semi-digested creme de menthe on his girlfriend’s six-year-old brother; nor of Simon’s left testicle hanging forlornly from his posing pouch in the school fashion show; nor of watching Will tearfully confessing to his teacher that “I thought it was a fart”, as he had to be escorted from the A level exam room. You can almost smell the, er, shame.

There is a mini-quiz segment too, featuring Inbetweeners “super fans” whose programme knowledge exceeded that of the cast themselves, with a scholarly textual grasp of lines such as: “What is Swansea. Is it an animal?”; “What's this pesto stuff? Is it for humans?”; and “Just cos you’ve had your first puff on your first joint it doesn’t make you Kurt Cobain.”

One super fan even had a tattoo of a grinning Jay with the inscription “CLUNGE” garnishing her upper thigh – ironically about as close as Jay ever got to a lady’s bodily treasure.

The quiz “prize”, won by a Will lookalike in specs and a blazer, is a bright yellow M-reg Fiat Cinquecento Hawaii Edition, complete with “tape deck” and red passenger door.

This runabout is also the co-star of the Fwends show and features in the freshly filmed sequences, such as their nostalgic trip back to Rudge Park Comprehensive (, as Carr puts it “in a car none of them owned to a school none of them went to”. Will relives the moment when he shat himself, which is, well, moving.

Best TV of 2018 Show all 10 1 /10 Best TV of 2018 Best TV of 2018 10) Save Me Lennie James's missing-child thriller Save Me looked as though it might be a paint-by-numbers affair. Instead it was a gripping start to Sky Atlantic's impressive run, with James taking the lead as Nelly, the womanising bum who gains a new lease of investigative energy when his estranged daughter Jody vanishes. A smart script kept us guessing right up to an ending that denied us the closure we had expected. A second series has been commissioned. Sky Best TV of 2018 9) Cunk on Britain How much you enjoyed Philomena Cunk's history of Britain depended on how funny you find Diane Morgan's resting confused face. I find it hilarious. Her interviewees are kind of in on the joke but clearly briefed to take it as seriously as possible. They’ll be mid-flow and she will cock her head and drain all the interest from her face. “What's the most political thing that's ever happened?” she asked Robert Peston, who did his best to answer with a straight face. Co-producer Charlie Brooker's fingerprints are everywhere in the way Morgan's vain, poorly informed, easily distracted Cunk operates within a ruthlessly satirical production, which sends up the tropes and cliches of every dodgy documentary and history programme. She might not be the comic creation we need, but she is the one we deserve right now. BBC Best TV of 2018 8) Sally4Ever You either love Julia Davis or think her sick filth ought to be banned. Sally4Ever proved yet again that there is nobody working today – or at least nobody with the same platform – with a blacker sense of humour. Sally (Catherine Shepherd) was already surrounded by monsters: her loser of a boyfriend (Alex MacQueen) and tricky colleagues played by Julian Barratt and Felicity Montagu. Then Emma (Davis herself) arrived, a tornado of sex and bad intentions. Beneath the shagging, drugs, excrement, manipulation and malice were pockets of tenderness, but you had to look pretty hard to see them. Luckily there were also gales of laughter. N.b. If you have yet to see it, please do not watch it with your parents or children on Boxing Day and then write in to complain. Sky Best TV of 2018 7) The Little Drummer Girl This was a spiritual successor rather than a sequel to The Night Manager. It was still a Le Carré adaptation on the BBC sprinkled with famous faces, but the differences were as pronounced as the similarities. Park Chan-Wook, the Korean auteur, directed with a high sense of style. Florence Pugh was dazzling as the ingenue actress Charlie, recruited for a dangerous mission across Europe, ably supported by Alexander Skarsgard and Michael Shannon as her spook handlers. Some viewers switched off after the first episodes, which took time to set the scene. They missed out on a vivid, beautifully told thriller. BBC Best TV of 2018 6) A Very English Scandal Hugh Grant… can act? That was the first surprise in this smooth, stylish BBC retelling of the Jeremy Thorpe scandal. He burst convincingly out of the charming fop mould he has slept in so comfortably for thirty years. What have we been missing all this time? The other shock was remembering how recent it all was. The government is still up to a lot of nonsense, but the days of this kind of cover-up, for these reasons, is surely over. Or is it? BBC Best TV of 2018 5) Patrick Melrose Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels have the kind of precisely drawn interiority that makes any kind of adaptation seem doomed to fail. Instead, the Sky Atlantic series brought them convincingly to life. It is not a happy tale. In flashback we saw Patrick's childhood in the shadow of his monstrous father David (Hugo Weaving), and the decades of self-loathing and substance abuse that followed. At the centre of all this was Benedict Cumberbatch, as good as he's ever been. His Patrick could be brilliant, witty, cruel and pitiful, sometimes in the same smack-addled sentence. Weaving, Jennifer Jason Leigh as David's wife Eleanor and Pip Torrens as his ghastly friend Nicholas Pratt all put in memorable performances, too. Sky Best TV of 2018 4) Dynasties At an age where most of us are long past doing anything, David Attenborough is still changing our expectations of what a nature documentary can do. Like The Rolling Stones, he has been on his farewell tour since about 1970, but unlike Jagger & Co, the returns are not diminishing. Is he fuelled by anger at the world's response to climate change? Or simply driven by some massive internal dynamo, a soul-quest to improve our ability to relate to penguins? Whatever the motivation, Dynasties was wonderful, telling complex stories of the animal kingdom with beautiful photography. BBC Best TV of 2018 3) Killing Eve It's unusual for a TV writer to attract more attention than the stars or director. Perhaps the world is changing. Or perhaps it's simply that the writer of Killing Eve was Phoebe Waller-Bridge, star of Fleabag, Star Wars and one of the country's outstanding new talents. Here she turned her hand to a spy thriller, an adaptation of Luke Jennings' novels about a beautiful assassin, Villanelle (Jodie Comer), and the MI6 agent given the task of hunting her down, Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh). Both leads demanded attention: Comer the magnetic murderer, Oh the harassed but brilliant spy. The script swerved between comedy, action and drama often enough to keep everyone guessing. BBC Best TV of 2018 2) England vs Colombia Yes, the national team have played on television in a World Cup before, but I'm including this because the outcome, an England penalty shoot-out victory, was so unusual as to count as a whole new format. At a time when we all watch things at different times, here was something unmistakably live. We watched Gareth Southgate's men knowing that the rest of the country was, too, poised in living rooms and pub gardens, ready to bury their heads in a sofa or throw their pints in the air. No other TV programme sold as many waistcoats. Rex Features Best TV of 2018 1) Succession The ageing patriarch and his scheming children. Not an original concept. Trust, the drama about the last days of Getty family, proved that it was possible for a series built on this premise to have actors, scenery, direction, script, etc etc, and still somehow fall short. Succession, by comparison, felt alive. If US production values and ambition gave it its scale, its heart was dark and British. We can thank Jesse Armstrong, co-creator of Peep Show, and his all-star line-up of British writers, including the Lucy Prebble, Tony Roche and Georgia Pritchett. They made the Roy family expats themselves, and you could hear the old aristocratic froideur in every withering put-down. But we cared for them, too. One of the many TV professionals I consulted for this list thought Succession was so much better than everything else this year that the top 10 should just have it listed in bold and then nine blank spaces. I wouldn't go that far but it's certainly at the top. Alamy Stock Photo

The talking (dick) heads are good too, especially when creators Damon Beesley and Iain Morris explain the genesis of some of the set pieces, often based on their own life experiences. Beesley, for example, confesses how he had ranted some foul-mouthed sarcastic abuse at some hapless kids for pushing in at an amusement park before bullying his way onto the ride. Smug, he turned to them and only then discovered that the selfish bastards were at the front of the rollercoaster because they had Down syndrome.

Greg Davies’s presence as the bad-tempered teacher Mr Gilbert is also enjoyable. No wonder that Davies went into comedy having himself been a bad-tempered teacher (“a living hell” in his seemingly sincere description). Waen Shepherd (Mr “Paedo” Kennedy) is extremely game to join in the fun – perhaps surprising given the times we live in. Indeed, I wonder, only a few years on, if phrases such as “spaz” and “rapey” could be scripted now.

You could call it a retrospective then, if you were pretentious enough, or “going in balls deep” if you’re Jimmy Carr. Although it lacks a certain pointfulness - the cast are even more absurdly old to play adolescents again and there will be no more episodes or movies - and all concerned refuse to take itself too seriously, which is just as well. Like a more successful sort of school reunion.