The Javone Prince Show, BBC Two

You may know Javone Prince as Jerwayne – the self-appointed ladies' man from Channel 4's PhoneShop – or from various memorably comic turns in CBBC's Horrible Histories. Now the BBC has given the comedy actor his own four-part variety series, and it got off to a very strong start.

Variety, like sketch comedy, is often a curate's egg, but Prince knows enough about the form to surround himself with talent, and is sure enough of his own to be generous with the time he gives others to entertain. The series was recorded in front of an audience at a south London dance hall (the rather wonderful Rivoli Ballroom in Brockley), his house band is led by 1980s soul legend Omar, and Prince presents a mix of live music (Mica Paris in the opener), stand-up comedy and recorded sketches.

Sketch makes up the majority of the half-hour, and it's the first black TV sketch show since Little Miss Jocelyn ended in 2008 and Three Non Blondes way back in 2003. The sketches are noticeably strong, as Prince (a Londoner of Caribbean heritage and a jovial host) delivers a witty look at 21st-century life from a black perspective.

The show opened with Prince as a Regency hero being stopped on his speeding steed by a white police officer who wanted to know if Prince owned his horse, and what he had in his saddlebags. “Mind telling me what this is?”, the officer asked as he tasted a powdery substance, to which came the reply: “It's oats, innit?”

Later we were treated to a Rastafarian café owner whose patois was so incomprehensible that Prince needed a translation app “for those moments when you're not black enough”; cutaways to a pair of Gogglebox-like fools commenting on the sketches, who could barely string a sentence together but were tweeting their precious thoughts anyway; and a very strong running gag in which a white couple had various butt-clenchingly embarrassing interactions with black men (assuming they had drugs to sell, or were about to steal their wallets), to which the payoff was a variation on “Black people, making white people anxious since 1948” (the Empire Windrush reached UK shores in June 1948, carrying 500 settlers from Jamaica).

This was deliciously edgy comedy, most of it about the assumption of criminality that black Britons face daily, but where the political message was put across with great subtlety and economy. The show was created and written by PhoneShop creator Phil Bowker (who also directed at a lick), with additional material by Prince.

A highlight was "Made in Peckham", a pitch-perfect spoof of Made in Chelsea in which Giles, Dante, Cookie, Ivan et al spoke in ridiculously posh accents while mouthing meaningless twaddle about who was going with whom and who had seen so-and-so on the rough estate in south London where they all lived, while necking cheap beer from cans and pushing their worldly goods in stolen shopping trolleys. MiC is easy to mock, of course, but when it's done with such flair and originality as this, it's worth it.

I could have done without the white black-wannabe host and the awkward interaction between Prince and Omar, both of which were too obvious and reduced the comedy quotient, but overall this was a very fine opener.