Amandaland and Am I Being Unreasonable? review: This brilliant comedy double bill makes Wednesday nights twice as nice

But with Amandaland (BBC1, Weds, 9pm) and Am I Being Unreasonable? (BBC1, Weds, 9.30pm) we've hit the jackpot.

Both are laugh out loud funny, but that isn't the only thing the two shows share.

Amandaland – a spin-off from the similarly hilarious Motherland – centres on a figure who, at first glance, could be a monster. A person so utterly vain and self-absorbed as to be completely objectionable.

Amanda – the glossy, Good Housekeeping mum with aspirations to be a online interiors entrepreneur – has come down in the world. Newly-divorced, her business having gone bust, she and her two children are reduced to state schools and a first floor flat in So-Ha, also known as South Harlesden, or “the area around Wormwood Scrubs prison”.

She gets very excited at the news that one of the mums at her kids' new school is the chef-patron of a trendy restaurant, and sees a way to ingratiate herself into a new circle of like-minded friends.

Most of the episode is taken up with her attempts to get in with the in-crowd, and as is the way with comedies, failing spectacularly.

There are failing electric cars, hot tubs, magic mushrooms and drunk teenagers involved, as well as Amanda's mum – equally objectionable and played with lip-curled gusto by Joanna Lumley - who turns up at Amanda's flat with an emergency food parcel from Waitrose, “because you've only got a Tesco Metro now”.

But this is Lucy Punch's show as Amanda, not only comfortable with the one-liners, but a brilliant clown, whether taking a pratfall or being hit on the head with a football.

Her performance humanises Amanda as well, letting us see the vulnerable, desperately insecure woman behind the monstrous social climber, struggling in the middle of recalcitrant teenage children and her ogre of a mother.

“I came here tonight to find my people,” she wails after a disastrous house party. “Well, the people have spoken and they really are not... very nice people.”

Similarly, Daisy May Cooper's character, Nic, in Am I Being Unreasonable? is also a woman who could easily become an irritant.

This second series starts with Nic's affair being exposed at a memorial service to her dead lover Alex – who happened to be her brother-in-law.

Nic is a woman who seems to be totally at a loss with life, not sure what to do with herself, dissatisfied with her lot but not sure how to change things, beyond detonating everything around her with irresponsible behaviour.

But the script, written by Cooper herself, makes it clear how her actions have hurt those around her, and isn't shy in making Nic the object of some horrific insults.

Variously, Nic is compared to a “walking haemorrhoid”, loud-mouthed, whiskered racing commentator John McCririck, and Hagrid, the burly, bearded gamekeeper from Harry Potter.

It's rare for a writer to subject themselves to such abuse, but then Cooper does give herself some of the best lines.

Escaping the memorial service in a cab, she recounts how the revelation of her affair deteriorates into fisticuffs.

“Someone lost a tooth,” she tells the cabbie. “They thought they found it but it was just an Airwaves.”

But the trump card of this show is Lenny Rush, as Nic's son Ollie. One of the funniest people on television these days, he steals every scene he's in, and one visual gag involving a vending machine is terrific.

Both shows, meanwhile, are written and created largely by women, allowing for gags about the 'sandwich generation', vaginal mesh and the struggles of not being able to 'have it all'.

But the real thing these two shows share is that they are both funny to the bones of them – the performances are uniformly terrific, and while both Amandaland and Am I Being Unreasonable? veer sometimes towards the surreal, neither loses its link to earthy reality.

Very few genuinely funny new sitcoms have come along recently, so for the BBC to put both of those in a double bill seems almost wasteful somehow. But for now, Wednesday nights are twice as nice.