The Comic Strip Presents… Sex Actually, Channel 4

Wednesday 28 December 2005
Did we like it?
While tyrannosaurus rex had an undoubted contribution to the history of the world, if through the wonders of genetics, it could be brought back to life today it would still be an evolutionary anachronism. Just like the Comic Strip.

What was good about it?
• The vague, ghostly hints of a satire of middle-class England. Bilbo (Rik Mayall) a conceptual artist who paints portraits as a blob of red ink and then expects it to sell for thousands.
• And Roy (Phil Cornwell), who is afraid of intimacy and expresses his sexuality through the largest collection of pornography on Berkshire (“This section is bestiality, some of the animals featured are now extinct”), and when the Kosovan builders constructing his garden decking romp with his repressed wife, he simply demands a 20% discount from the contractor who employed them.
• The conclusion where, inspired by the random appearance of a festive choir, the corrupt residents of the close endeavour to live a better life as Roy pledges to sell his pornography to finance a romantic trip to Paris.
• The performances were all of a high standard. Sheridan Smith made a convincingly ditzy Angie, though making her the murderess seemed a wholly illogical conclusion to an already flimsy premise. And Robert Bathurst and Rebecca Front were brilliant as a bitter couple sniping at each other.
• The opening credits remained unchanged, which was good.

What was bad about it?
• The complete absence of a plot. Perhaps the writers imagined the comedy could be ignited through a cast of grotesques, but adequate situations were required for the characters to express their quirks convincingly. The promising Carol and Charles seemed to be waiting for any chance to show off their argumentative relationship rather than let their disputes flow naturally from the script. While Jane being chased around the garden by lustful builders may have been an ironic take on Benny Hill’s outdated sexism, but it came across as a lost echo from the 80s which has only just found its way out the abyss of alternative comedy’s profound conceit.
• The Comic Strip is always revered with the same adulation as the Sex Pistols, but similarly, each was just a plastic platform for a much richer consequence. The Young Ones and Blackadder, to name but two, are examples of shows which have the attitude of the Comic Strip within them, but far outstrip them for laughs.
• Perhaps in the pampas grass laden closes of the Home Counties, Sex Actually was an acerbic spoof on the dubious morality and frustrated sensualities of the stuffy middle-classes, but to the rest of the country it was a grim indulgence.
• Nigel Planer – what was the point of his presence?
• Doon Mackichan’s talents being wasted with a mostly dire script.
• Rik Mayall playing a frustrated genius – no surprise there then.

Return Of The Goodies, BBC2

Friday 30 December 2005
Did we like it?
At first there was that sense of euphoria and fun of meeting up with relatives you haven’t seen for a decade, but gradually you realise why it’s taken a so long to attain the motivation and strength to withstand another get together.

What was good about it?
• Some of the sketches still retain their comic appeal. The incessant berating of Tony Blackburn (although this was tempered when the Goodies allowed him to be in on the joke in return for playing their awful records on the radio); and the lassoing of wild Rolf Harrises in order to initiate a breeding programme in a zoo.
• The chronology of how the Goodies moved from the Cambridge Footlights (perhaps the smuggest collection of bilious humanity in the British Isles except for members of the Groucho Club), through a myriad abortive comedy shows in the 60s to the birth of The Goodies.
• One of the main reasons that the Goodies seemed to be successful was that all three were, and still are, very likable, contrasting personalities – posh Tim, boffin Graeme, and unkempt Bill – and this came across in the studio as they looked back over their careers.
• Tim Brooke-Taylor saying that he perhaps should have been part of Monty Python, but modestly adding that his writing “wasn’t that good”.
• Clips from At Last The 1948 Show – the Yorkshiremen engaged in a series of one-upmanship about the sorry state of their lives – and Broaden Your Mind, which seemed like a 60s version of Look Around You.

What was bad about it?
• Much of the humour had dated very badly. This is not a criticism of the wit of the original shows, more that the humour relied heavily on topical issues that were perplexing to a contemporary audience. For instance, it was possible to appreciate that the sketch about Captain Fishface may have been a hilarious pastiche of a Birds Eye Fishfingers advert, but without remembering the ad itself, it merely seems bizarre.
• The allusions to some conspiracy theory as to why the Goodies has never been repeated anywhere. We would surmise that, like executing French aristocrats, denying women the vote or locking 10 strangers in a house together for a TV show, it was very much of its time and today would be a risible and outmoded form of entertainment.
• The Funky Gibbon. Any period of music can be wrought to appear the worst in history if you can find those generation-defining abominations.
• The Cambridge Circus, who were essentially a bunch of Cambridge Footlights, including Tim and Bill, who performed their awful show on Broadway. It was the kind of novelty act some Americans expect to see from the top deck of a London tourist bus as common behaviour amongst the bowler-hatted, repressed Brits.

Top Buzzer, MTV

What’s it all about?
The Johnny Vaughan-penned comic misadventures of two morally conscious London hash dealers.
What to say if you liked it
The first comedy/drama about drugs that isn’t weighed down by the ethical necessity of exhibiting the awfulness of illegal narcotics.
What to say if you didn’t like it
A Young Ones for the undiscerning contemporary generation, only without the jokes, distinct characters and plotlines even fainter than Ben Elton’s.

What was good about it?
• James Lance as Sticky is the only likeable character in the show, but we perhaps feel warmer to him as Lance seems to have transplanted the nonchalant posh drop out who says “fuck” with accentuated class from his roles in Teachers and The Book Group.
• Some of the camera tricks used to illustrate Carlton’s trip were interesting and disorientating.

What was bad about it?
• Drug dealers are the most boring protagonists in the history of entertainment. Indeed, Hollywood sent a bouquet of flowers to Islamic militants for providing the template for a new generation of credible blockbuster villains to fill the void left by the collapse of the Soviet Union that drug dealers inexpertly tried to plug (Crocodile Dundee 2 for instance).
• The currency of friendship among the gang isn’t established through anecdotes and japes but the sharing of a spliff. A fine device for decadent ciphers in a ropey drama to get matey, but for an audience who draw their stimulus from sharp discourse it’s hardly engaging.
• The non-existent plot that observed the hapless Carlton get too high before a romantic meal with Daisy, so he staggered out down the supermarket to get some salt and then… actually, no it’s not worth stealing your precious time explaining the rest of the sorry tale.
• Far too much swearing. The script writers seem oblivious to the notion that profanity is only potent when used sparingly.
• The cynical note after the credits, which gives phone numbers where you can get help for addiction which typically append all shows that exploit social traumas for their own ends and then claim there is a scrap of educational salvation in the show.
• The characterisation, the worst of which was Bugsy (played by the promising Ashley Walters). The DJ was branded with “coolness” and depth after he refused to sell the secret of his delicious cocktail to the corporate suits.

Jack Dee Live At The Apollo, BBC1

What to say if you liked it
The master of miserablism returns with an array of top guests
What to say if you didn’t like it
A washed-up comic props up a show of has been guests
What was good about it?
• It’s always refreshing to have Jack back on our screens as nobody can moan with such mordancy.
What was bad about it?
• Joan Rivers was the special guest.
• Joan Rivers opened her mouth.
• Joan talked about insignificant American celebrities in her routine that exhibited the same laziness of those film ads where the voiceover is in an American
accent.
• The audience applauded Joan’s pitiful jokes far too often.
• Some of the jokes seemed to have been born and bred in America (“Italians get the biggest rings as they take them off dead people”), but died in Britain.
• Joan’s face was so forcefully fastened to her scalp that it would serve more use to society were it to be pulled tightly over a burning chip pan to smother the flames.
• The cameras would zoom on to “celebrities” (such as Jo Guest and someone from Holby City) who, even compared to the American “celebrities” Joan twittered on about,
are but microscopic viruses. And Joan was rivalled in the wrecked celebrity stakes by Liam Gallagher.
• At the end of her performance, Joan was still breathing.
• One of the best bits of the last Jack Dee series was when the audience would leave little video messages before the show and then Jack would mercilessly mock them. This has been adapted, but now they “send” Jack text messages. However, far too many of the “messages” seemed to be scripted intros for a gag.

Ideal, BBC3

Tuesday 27 December 2005
Did we like it?
The festive edition of the Johnny Vegas sitcom provided a slice of urban life tinged with surrealism, which made it watchable.

What was good about it?
• Portishead’s Glory Box being played pre-credits.
• The fact that Ideal highlights a common occurrence within the UK: drug-dealing.
• Lovely Ronny Jhutti's appearance.
• Cartoon Head’s weird seduction technique [first male-on-male nipple action on British TV?]

What was bad about it?
• Pregnant woman: who’s the father? Again a common occurrence but yawn!
• Ronny Jhutti’s hair: he looked like an extra from East Is East.
• The camp gay guy: why couldn’t the writers have come up with a gay Average Joe who dabbled in dope?
• The lesbian kiss seemed contrived: wouldn’t the promiscuous heterosexual woman have protested?

Ideal, BBC3, Tuesday 14 March 2006
Did we like it?
An enjoyable and original comedy which has shifted focus as far away from the rather dull topic of drug dealing as it’s possible to move when the central character follows that profession.

What was good about it?
• Johnny Vegas as Moz. Sure, he’s still weighed down by an accent that slurs like an off-course cruise liner dragging its keel along the floor of a shallow riverbed, but as he’s playing a slothful, one-dimensional Northerner such a deficiency becomes a virtue.
• Moz’s hapless efforts to charm his timid new neighbour Judith. As he spots her moving in, he stands in his doorway and stretches out his portly frame. Later, when Nicki storms out of the flat, Moz, eager to appear free and single, quizzically enquires of Judith, “Who was that?” But his cover is blown after Derrick and Yasuko turn up to invite Moz to be the best man at their wedding (only for a disgruntled Moz to discover he was about fiftieth choice, even in the queue after scoundrels such as Cartoon Head and Colin).
• When “on probation” Colin turns up and, like Derrick, confesses he is going to “cut down” his hash intake, Moz exclaims: “Not another one! You of all people; you haven’t got much to live for!”
• And when Colin tries to flog some mace to him, Moz exasperatedly replies: “You’re trying to sell me something specifically designed to protect me from people like you.”
• Moz deliberately and sympathetically giving the heavily pregnant Jenny a warning over the dangers of smoking while pregnant before selling her some dope. And Jenny’s worries that her verucca will prevent a water birth for her baby as she has already “booked in at Parkway Baths”.
• When PC reveals to Moz that he won’t be around anymore because he has been “recommended for promotion”, Moz implores him to “get embroiled in a scandal” to scupper it. But a resigned PC replies: “What’s the point? The official inquiry would be bound to clear my name.”
• And as PC leaves he resolves to “do everything I can to beat this” as though making a pledge to conquer an illicit addiction like alcoholism.

What was bad about it?
• The revolving door format may be effective for quick gags, but does little to build up narrative flow or sketch out characters so the audience cares about them. A case in point is the pregnant Jenny; if the viewers gave a damn about her well-being then they would be horrified at her attempts to buy dope from Moz (and accordingly lose respect for him). And while this apathy contributes to the gag, the fact that she, and almost all the other characters are ciphers (as well as being unlikeable), leaves the comedy feeling a little empty and dehumanised.
• The consequence of this, is that Ideal functions more like a succession of stand-up routines than a sitcom (with Johnny Vegas as compere), and the storylines appear tacked on as an afterthought to link the individual spots together.

The Big Fat Quiz of the Year, Channel 4

2007
Did we like it?
For the first half hour it was great. But then Noel Fielding and Russell Brand lost interest in being funny and instead proceeded to verbally stamp their dull jackboots of sterile surrealism over everything including David Mitchell and Jonathan Ross, who by the end had both given up, too.

What was good about it?
* David Mitchell’s rant against the Cutty Sark: “What is it? A boat, essentially a lorry. What were the tours like? This is the sails, the wind blew it and it went!”
* Eddie Large’s ‘past-life regression’: “I’m Jock, Jocky Campbell, wee Jocky Campbell. I’m fighting probably the English in the 17th or 18th century. We’re going to batter them in, I don’t know, a massive field.”
* The comments about the 2012 Olympic logo from Phil Mitchell from EastEnders (“Fuckin’ diabolical”) and Simon Cowell: “Seriously, it’s terrible. Give me 500 grand and I’ll give you ten better than that!” As the logo can provoke such fury in two of the figureheads of cultural abasement in the United Kingdom the emblem for 2012 becomes a more precious national monument than Stonehenge, while Cowell’s surly assumption that he can create anything other than musical gruel from the corpses of rotten swineherds epitomised his deluded arrogance.
* John Hurt’s crisp, sardonic reading from Peter Andre’s autobiography. “As I entered I caught sight of Vanessa Feltz who winked at me as if to say, ‘good on you’.”
* Jimmy Carr: “In August, Princess Diana’s memorial concert was held. People said, ‘It’s what she would have wanted’. I’m not sure she would have wanted a memorial concert at all.”
* Thom Yorke asking a question with such a maniacal grin he seemed to be taking a break from his seasonal lobotomy, and then emitting the sort of laugh that isn’t usually heard outside of packs of squabbling hyenas.
* Noel Fielding was much funnier last year, and is often someone whom you look forward to with relish on comedy panel shows. Russell Brand can be good, too. But here, it was perhaps that they had been given carte blanche to act as they pleased with no leash of discipline that ruined the show.

What was bad about it?
* Noel Fielding and Russell Brand giving up, and from then on concocting answers which had very little to do with the actual questions, all the while being encouraged by the indiscriminate adoration and twittering laughter of their teenage girl disciples in the audience.
* To the question of what Stephen Hawking did for his 60th birthday, the pair contributed: “He killed a priest with his mind!”
* Or for a picture of the ‘past-life regressing’ Eddie Large they said he was “subjugating Sid Little (sex wise)”.
* Or for the prostate cancer awareness advert which was unusual because it starred the late Bob Monkhouse they said that it instead starred “a talking dragon”.
* Russell Brand’s weary contention that the home secretary, the defence secretary etc aren’t really secretaries because they can’t type at 100wpm.
* But worst of all was when Noel Fielding turned into a human cliché, calling the bloke who helped foil the ‘terrorist attack’ on Glasgow airport “Braveheart” with all the sadistic conceit of ITV1 curling it’s finger around a rifle trigger as part of its role in the firing squad to exterminate originality.
* Lily Allen’s futile rant about how Radiohead’s In Rainbows internet release “sets a bad precedent for young musicians” who are hoping to have a career in music. It is s far better ‘example’ than stooges who emerge from the primordial quagmire of My Space with the full support of a multi-national record label’s marketing department and yet claim to have risen to the top because of ‘word of mouth’.
* Take That asked the teams a question as if they’d just learned to read that very morning, or not in the case of Mark Owen.
* Jonathan Ross’ suit looked as if it was made from a disused Norfolk railway station.
* Lily Allen’s smile played across her face capriciously like a rapidly eroding coastline occasionally bolstered by some do-gooder environmentalists searching for the secret of maps.
* David Mitchell furrowed his brow like a pair of rutting stags raised from their reverie of skimming through beauty magazines by an out of place Rubik’s Cube.
* Rob Brydon looked on the verge of being transformed into an argumentative golf course by Donald Trump.

2006
The Big Fat Christmas Quiz, Channel 4
Highlights
1 Host Jimmy Carr's jokes including "Cannabis changed from a Class B drug to Class C which was a nightmare for Scouse kids. They had to learn a new letter." "Dogging – you end up driving away in a car looking like a plasterer's radio." "Wayne Rooney broke his foot. He didn't mind too much because all the brothels he visits have a stairlift."
2 The competitiveness and campness of David Walliams, squabbling with his partner Rob Brydon
3 The victory for Jonathan Ross (we love) and June Sarpong (we also love)
4 "What do you do before you please a lady, David?" Before he could answer, Jonathan chipped in: "He goes to a cashpoint."
5 David and Rob talking about Parky (aimed at Jonathan) "He's a proper chat show host. He's interested in you, not just going on about himself all the time."
6 Jimmy Carr's question: "Do you think Ant & Dec have ever double teamed a lady?"
7 The suggested answers to the question, what did Michael Jackson tell a boy white wine was? Man juice, love piss, Pepsi Cola. The correct answer was Jesus Juice
8 Jonathan Ross – "Ant and Dec, a massive cock and that little bloke – what a brilliant night that would be."
9 Jonathan's ciabatta/Lesley Ash joke
10 Jonathan's impression of Nadia
11 Simon Pegg and Liza Tarbuck's surreal answers
12 The Neasden primary school re-enacting The Office's Golden Globes win and the art warehouse fire

2005
Big Fat Quiz Of The Year, Channel 4, Boxing Day
Did we like it?
We stopped watching after 45 minutes it was so bad.

What was good about it?
• Jonathan Ross, David Micthell, Rob Brydon and Denise Van Outen.
• Rob Brydon's Ronnie Corbett impression.
• Jon Snow's cryptic clues to the year's big pop hits

What was bad about it?
• Sharon Osbourne ruined the whole affair by being studpidly grand, being thick, being a show off, being there.
• Host Jimmy Carr's unremarkable jokes and aimless banter
• Gordon Ramsay's not a funny guy
• The format in which the teams had to write down their answers made it tedious
• Jimmy Carr telling Jordan and Peter Andre that they couldn't look more glamourous. Idiot. They couldn't have looked more chavvy, fake-tanned or appalling.

Big Fat Quiz Of The Year, Channel 4
Did we like it?
Those taking part certainly had a whale of a time, but we always struggled to get as much entertainment out of Jimmy Carr's quiz as they did.

What was good about it?
• David Walliams' prissy tantrums in his eagerness to win and remind us of his cross-channel swim. He was the funniest participant; his partner Rob Brydon was arguably the least funny.
• Jonathan Ross and Noel Fielding were both entertaining, and Noel came up with the best answer of the night. When asked to name the parts of the crocodile's anatomy consumed by Matt Willis on I'm A Celebrity, he suggested wine gums, envy and pieces of rainbow.
• The Neasden schoolkids returned from last year, acting out news stories of the year.
• Sir Ian McKellen reading out extracts from the autobiographies of Jade Goody and Kerry Katona with such eager sincerity that it underlined how facile these products are.
• Jon Snow's description of rock hits of the year in news story form.
• David Walliams telling Boy George that he'd enjoyed Matt Lucas's wedding because "you weren't there"

What was bad about it?
• Jimmy Carr was too indulgent with the appalling Russell Brand whose appeal still remains a mystery (is it, perchance, because he speaketh like a 17th-century dandy?). Carr did, however, come up with a great theory about Noel's parentage: "Rod Stewart made love to a raven."
• The quiz dragged on so much that some better written material would have come in handy to keep the entertainment levels up.
• David Walliams finishing bottom after some rigged scoring. When he got the final question wrong, he spat: "We're interested in the big issues not some chicken in a fucking tin."

My Dad’s The Prime Minister, BBC1

What was it about?
Sitcom based on life at 10 Downing Street with the Philips family.
What to say if you liked it
Fast-paced satire which shows funny side of running the country.
What to say if you didn’t like it.
Mildly amusing look at what it might be like in Downing Street at election time.

What was good about it?
• The PMs kids, played by Joe Prospero and Emma Sackville. We really loved her T-shirt with the legend ‘My other Barbie’s a crack whore’ and her catchphrase – "I'm doing my GCSEs. You can't expect me to be nice."
• The party political broadcast in which the PM was so desperate to "get down with the people" that he was seen dancing with a clone in a gay club
• The scene of horror that erupted in the PM's imagination whenever the spin doctor recommended he play "the family card"
• Mrs Philips (Carla Mendonca) teasing her husband about whether she was going to vote for him.
• Thelma Barlow (Mavis in Coronation Street) did a good turn, with a Brummie accent, as a pensioner trying to get to her hospital appointment which resulted in horrific press coverage (Oldladygate).

What was bad about it?
• Please stop using these bloody awful audience laughter tracks – was this one recorded at the funny farm?
• Some of the jokes were a bit contrived and it was halfway through the show by the time we got our first real laugh.
• Robert Bathurst looked uncomfortable and a bit flat for the most part. We’ll have to wait and see whether it picks up in future episodes.

Eight Of Out Ten Cats, Channel 4

Eight Out Of Ten Cats: Big Brother Special, Channel 4, Thursday 30 August 2007
Did we like it?
Depends on your own perspective. On the plus side, four educated wits mock a bunch of self-serving idiots; on the negative side, four sneering bullies use emotionally stunted morons as verbal punchbags.

What was good about it?
• Jimmy Carr: “Sadly, Shanessa couldn’t be with us – because we didn’t invite her.”
• Jimmy Carr: “Initially 11 women went into the house, and then Ziggy joined them – making a total of 12 twats.”
• Jimmy Carr: “Did you see Channelle back in the house?” Sean Lock: “Is she delivering pizzas already?” Rather predictable, but Lock’s dry delivery made it amusing.
• Jimmy Carr: “20% of Brits think that Charley should… do what?” Sean Lock: “Only communicate by post.”
• Charley became confused by the concept of brain surgery, and Carr suggested she should have a “cosmetic lobotomy”. “How much would it cost?” she asked. “I’ll pay for it!” quipped Carr.
• Billi, the sort of person who was granted the gift of life in the same way someone gets to keep a football when it is booted into their garden and the kids are too scared to ask for it back, finished a clear last in each of the polls about who from the assembled housemates you would like to perform brain surgery on you/ become your pub landlord/ and whose diary you would most like to read.
• This bit could either go here in the ‘good’ section because it was quite funny or in the ‘bad’ section for the merciless mockery of Charley’ cultural ignorance and the general University Challenge snobbery. But because it is her it’s ‘good’. Danny Wallace: “I’d love to see how long it would take for Charley to get into an argument with Ghandi.” Charley: “Who’s Ghandi?” Wallace: “Brilliant!”

What was bad about it?
• In his intro, Carr referred to the 24 housemates who had been part of Big Brother 8. With 18 of them already out of the house and with only one a pariah on a par with a child murderer, there were 17 to choose from to make up the six person Big Brother panel. So why was it necessary to reach back into the distant and largely forgotten past to retrieve Nicki, Lea and likeable goofball Eugene?
• Jimmy Carr: “I don’t like to think of there being winners and losers in Big Brother – they’re all losers.”
• Rotund comic Jason Manford: “Everyone describes Laura as ‘bubbly’ – that’s because she eats too many Aeros.”
• Charley is now too aware of her catchphrase “I’m not being funny”, and too often because her atrocious acting skills it was apparent she was deliberately pre-fixing her words in order to give Carr and the rest a goldmine of (weak) gags, dragging “I’m not being funny” in front of her sentences with all the calculated menace of an unscrupulous car clamper boxing in an unmindful motorist.
• Shabnam laughing hysterically whenever someone insulted her, or she was at least edited to look that way.
• Dull Nicki.

Highlights
• Jimmy Carr – "The title Big Brother is inspired by George Orwell's novel 1984 but this year's casting was inspired by Animal Farm."
• Clips of the most-talked about moment from BB6 – Craig's unrequited love for AnTHony, with the hairdressing horror pawing away at the vomiting Geordie. Craig, we learned, is one of the 17 per cent of BB contestants who are hairdressers.
• Science being told that 10 per cent of Big Brother viewers think that Science is a silly name. He tried to rescue his dignity by breaking into one of his awful raps that make the average greeting card verse seem like a great work of poetry.
• Sean Lock suggesting that 34 per cent of BB contestants go back to Asda after they leave the house. The correct answer: they lose weight.
• Jimmy Carr – "Nadia's post-Big Brother diet was extreme. She cut out all meat and two veg."
• Dave Spikey envisaging how Jade Goody would fare on Mastermind. "You've passed on all 22 questions. The answer to question one was Jade."
• Jade proving how thick she is. Commenting on Craig creeping around AnTHony: "If that was a man and a woman, that would be called sexily harassment." Commenting on the suggestion that President Bush is more stupid than her, she said: "I don't know who these people all are."
Lowlights
• Clips of the third most-talked about moment from BB6 – Kinga The Bottle Bank aka Kinga The Novelty Wine Rack
• Clips of the second most-talked about moment from BB6 – the hot tub orgy when Makosi "fell pregnant".
• Science claiming he and Maxwell are "strong characters, strong personalities." No. You are both big-mouthed losers.
• The sight of Maxwell and Victor in stupid hats; Michelle in a stupid face; Kemal in a stupid haircut.
• The not-worth-the-fee appearances by Liza Tarbuck and Jeremy Edwards

Eight Out of Ten Cats, Channel 4
What to say of you liked it
A fabulously irreverent take on the comedy quiz show format that adds a distinct voice to the choir of quintessentially quality Friday night TV feasts.
What to say of you didn’t like it
If comedy quiz shows were organs in the human body, Have I Got News For You would be the vibrant heart, QI the buzzing brain and 29 Minutes of Fame the oozing foot sores, then this is the empty, wizened testicles sympathetically eyed by a doctor armed with a pair of bolt cutters.

What was good about it?
• The shameless pilfering from successful shows as inspiration for the rounds. The first round was a list of the most talked about topics of the past seven days a la Family Fortunes, while the Poll With A Hole section was essentially HIGNFY’s Missing Words round renamed.
• The panel, comprised of Dave Spikey, Sean Lock, Mel Giedroyc, Lee Mack, Simon Amstell and Richard Madeley, were a good mix and all made amusing contributions. Admittedly, Madeley’s seemed to have been fed to him prior to the recording, but he got the timing right.
• It was much, much better than the disastrous 29 Minutes Of Fame and there was no dead(Jason)Wood. Also, Sean Lock was able to achieve redemption and prove he is a genuinely funny bloke. In fact, going by our current exchange rate between Comedy Quiz Shows we’d swap one Eight Out of Ten Cats for three 29 Minutes and the whole series of Space Cadets (still the fathomless nadir of the genre), but only half a QI.
• Jimmy Carr was a slick host, but his impromptu wit appeared to be constricted by his role and the best gags all came from the panellists.
• Simon Amstell and Sean Lock were the pick of the panellists. Amstell made a series of sporadic quips such as: “My brother had one of those black and white anti-racist wristbands. But the black one fell off, so he’s now a racist.” And in answer to the question: Seven per cent of kids don’t know how …? “The correct way to prepare crack?”
• Lock’s best gag was when he explained why he was a lapsed Catholic. “I was at confession, and I thought hold on a minute. I’m in a little wooden room telling dirty stories to an Irishman who’s never had sex. I thought ‘It’s bollocks, this.’” Although he almost trumped that remark with his guess at the Most Frequently Told Lie (“I won’t come on your cat”).

What was bad about it?
• The introduction was done with an American accent. It’s bad enough that films are trailed with Yankee tones to suggest the UK market isn’t important enough to bother re-dubbing for or to award the product (or should that be “pro-duct”) a specious global
authenticity, but for the festering practice to spread onto British TV shows is an infection that quickly needs to be cleansed, preferably by tossing the offenders in an acid bath.
• The opening exchanges between Jimmy Carr and Sean Lock were the kind of stilted dialogue you would expect from regional theatre actors and as a consequence, much of the humour was stripped from the first five minutes.
• Jimmy Carr’s joke. “It’s been claimed that the Make Poverty History wristbands are made by children in China. But they may not be children as they are a lot shorter over there.” While questionable in taste, the worst crime was that it simply wasn’t funny.

Mumbai Calling, ITV1

Wednesday 31 May 2007
Did we like it?
This was a very promising start for this brand new ITV sitcom. Now there's a sentence we never envisaged writing in our lifetime. Based in a Mumbai call centre, it was an enjoyable half-an-hour, with much thanks to the wonderful Sanjeev Bhaskar. This man can do no wrong.

What was good about it?
• Blimey, there were some laughs, many of the characters were not caucasian and, but for one brief lapse, there weren't any unnecessary celebrities involved. We had to check three times to make sure this really was an ITV sitcom.
• There were some tried-and-tested Goodness Gracious Me-style lines in there, where characters awkwardly tried too hard to hide latent prejudice, which we enjoyed, although one or two were a bit too obvious. "I'm going to send you back where you came from," threatened Ken Gupta's (Bhaskar) boss. "Wembley?" he replied, perplexed. We can easily forgive that, though, because the first episode of a sitcom has to be one of the hardest things to execute perfectly and everything is almost necessarily heavy-handed.
• We also enjoyed the Family Guy-style flashbacks, which were not only funny but were a decent way of showing a little back story to the characters. For example, we were shown how Daddy's girl Tiffany, miffed at not being allowed to work, was given her first job by her Dad - as a paper-girl driven to the front door of every house by a chauffeur.
• Tiffany, cousin Anthony and Ken were all sent to sort out a struggling call centre in Mumbai. Once there they met with smooth and unscrupulous Dev, who was enjoyably over the top and had one or two good lines. When intorduced to Tiffany he replied: "Like the breakfast, isn't it?"
• There were some nicely judged lines from the call centre staff as well, "I'm a Watford fan too, sir," lied one.
• Dev calling Ken 'Son of an owl'.
• Ken claiming everything was to be done by the book from now on: "We'll log all calls, problems will be referred to as challenges - everything."

What was bad about it?
• Twiggy's cameo was awful. She's bad enough on America's Next Top Model but she was dreadful here, and pointless. We hope this isn't a theme whereby every week a 'celebrity' will make a cameo call to the call centre.
• While Dev's character was nicely exaggerated and quite fun, layabout thick-o Anthony was just irritating, like a cheap knock-off of Daphne's tiresome 'English' cousin in one of Frasier's rare moments of miscalculation. Hopefully his character will calm down as the series progresses.
• The fact that ITV had to announce at the end of the show that the hapless flood hotline featured in the programme ("Don't worry, madam, it's only an emergency") was fictional and nothing like the real flood hotline in the UK. Thanks for that.

Lenny’s Britain, BBC1

Tuesday 12 June 2007
Did we like it?
The BBC seems to be spending more time trying to analyse comedy (the Dawn French series, Comedy Connections, The Comedy Map of Britain etc) than producing decent examples of the stuff. And this four-parter is a complete waste of time. Lenny is lacking the lovability factor and there's no fun to be had from watching most ordinary people telling bad jokes

What was good about it?
• Some of the Midlanders were amusing – and not just those Amy Turtle-like accents

What was bad about it?
• Lenny's style of mixing Open University lecturing with buffoonery in silly voices.
• The pointlessness of the exercise. "What makes us laugh and where does our sense of humour come from?" Lenny asked. We weren't much the wiser afterwards. It seems that every single bloody thing makes Lenny laugh. Even himself!
• Padding the programme out with contributions from a “joke booth” which was set up in locations around the land as a recycling bin for old jokes.

Touch Me, I'm Karen Taylor, BBC3,

Monday 10 June 2007
Did we like it?
It wasn't bad. All sketch shows are hit and miss, just as all sitcoms have good and bad jokes in them. It could have done with a mite more polish but overall it was an enjoyably silly half an hour.

What was good about it?
• Probably the best sketch idea was the Cash Cow series, which was a parody of those rip-off phone-in-and-win-cash digital channels that newspapers like to wring their hands about because they exploit the stupid. With her hoiked-up breasts and winning smile, Karen played the part well, although we felt the sketches lost their agreeable subtlety as she became more infuriated by the idiotic callers. The first caller trying to guess the famous phrase “The …”. was Daryl who had been tagged for “setting fire to my nan’s dog”, whose guess was “The… pirates.” Other guesses included “R Kelly” and “The R Kelly”, before at 5am she finally revealed the answer was “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”. She then set up the next famous phrase which was “A …”
• We also liked the innovative MySpace parody, delightfully and correctly signposted as MeMeMespace. This was realised well despite the obvious difficulties of putting a website on a sketch show.
• Some of Karen's bawdier lines that were there to shock did their job. Coming out of the shower after cheerleader practice she commented: "I love a good shower. Best piss of the day."
• The lonely, sex-starved, inappropriate teacher was good as well, lusting after her male teenage pupils, demanding that the hunkiest ones strip to the waist, and victimising the prettier females.

What was bad about it?
• We found this opening show rather muddled. From the awkward, stilted opening where Karen seemed to read clumsily from an autocue in the gym of her old school, to a cheerleading sequence at the end, we couldn't quite understand why she was back at school in the first place. Although it did afford Karen the chance to squeeze into an Ann Summers nurse's uniform.
• There were far too many groaningly predictable punchlines, from Karen having an internal examination and then telling the doctor it was the closest she'd been to sex in ages, to the American football player walking into the changing rooms looking all hunky, only to emerge as a skinny bloke (all that padding, you see), to the character who claimed not to miss her ex, but wore a T-shirt with his face on it.
• The weird sketch where Karen left her baby in a cafe and walked out drinking a can of beer.
• The bad-taste undertaker who kept making jokes about the death of a woman's husband. We like bad taste. This just wasn't funny. (Actually there's mixed feelings at thecustard.tv about this. Some of us loved it)
• Overall it was a decent show, but sometimes it was rather derivative and
when it did try to be original it just ended up being puzzling instead.

Would I Lie To You?, BBC1

Would I Lie To You?, BBC1, Saturday 16 June 2007/8 Out Of 10 Cats, Channel 4, Friday 15 June 2007
Did we like it?
These comedy panel games are diverting enough, but the proliferation of the genre means they're no longer must-see TV programmes (apart from Have I Got News For You).

What was good about them?
• Three out of the four team captains: David Mitchell (surreal and posh) and Lee Mack (wisecracker) on the BBC1 show and Sean Lock (surreal and common) on C4. We're reserving judgment on Jason Manford, who has replaced the rather repetitive Dave Spikey. We've seen Jason on a few shows and he's yet to raise much of a laugh. But he's young (and northern) so maybe he'll develop.
• Lee's opinion of David as an old fuddy-duddy who wouldn't have possible gone to see Kill Bill (he has and was mightily offended at the suggestion that he hadn't).David was also a young fuddy-duddy, it seems. "Aged five I wrote to Playschool to suggest how they could resolve a union dispute," he confessed.
• The 8 Out Of 10 Cats format (slightly tweaked on this fifth series) still has mileage – but we think we may soon tire of WILTY (appropriate acronym!), which is like Call My Bluff with bits of trivia replacing obscure words.
• The best of the guests was Frankie Boyle on WILTY; Dom Joly on the same show wasn't bad (and managed to conceal the truth that he'd been at the same school as Osama Bin Laden), and Johnny Vegas was on form.
• The sexiest of the guests was Danny Dyer, all in white, ladding it up, and always welcome on our screens.

What was bad about them?
• Hosts Angus Deayton and Jimmy Carr have become predictable. You can guess their jokes in advance and their acts of irritability and schoolmasterliness seem very staged these days.
• The 'civilian' guests only rarely work. Natalie Cassidy annoys us; Duncan Bannatyne worked as the butt of a few good jokes (mainly about his ban on buying paper clips and his accent "I'll be honest, I'm getting every other word," said Lee); and the horrible
Katie Hopkins has learned nothing from the media ridicule she's received, carrying on like the snooty cow we loved to hate on The Apprentice. Poor Sean Lock, it seems, is forever doomed to have a nonentity beside him.

Pulling, BBC3

Did we like it?
The opener to this comedy starring Sharon Horgan was too dark to be enjoyable: there was so much pain. But there were enough funny lines to make it worth sticking with, especially as Horgan's Donna has dumped her dull fiancé and good times are ahead in Penge. Maybe.

What was good about it?
• It was brave to open up with such miserable black comedy, as Donna realised it was not a brilliant idea to marry the dull Karl (Cavan Clerkin), who we first encountered being masturbated by a bored Donna (who didn't realise when he'd finished) and cleaning himself up with a leaf from the cheeseplant.
• Donna's wonderful hen-night. Crazy friends Karen and Louise had suggested a spit roast with Jamal and Kevin, but Donna went ahead with awful matron-of-honour/baby bore Tanya's night at the bingo.
• When timid pal Karen (Tanya Franks) tells Donna that Karl is dependable, rough old Louise (Rebekah Staton) interjects: "Terry Wogan's dependable but you wouldn't want him blowing his muck inside you every night."
• The pre-wedding meal at Jumpin' Joes, somewhat wrecked by the announcement that the wedding was off. Mouthy mother-in-law Margaret, armed with bread rolls, pursues a fleeing Donna outside. "My son has more dignity than..." she roars, just as Karl comes crawling out on his knees. One of the many marvellous cringeworthy moments in the show.
• Donna's decision to move in with Karen and Louise in their "spare room... aka the shit room."

What was bad about it?
• The grim picture of relationships and friendships.
• Generally, Pulling was inventive and fresh but there was still a slight reliance on Victoria Woodyish lines such as "There's a salad bar – with croutons."

News Knight With Sir Trevor McDonald, ITV

Sunday 24 June 2007
Did we like it?
Like the emergency services preparing for a the touchdown of a crippled passenger jet spluttering its way on to the runway on half an engine, we really did fear the worst. But thanks to Marcus Brigstocke and an acknowledgment that Sir Trevor has the comic timing of a breeze block it was quite amusing. In parts.

What was good about it?
• The National Television Awards have hammered home the point, year after year, that Sir Trevor cannot tell jokes or inject spontaneous humour into scripted witticisms; a flaw exacerbated by the fact that three professional comedians were sat to his left. However, what he can do is act like a stooge in the same way Boris Johnson in one of his thankfully sporadic outings as guest host of Have I Got News For You.
• Like Johnson, Sir Trevor is given ludicrous statements to read out in his flat delivery such as “I can’t remember the last time I went to Glastonbury, but that’s mushrooms for you.” If it was read out by someone who wasn’t a conservative member of the British establishment, for instance Jonathan Ross, it wouldn’t be funny as the link between memory loss and mushrooms is too predictable. The humour is gleaned from the unexpectedness of the orator in the same way as it would be just as funny had the Queen said it.
• Marcus Brigstocke delivers most of the funny lines fulfilling a similar role to that which he did on What’s The Problem? With Anne Robinson, with the crucial difference being Sir Trevor’s willingness to play the stooge and not attempt to measure his wit against a comedian. Brigstocke is also much closer to the host, unlike with What’s The Problem?, when the Moon was in nearer orbit to the Earth than he was to Anne Robinson.
• After Sir Trevor was referred to as Mr T, Brigstocke quipped: “If anyone offers you milk and you wake up on a plane…”
• Reginald D Hunter’s envy of the debauched delights he thought had come Salman Rushdie’s way when the Fatwa was placed on him in the mid-80s. “I want a Fatwa,” raged Hunter. “I’m going to write me a book called ‘Allah, The Qur’an And Your Momma’!”
• And on the same subject, Brigstocke noted that he was “going to Islamabad and opening a flag and match shop”.
• The only time Trevor appeared to be anything more than a comedy dummy resting on a ventriloquist’s knee was in his vilification of Bernard Manning. “I never thought of Bernard Manning as a racist comic,” he began, “just a fat, white bastard.”

What was bad about it?
• Boris Johnson’s turns on HIGNFY work because of their infrequency and the novelty of having a clueless buffoon present a quiz show notorious for its slickness and humour. It’s possible Sir Trevor’s ineptitude in comic delivery will soon become a joke that wears very thin as his practised stiltedness becomes more and more transparent until he simply degrades to the bad presenter he is at the National Television Awards which he hosts as a virtue of being the last rotting totem pole of ITV’s integrity.
• Another fault is that New Knight brazenly pilfers ideas from other shows, but suffers in comparison when they aren’t as good. The HIGFY trait of applying a topical news story to an unrelated bit of film is done with particular clumsiness. Film of two ITV regional newscasters talking about rats is claimed to represent media opinion on the latest Big Brother housemates was a trite, outdated and predictable barb.
• Similarly, Sir Trevor’s contrived naivety as host can mean that potentially funny gags are ruined. The best example came in the ‘Gay or blind’ segment in which an American newscaster lauded the achievements of a man conquering a mountain peak “even though he is gay… sorry I meant blind”. Imagine how much wittier this would have been in the hands of Harry Hill.
• The ham-fisted effort to make it seem as though David Cameron was rolling up a joint. Firstly, the hands pasted on to the film were out of proportion to Cameron’s body and that whole joke is about two years old.
• Sir Trevor: “My top three news stories…” Ripped off from Eight Out of Ten Cats.
• The abysmal film quality of some of the footage. They seemed to have either been downloaded from YouTube to save on costs or were last broadcast around the same time Sir Trevor appeared on TISWAS.
• Transposing Tony Blair on to Britain’s Got Talent for his premiership to be lambasted by the judging panel suffered because there are few people in the country with no right to sit in moral judgement on Blair, and two of those people are Piers Morgan and Simon Cowell, both parasites who make tapeworms seem like St Francis of Assisi. Amanda Holden’s comments were as colourless and drab as usual.

Sensitive Skin, BBC2

Thursday 10 Novmber 2005
What to say if you liked it
A painstakingly realised drama that lays bare the casual crumbling of vibrant middle-age into the archaic angst of being a pensioner.
What to say if you didn’t like it
A void of a drama whose subtleties merely mask a yawning chasm of tepidity and narrative.

What was good about it?
• The cast. Essentially only three people, Davina (Joanna Lumley), Al (Dennis Lawson) and Orlando (James Lance), but each is superbly intimately sketched that they became near-icons after the first episode.
• Davina’s anxiety over growing old were stamped in the opening scene when her doctor outlined the crippling conditions associated with HRT. But her concern was only with the sole benefit – that it keeps her “looking younger”.
• Al and Davina’s sterile apartment, with its grey-washed walls, sparse décor. The visiting Orlando complained that the flat ideally suited him, and it would do just that – it was a parody of a young entrepreneur’s dream home (leaving aside the fact that entrepreneurs don’t dream), and so lifeless that even a ghost wouldn’t haunt it.
• Al’s frenetic personality contrasted well with the icier Davina. He was irascible with his son Orlando; vengeful when he went to the library purposefully to read the terrible reviews of a rival journalist’s new book cackling falsely at the literary bile; but epileptically contrite when he accidentally knocked down the local drug dealer.
• Meanwhile, Orlando, 33, has been mollycoddled by his parents and is aggravated that their decision to sell the home he grew up in for their apartment has finally cut the parental umbilical cord. Recovering after his girlfriend dumped him for being impotent, he spitefully demands that Al cares for his dog William – condemning him to be a parent, of sorts, once more.
• When Al and Davina joke about her braving the dangers of travelling on the underground, such as terrorists and muggers, she quips she “rather fancied” herself “as Purdey Hurst”.
• Even the human manifestation of Davina’s frustration as a, grouchy, grizzled admiral (played by Feddie Davies), representative of the moment she realised she would never marry Robert Redford, worked because of the matter-of-fact mood of the whole tale.
• The dislocation evident between Al and Davina when she emerged from the hairdressers, and tried in vain to keep it from blowing in the wind, while Al absently tried to hail a cab.
• The crushing mediocrity of middle-aged, middle-class suburban homes exemplified through Davina and Al’s visit to her sister. Her sister sat quaintly on the sofa, tea cup and saucer in hand, as if she had been there for all eternity, whilst her husband tried to impress Al with his terrible new compositions on his electric piano.
• The dog spinning in circles after inhaling cocaine.

What was bad about it?
• The mournful piano which punctuated the story, often heralding one of the protagonists moping around in a veil of self-pity.
• The rather obvious joke about the irritating cellophane on CDs

The Thick Of It, BBC4

Tuesday 3 July 2007
Did we like it?
Perhaps it’s because we’re sick of prime ministerial political posturing, but while this episode was good it lacked the chilling momentum of usual, and flaws such as plot recycling, unrealistic dialogue and irritating characters punched through the TV screen.

What was good about it?
• Peter Capaldi’s central performance as the heinous Malcolm Tucker is still as hypnotic and hilarious as ever. As the numerous MPs jostled for the right to succeed the departing PM, Malcolm manipulated them – and everybody else so that he ultimately kept his place in the political food chain, even rising a few places.
• Initially fearing he was left out of the interior loop at No 10, Malcolm got Ollie to get his rival Nick to betray Tom, the favourite for the role of PM, in favour of a ‘safe’ backbencher. But once she had been frogmarched into the office of the hapless Ben, she revealed to Jamie that she had an addiction to online gambling, which was greeted with groans of dismay from everyone – except the smirking Malcolm.
• His overarching ploy was to set Tom up as PM, but to ensure that he was better placed than Nick to be in the loop by threatening to disclose Nick’s treason in switching allegiances. The only other matter was to intimidate the Daily Mail night editor into not printing a story about Tom’s addiction to painkillers and Malcolm had transferred his preponderate power to the throne of a new king.
• When the timid Robyn meekly voiced her concerns about working with Jamie to Malcolm as she found him “a little bit frightening”, he reassured her with: “Jamie has never hit anyone. Or anyone he has hit hasn’t had the balls to take it to a superior.”
• Glenn’s nervous breakdown after he was scorned by Malcolm, Jamie and Ollie, with the final straw being when the absent Hugh asked to speak to Ollie and not him. He staggered over to his desk, picked up his papers and screamed, “I am a maaaan. I’m not irrelevant, I’m not irrelevant, I’m not irrelevant.” He as calmed by Robyn and Terri before Malcolm sneeringly called him into action for the denouement of his plot to keep his hands clasped about the neck of political power.
• Julius, the Peter Mandelson figure, who had the old PM’s ear but was fighting in his own placid way to retain his permit to march down the corridors of power. Julius spent much of the fraught evening listening to the test match on the radio with the alienated Glenn, and his calm malice contrasted with the raging whirlwinds of Malcolm and Jamie.
• After Ben insults a cleaner who is appalled at the mess in Julius’s office, she says she will sell her story to the News of the World. Malcolm is forced to appease her, but in the end may have encouraged her to sell her story to discredit the inept Ben, who he had lined up as a potential leader should his plot fail.

What was bad about it?
• The disparate plotlines seemed over familiar – we’ve already seen Ollie mess up his girlfriend’s job with a deluge of disinformation before, while Jamie, riotous on his first appearance when he was even more brutal than Malcolm, was reduced to little more than a portable profanity machine nicked from Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant.
• Naïve little Ollie who was the viewers doorway into the vicious world of politics has become as corrupt and morally debauched as the worst of them. And while this is perhaps a logical character progression and Chris Addison is as convincing as ever, he has become extremely irritating.
• Usually The Thick of It is swept along by a tsunami of witticisms and Machiavellian antics that we don’t tend to notice the very tiny flaws. Perhaps its momentum has slowed to a curdled inertia or maybe it is simply more flawed than usual, but we neither laughed as much as in previous episodes nor did we marvel at the backbiting and backstabbing.
• Whereas the swearing was once an illiterate, primal substitute for more calculated language ejaculated by incandescent feral hairless apes, here it appeared that all the calculation was in the swearing and where once you could join the dots to empathise with the frustration of Jamie, Ollie et al, here it seemed to be profanities because they had nothing interesting to say.
• And this dissatisfaction with the dialogue carried over into the one-liners. Malcolm’s once more seemed to have been improvised from the monstrous maelstrom of his swirling fury, but others seemed to express themselves far too wittily. Jamie’s vocabulary is like a goat tightly tethered to the word ‘fuck’, yet he came out with two lines that were inherently funny, yet oddly didn’t even raise a smile because they seemed to be intruders from another sitcom – “There are shades of grey,” protested dull MP Cliff. “I’m looking at about 15 shades of it,” snarled Jamie. And when berating Terri for leaking his deception to Malcolm he barked: “You’re about as secure as a hymen in a south London comprehensive!”

Fonejacker, E4

Thursday 5 July 2007
Did we like it?
Fonejack (verb): to seize control of a telephone conversation by farce esp. to divert it from reason and logic. That was the definition in the title credits, and to be fair, that was exactly what happened. This year’s Trigger Happy TV, it was essentially a spoof call show, enlivened by clever use of ‘guerilla’ type graphics and a wide-ranging remit of calls. Shops, restaurants, directory enquiries and private citizens all became victims of the Fonejacker. It was funny enough to prompt a repeat viewing, but we can’t imagine it lasting more than a series.

Good calls?
• There was an over-reliance on a foreign gentlemen who mispronounced acronyms – but the reactions he got from Directory Enquiries when requesting the number of ‘Duhfs’ (aka DFS) and a tv repair shop when discussing his broken ‘Voosra’ (aka VCR) justified this fairly obvious starter.
• Terry Tibbs, a cross between Harold Steptoe and Swiss Tony, was the most well constructed and thought out character. His running rings round a guy who was trying to sell a Maserati was the highlight.
• The thumbless man trying to buy a voice-activated mobile phone from a Carphone Warehouse employee.
• The spoof estate agent which was using a voice-recognition system to enable people to specify the type of property and the area that wished to live in had us wincing in recognition as the deliberately misheard details sent the caller round and round in a spiral of frustration.

Bad calls?
• The Ugandan bank official trying to elicit people’s bank details was a poor replica of the Nigerian 419 email scam that we’ve all been sent. And unsurprisingly, nobody bit.

The Big Impression, BBC1

The Big Impression 2004 Christmas Special, BBC1
Highlights
1 Dirty Den and Little Mo in EastEnders, realising the episode was just going to be a double hander. "I hate them," Mo said. "We'll have to indulge in some sub-Pinteresque dialogue instead of the way we normally talk."
2 Richard Madeley's hatred of Christmas. On I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday – "They haven't thought it through." On playing parlour games – "Imagine playing silly little guessing games every day."
3 Jennifer Saunders bashing out the script of the French & Saunders show ("We're just finishing it") with Alastair McGowan as Dawn French being Alastair McGowan
4 Posh and Becks discuss her pregnancy with an unintelligible Parkinson. "I love being pregnant. I just eat. As David says, I'm eating for one now."
5 Kelly Holmes being interviewed on Lorraine Today ("Lorraine and Kelly!) and being regarded as a flop for not being a gallant loser
Lowlights
1 Alan Titchmarsh: the real thing is boring and so was the impression
2 The Making Of Bridget Jones with Colin Firth (we thought it was supposed to be Hugh Grant for most of the sketch) and Renee Zellweger
3 Ronnie Ancona's Kerry Katona
4 Vernon Kay hosting reality show Scraping The Barrel (although the Raj Persaud impression was spot on)
5 The overlong Wizard Of Oz parody featuring Dot Cotton, Sven, Jordan, Ozzy, Michael Winner and Ruby Wax (although we loved Barbara Windsor as a munchkin)

Rich Hall BBC4 specials

Rich Hall’s Cattle Drive, BBC4, Thursday 12 January 2006
Did we like it?
An unusual comedy which was odder than it was funny, but one to watch again now the characters have been bedded in.

What was good about it?
• Rich Hall as both himself, and deranged animal rights activist U Horst Nightmare, and Mike Wilmot as Rich’s hapless flatmate.
• The acerbic social commentary which although at times sounded like the Daily Mail was funny and sharp enough to make its point. The most amusing instance was when Rich and Mike’s flat was being burgled but Mike’s efforts to tackle the thief were thwarted by his insistence that as long as he was running away from Mike, he couldn’t be restrained or it would constitute an assault.
• Rich: “What sort of robber would rob a place called Bleak House? For Leonard Cohen albums?”
• When Rich and Mike are arrested for pinning the burglar to the ground, their solicitor reveals he is a property solicitor and not qualified to deal with criminal cases but could conduct a survey of the police station and offer a fair valuation.
• As the fugitive Rich and Mike make camp in the desolate wastelands of Berkshire, Mike hears Rich ask him if he has any secrets. He does, and recounts a tale of how at 12-years-old he was subjected to the lewd advances of an uncle. A bemused Rich replies “I asked you if you had any ‘cigarettes’, not ‘secrets’.”

What was bad about it?
• The budget seems to be that of a CBBC drama. Plenty of cheap closed off sets that weren’t being used to film the new series of Kerr-ching!, and scenes that appear to have been shot in a single take.

Rich Hall’s Election Special, BBC4
What was it about?
Rich Hall and mate (Canadian comic Mike Wilmot) go native in Montana to see what the locals are up to at election time.
What to say if you liked it.
An offbeat look at what the American election’s really about. Guns, guns, guns… and a bit about education.
What to say if you didn’t like it.
Who cares what a bunch of boring rednecks think?

What was good about it?
• The ‘thinkin’ fellas’ union’ – Hall’s idea of a get together in a log cabin to talk politics and ‘drink a shitload of bourbon.’
• Using an alter ego – local radio ‘shock jock’ Wayman Tisdale – the kind of bloke who makes Rush Limbaugh look like a softie.
• Margot Kidder (Lois Lane) as the local teacher. ‘If Bush wins again, we’re fucked. We’re all fucked – for the rest of our lives.’
• Mike goes shopping. ‘Easy Cheese, cheese and aerosol. It’s what made this country great.’

What was bad about it?
• It was a bit long and although it promised plenty of laughs at the beginning, it got bogged down.
• The constant rowing between Hall and Wilmot started to grate after a while, as did the increased swearing as the show went on.
• The fact that it was quicker to buy a gun in a shop than get a drink in a bar – not the programme’s fault – but that’s bad.

The Keith Barret Show, BBC2

The Keith Barret Show: Ulrika Jonsson and Lance Gerard-Wright, BBC2
1. Keith: “Lance, you once worked for Fergie.” Lance: “Yes, the Duchess of York.” Keith: “Well, of course. Who’d want to hang out with a football manager? (Looks aghast at Ulrika). I’m sorry, I’ve done it again.”
2. Keith: “I usually ask my guests where they met, but we all know you two met on TV. Lance, what was your gladiator name?”
3. On the subject of Santa Claus, Keith said: “I went into my little smashers’ bedroom at Christmas and on the pillow was a lovely note that said: ‘My brother doesn’t believe in you, but I still do’. I turned it over and it was addressed to me.”
4. Keith: “Ulrika, this could be the first show where you don’t marry someone.”
5. After Keith’s eulogy to Ulrika’s beauty had drawn muted audience applause: “Don’t worry we can dub something on it. We’ll go down to the archives and pull out ‘Wembley Crowd’.”

The Keith Barret Show: Richard Whiteley and Kathy Apanowicz, BBC2
1 Keith doing a digging-a-hole mime as Richard Whiteley talked about the first time he saw partner Kathy Apanowicz – she was an eight-year-old on Junior Showtime.
2 Richard and Kathy revealing their Sunday morning bed game: guessing who'll be reviewing the papers on Breakfast With Frost
3 Keith's disgust when an audience member asked the couple: "Would you ever consider a menage a trois with Carol Vorderman?"
4 Keith's conundrum game
5 Richard banging on about Giggleswick School while Keith and Kathy ignored him

Johnny Vegas: 18 Stones Of Idiot, Channel 4

What to say if you like it
Johnny Vegas gets his own primetime show and grabs the opportunity by the scruff of the neck, shakes it around a few times and belches in its face for good measure before delivering on his promise: "I'm giving you back the TV that you've been denied."
What to say if you dislike it
18 minutes of idiocy and about 40 minutes of self indulgence

What was good about it?
• The title sequence with Johnny as a cowboy, riding from the mean streets of St Helens to "that London".
• Johnny spitting in disgust at the thought that he'd be perceived as a TV presenter.
• Ray Winstone's guest appearance. "You were born in the East End, how come you became a poofy actor?" Johnny asked. "Do you ever stick your finger up your ask while having a wank?" asked an audience member (although Johnny admitted the question had been devised by a "little researcher gobshite")
• Johnny pulling out his earpiece and screaming at the producer when instructed to wind up the interview with Ray
• Johnny on the toilet while being slagged off by an angry baboon perched on the toilet roll holder
• Johnny's Deluxe Hamper of prizes (a plastic bag containing a Birds Of A Feather DVD, fags and booze)
• Pro-Celebrity Lock In, a reality show spoof (with its own Diarrhoea Room) in which Johnny got drunk with Terry Nutkins, Keith Barron, Rustie Lee, Martin Offiah, Ro-Land from Grange Hill, Angus Barnett (who?), Timmy Mallett and Roger de Courcey & Nookie at Camden's The Good Mixer dive.
• Johnny's death defying leap on a chopper bike over a prone, nervous Ray Winstone

What was bad about it?
• Johnny ruining Sing A Song while being beaten by dancing girls plucked from a northern poorhouse
• Johnny's ranting and self pity becomes too much to take after an hour
• TV Democracy, an item no better than Noel Edmonds' grunge tank, in which Neil Hamilton (yes, him again) had to dance for fish.
• The dull item involving shopping TV presenter Nick Davies, "the man who could sell Abi Titmuss dignity" who attempted to turn Johnny into "a doctor of shopping, qualified to prescribe savings."
• The Jerry Springer/Trisha spoof called Beef & Gravy

The IT Crowd, Channel 4

The IT Crowd, Channel 4, Friday 3 February 2006
Did we like it?
It was like watching a trial of an exceptionally promising young footballer who has bags of natural talent but is prone to the odd bout of inconsistency. While offering sporadic flashes of brilliance now, if properly nurtured he could be a star of the future.

What was good about it?
• Usually when a show is hugely derivative of a classic, it’s a bad thing. But in the IT Crowd’s case, we’re willing to mostly make an exception because: a) Writer Graham Linehan actually (co-)wrote Father Ted; and b) Any show that even partially apes Father Ted is worth watching because Father Ted is one of the greatest programmes in TV history, and certainly the funniest.
• The scenario duplicates Father Ted with three social misfits exiled to a cold and lonely wasteland (Craggy Island and the IT department in the dilapidated bowels of Reynholm Industries). And while Jen (Katherine Parkinson) is distinctive, Roy (Chris O’Dowd) is a Ted clone, and Moss (Richard Ayoade) is Dougal reincarnated (minus the charm, however).
• Roy, who acts as the protagonist, is at the same time aware of his pariah status and desperate to be accepted by the “normal” people upstairs, yet unconsciously lets himself down with his behaviour which condemns him to a life of servitude. In the second episode, he couldn’t help himself in wanting to have a go on a tranquil-natured scientist’s machine that illustrated how easy it was to induce stress, and ultimately caused the scientist to lose his temper and attack him.
• The inventive, surreal touches which at least indicated the potential of a great comedy. Such as when Roy exclaimed to Moss that their new boss Jen didn’t know anything about computers, Moss dropped his cup of tea in shock. Roy looked at him in dismay before Moss ambled over to another cup adding: “Oh don’t worry. That’s why I always make two cups of tea.”
• The credits at the end of episode one, which illustrated Roy and Moss’s journey to an Amsterdam fair with a pair of disenchanted prostitutes.
• Denham Reynholm (Chris Morris) exchange of gifts with a visiting Japanese chairman after a business deal had been struck. The Japanese gift was an oriental samurai sword, while Reynholm Industries furnished the visiting dignitary with a pair of Doctor Marten boots. As the chairman stomped about in his new boots, he accidentally trod on Jen’s already mangled feet and her expletive-ridden rebuke (censored by Denham’s minion pressing the profanity button) cost the firm the contract.

What was bad about it?
• The laughter track. Not since I’m Alan Partridge has there been such an unwelcome external intrusion into a comedy. In the first few minutes the “audience” laughed at a phone ringing. Why is this funny? It lingered throughout the double-bill like a tuberculosis-ridden cough, ruining a number of moments that would have been more amusing without its unsolicited approval. And by the second episode matters had declined to the point that when we’d start laughing at a gag, the “audience” would pipe up with its insincere chortling, and thus compel us to stop laughing as we didn’t want to be associated with anything that would bracket us with that rabble.
• The first episodes of any new show, whether a drama or a comedy, should concentrate on bedding the characters down. This was performed adroitly with Jen and Roy, but with Moss there was too much effort to establish him as an uber-nerd. He had ordered both the children’s and adults’ editions of Harry Potter to spot any discrepancies in the text, playing up to the stereotype of the geek, and his accent was too annoying sounding like Lou from Little Britain on helium.
• And while we’re on the subject of accents, what happened to Denham’s? In opening scene where he met new employee Jen it had an American twang, and from then on flitted between both sides of the Atlantic with the frequency of blacked-out planes illegally transporting suspected terrorists.
• Denham repeatedly asking Jen if she was “sure” was too much like Mrs Doyle offering cups of tea.


Series two
What has improved about it?
• Moss. Initially, his geekiness was too contrived to be funny but since then he has improved massively. The bits when he was on the toilet and his mother was knocking on the door were brilliant, as was when he was stumped in trying to rescue Roy from beneath a desk by claiming there were sexy workmen at the window to distract the ladies pinning Roy in place.
• Denham Reynholm. Chris Morris’ caricature of a capricious office boss has become gradually funnier as the series has worn on. Perhaps still a little too over-the-top to be a future classic character.

What hasn’t improved about it?
• The script still seems to lurch about with very little focus. Whereas the curious logic of Father Ted added to the surreal atmosphere, too often characters lumber from one situation to the next with very little coherence as to why they’re actually acting that way.

Imagine: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Studio, BBC1, Wednesday 2 February 2006
Did we like it?
The fact that Alan 'You're So Vain' Yentob grasped the opportunity to show off a bit was off-putting, but there were interesting glimpses into the world of sitcom-making

What was good about it?
• Peep Show pairing David Mitchell and Robert Webb being funny as they talked about their show – and the look at the behind-the-scenes complications of making it
• It was a much more thoughtful programme than the similar Channel 4 enterprise fronted by the ghostly David Liddiment
• Armando Iannucci on his genius satire The Thick Of It
• Tamsin Grieg revealing how she thinks of old aunts to stop her giggling at Stephen Mangan's improvisations on The Green Wing

What was bad about it?
• Ricky Gervais and, to a lesser extent, Stephen Merchant are obviously better at writing comedy than talking about it
• People being forced to say nice things about My Family and Yentob hailing it as one of today’s great comedies
• Paul Whitehouse was a little self-aggrandising as he spoke about BBC2's brilliant Help

The Last Laugh, BBC3

The Last Laugh, BBC3

Did we like it?
This edition of Dara O’Briain’s series on comedy writing focused on the British attitude to sex in comedy and featured the work of Jonathan Harvey (Gimme, Gimme, Gimme). Though an interesting insight into his writing and the analysis of potential endings for a part-written script, it failed to cover either in enough depth and was akin to having a delicious starter and the main course not turning up.

What was good about it?
• The vintage clips of Dick Emery and the early Carry-Ons showcased how to pitch seaside postcard humour. Any excuse to show Dick Emery’s toothy vicar, or ‘Oooh you are awful!’ always goes down well with us.
• Kathy Burke’s refreshingly honest approach at the 2002 Comedy Awards to the critical reception given to Gimme, Gimme, Gimme by the gay press – “F*ck ‘em!” even made Jonathan Ross wince.
• Jonathan Harvey discussed with disarming frankness his career highs (Beautiful Thing and his writing for Coronation Street) and lows (Closest Thing to Heaven).
• The last quarter of the show devoted to the competition between four budding writers to finish a partly written Harvey script was an informative look at how comedy producers rate and dissect potential sitcoms. The winner may yet see their script turned into a pilot.

What was bad about it?
• The programme wasn’t particularly well-structured – flitting about from topic to topic and back again.
• The clips of Gimme, Gimme, Gimme proved once again how hit and miss the show was.
• The competition element quite often slipped into an “everyone’s a winner” mentality. Maybe all the scripts were of a high quality, but it just sounded somewhat trite.
• Neither of the two main features were covered in enough depth.

Janet Street Porter’s Desperate Women, Channel 4, Saturday 28 January 2006
Did we like it?
Janet delivered a coruscating diatribe on the inherent obsession of vilifying women in the public eye, and as a consequence, ‘normal women’ too.

What was good about it?
• Janet began her polemic with: “We (women) have more choice, more money and more power. So it’s a great time to be female? Crap!”
• Even though it is also broadcast on Channel 4, 10 Years Younger was rightly castigated for the coercive process whereby a woman is humiliated by having people on the street guess her age, and then told all her ills can be solved with a few strokes of the surgeon’s knife. Presenter Nicky Hambleton-Jones seems to have the same ethical essence as those soft drinks companies who market their cola-flavoured drinks more desirable accessories than water in poverty-stricken third world shanty towns.
• The comical absurdity of 10 Years Younger’s cosmetic surgeon Daniel P Goldberg illustrating to some poor sap, who’s had her confidence mangled in Hambleton-Jones’s train wreck apocalypse vernacular, how her chin will look better once she has the fat removed. But Goldberg was unable to do so as his chin was far flabbier than hers, which pinpointed how ridiculous the whole charade was.
• The exposure of Darryn Lyons, the boss of a London-based paparazzi agency and one of the ugliest men in Britain, as an unprincipled tabloid lapdog. With his podgy porcine face squatting below his multi-coloured Mohawk mane, he resembles a colourful constipated parrot trying to shake a particularly tenacious turd from its feathered behind. Lyons justified his firm’s policy of passing on snaps of celebrities to newspapers to pick out illusionary faults with by claiming that he only took the photos and it was up to the newspapers what they did with them. He displayed the same vacuity of moral conceit greedy chemical companies exhibited when supplying the ex-tyrant with toxic gases, protesting they didn’t imagine they would be used to exterminate Kurds.
• Vanessa Feltz’s hypocrisy was laid bare when she claimed she was willing to host some gruesome live cosmetic surgery show on Five “to pay the bills”, and protested that she acted as a cautionary force against such operations by asking probing journalistic questions about the validity of the operation. Janet, quite rightly, wasn’t convinced.
• The funniest moment came in an incidental headline from the Daily Mail’s fawning eulogy to Lynda Lee-Potter, which heralded that “with more women like her, we’d never have lost the Empire”. Which presumably means if Britain had been ruled by a heartless tribe of Amazonian dictators who propagated the slavery of sovereign nations such as India while simultaneously bleeding them dry of their natural resources to fund the debauched wealth of merchants who spent all their spare time in London’s whorehouses buggering stuffed effigies of tigers they’d bravely shot from the top of their elephant mount then Britain would still be ‘Great’.

What was bad about it?
• It was tucked away in the corner of the schedules as if Channel 4 didn’t really want you to watch it like a schoolboy stowing his first pornographic magazine amongst his old schoolbooks. If the protest about the Poll Tax had sought such a meek expression of their views then instead of pitched battles in the centre of London, a sprinkling of disaffected hippies would have trooped through Lowestoft. It also might have been a refugee from last year’s schedules as the death of Lynda Lee-Potter, whose passing Janet seemed to mourn with all the global sorrow at the eradication of smallpox, in 2004 was said to have occurred “last year”.
• Janet failed to pick up on the fundamental purpose of disseminating feminine insecurity in the media, in that insecurity over appearance breeds the need to purchase perfume, surgery et al. Without provoking the deluded necessity of these comforts, there would be no sales of such products; the same products that clog up the pages of women’s magazines with advertising – the lifeblood of commercial magazines. No insecurity = no sales = no advertising = no magazine.
• The adverts during the break. For every brave step forward taken by Janet in her bid to dismantle the corrosive corruption, two were taken back through the commercials shown. Well done, Channel 4. With one hand you nurture, suckle and tuck carefully into bed at night the notion of promoting a more responsible attitude towards women and encourage that self-esteem and confidence are so much more than wrinkle-free skin and nauseatingly skinny hips. While with the other hand, with adverts for teeth whitening toothpaste, skin cream, 5%-fat oven chips, fresh breath toothpaste, “Say goodbye to winter skin” face cream, shampoo, Jaguar – catchphrase “Everybody cares what gorgeous says” – and the News of the World, you may as well push the notion down the stairs, slam its head in doors and stub out cigarettes on its back.
• The justification churned out by the guilty parties taken to task by Janet was that by picking the smallest fault with celebrities, their altruistic aim was to make ‘normal women’ feel better about themselves. Consciously oblivious that it is through the same magazines’ saturation coverage of the celebrities that has caused the insecurity in the first place. It was rather like pioneering and spreading both the cause and cure for cancer and expecting sufferers to be glad at the distribution of the cure.
• June Sarpong was one of the better talking heads but made an error when she claimed to have “interviewed some of the most beautiful women in the world”, presumably falling into the trap, set by magazines such as Heat and OK!, that celebrities are among the most pulchritudinous people in the world. Completely wrong. Walk down any busy street and within 100 yards, you’ll have passed 10, maybe 20, women who are prettier than either Pamela Anderson or Nicole Kidman (but that’s partly because Anderson and Kidman have, in their own particular ways, been enslaved by the tyranny of homogenised celebrity).

Lead Balloon, BBC4/BBC2

Did we like it?
A wry, acerbic diatribe about how miserable life is for a gloomy, middle-aged man with a chip on his shoulder and a sense of charity that would shame King Herod.

What was good about it?
• Jack Dee is hardly stretched playing a sneering, pessimistic comic Rick Spleen, but he adds layers to the superficial gloss of his stage act. The miserliness of Fagin burrows its way believably into the plot like a wasp pupae sucking out the nutrients of a paralysed caterpillar, before spreading its wings into the so-far hilarious denouements.
• Raquel Cassidy is an excellent foil and a well-written role in her own right as Rick’s partner Mel. Forever mirroring the audience’s exasperation with Rick’s penny-pinching through a roll of her eyes or a barbed riposte; it’s perhaps the attrition of living with Rick that has made her the most cynical character in the comedy.
• The artfully crafted scripts that start from points of little promise – in the opener it was Rick and Mel being invited to a christening, Rick doing an advert for recycling that “made him look like a prick”, and exquisitely neurotic café owner Michael foisting one of his homemade cakes on Rick – and are then skilfully woven together, ultimately conspiring to humiliate Rick or leave him out-of-pocket.
• The scariest derision (we think that’s the collective noun for shopkeepers, if it isn’t it should be) of shopkeepers this side of Royston Vasey. Rick’s nosing around a shop selling christening presents was disturbed by the disturbing Maureen (Miranda Hart) who would oscillate spasmodically between matronly empathy and banshee-like hysteria. As she tried to flog a £140 teddy bear to Rick, he claimed that “they sometimes have spikes in them.” To which she shot back. “Well, no. It was made in Austria.”
• Meanwhile, the electrical goods shopkeeper and paper shop worker in the second episode could have crawled from the pages of Franz Kafka.
• Magda, Rick and Mel’s home help, plays the role of the straight-talking stooge whose naivety or bluntness is often as the root of Rick’s problems. It was she, for instance, who threw Michael’s treasured cake in the dustbin.
• Rick’s daughter Sam (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) and her boyfriend Ben (Rasmus Hardiker). It’s worth noting that Rasmus Hardiker appears to be turning into the new Nicholas Lyndhurst; both are painfully thin and very talented actors and seem(ed) to vacuum up all the roles as hopeless maladjusted teenagers. It’s only hoped that Hardiker doesn’t get unjustly typecast, though.
• Rick’s enduring efforts to spend as little as possible such as ruining the christening present by trying to engrave the baby’s name on it himself rather than pay the extra £20 or going to extraordinary lengths to repair the broken toaster rather than buy a new one. But is frequently duped by Ben into giving him money. “I didn’t know that Ben smoked dope!” exclaimed a dismayed Mel to a sheepish Rick. “I wonder where he gets the money.”
• Rick setting his alarm clock obscenely early in the morning just to see if the paper boy would have woken him up after he had a word with his boss; spying through the curtains as Wayne lumbered along the street.

What was bad about it?
• The argument and quips provoked by Rick’s junk mail lacked the sharpness of the rest of the script.
• The frequent decamping to the café, which is fine as we get to see more of Michael, but seems like a rancid organ donation from Seinfeld.

He's Having A Baby, BBC1

Debut: Saturday 20 August 2005
What to say if you liked it
Normally you have to be off work sick, tuned to ITV because you've seen the Diagnosis Murder episode on BBC1 before, if you are to see a programme of this kind. Thank you, BBC, for making it available in a primetime Saturday night slot.
What to say if you disliked it
It's hosted by Davina McCall. And with Kate Thornton fronting The X Factor at the same time on ITV1, this was a real devil-or-the-deep-blue-sea dilemma for us poor viewers.

What was good about it?
• The eight featured fathers-to-be are a nice enough bunch. But should they really become minor celebrities purely because they've proved to have lead in their pencils.
• The grimaces of the men as they watched a video of childbirth – or, in the case of Ellis, a look of nauseated horror.
• The three sisters featured in a voxpop who loved their father because he turned them upside-down and used them as mops

What was bad about it?
• "There'll be no singing, no dancing; no-one will be voted out," Davina promised. There'll be no entertainment value whatsoever, she failed to mention.
• Despite this being a show about giving birth, Davina adopted a rather prudish approach as if conception and delivery were awful things that should not be mentioned. When Ellis screwed up his pretty face to deliver his verdict on the childbirth video – "Seeing all that stretching and that were horrible" – Davina leapt in with "Stop there. It's teatime."
And later she said: "For every one being born, there's one being made. Saturday night and that. Whey-hey!!! Let's change tone now. Out of the gutter." So the act of procreation is mucky, is it?
• Liam and Jonny rather spoiled things by already becoming fathers before the programme started. Spoilsports.
• The stories of how Liam and Jonny became fathers were spun in such a way as to suggest there'd be a harrowing ending. Cynical.
• Danny Wallace's dad assignments. The first was for the fathers to care for a newborn baby for two hours. "Fellas, come and grab a baby."
• The show featured two Coventry City fans, which is surely a statistical anomaly that should have been ironed out.
• Jeff Brazier was featured giving his view on raising kids. So was David Baddiel's brother Ivan, who also happens to be part of the production team.
• The audience laughing at any weak joke made by Davina, and awwing at every bloody opportunity.
• The pointless kiddiecounter, clocking up the number of babies being born during the show (every 45 seconds in the UK, we were informed)
• Matthew the weedy IT consultant wearing a sleeveless top. Yuck.

Meet The Magoons, Channel 4

Debut: Friday 19 August 2005
Episode guide
Six-part comedy series about four Indian lads who work in The Spice, a Punjabi curry house in Glasgow. The spin-off from Comedy Lab is written, directed by and stars Hardeep Singh Kohli as Hamish the trivia king, with Sanjeev Kohli as Surjit the peacemaker, Paul Sharma as Paul the ‘Welsh waiter’, Nitin Ganatra as Nitin the manager man and Vincent Brahim as Nitin's dad, the restaurant owner.
Stairway to Havan: It's the annual West of Scotland Indian restaurant five-a-side football tournament and Nitin's gay friend Imran (Ronny Jhutti) is roped in to join the Spice team. There's also a prayer ceremony to bless the new restaurant oven.
Seven For Eight, or Eight For Seven: Nitin is bewildered by the number of diners expected in the Spice; should it be seven diners at 8 o’clock or eight at seven o’clock? He also blunders when he allows the old tables to be taken away without first having received their replacements, which might not be such a problem had he not also forgotten about a stag night party.
The Samosa Triangle: Nitin’s dad has been charmed by the seductive Dolly Pathan who has encouraged him to bolster his corporate identity through the purchase of her aromatic samosas.
Around The World In Eaty Ways: Chef Alan strikes in protest at Nitin’s new novelty nights when customers can enjoy delicacies from Russia, China and France. In desperation, Nitin hires his friend Giles Chan to help out on the Chinese evening, but will his hare-brained scheme succeed?
Devi Does Dallas: To get more business for The Spice, Nitin dreams up Kurry Karaoke for which each meal ordered is presented with a performance of a karaoke classic by Frank Sinatra or the Carpenters. Meanwhile, Paul is challenged to get a date after boasting of his irresistible charm.
A Previous Engagement: On the way to an engagement party, Nitin stops off to pick up the entertainer for the bash – a snake charmer named Selina, whom he once dated but is now in love with Paul. At the party, Selina tries to seduce the reluctant Paul again, but the competitive Nitin tries to charm her instead.

What so say if you liked it
Daft, diverse and delightful. Featured football, food fighting, F-words and a Fiction Factory reference (they were a 1980s band from New Zealand).
What so say if you disliked it
Box-ticking, bickering-packed banality.

What was good about it?
• Vincent Ebrahim (aka Mr Kumar) who stole the show as Nitin's dad and the owner of The Spice curry house in Glasgow, especially when he wrestled the Hindu priest who'd come to bless the new clay oven.
• The four main characters – Nitin the manager (Nitin Ganatra), Hamish the trivia king (played by the sitcom's writer and director Hardeep Singh Kohli), Surjit the sensible(ish) peacemaker (Sanjeev Kohli) and Paul the annoying, childish Welsh waiter (Paul Sharma).
• The quartet's laddish antics – competing to lift a stack of chairs, shoving fruit up their shirts to create fake breasts, badmouthing each other incessantly etc
• The homophobic "Hello sailor!" joke – it was a little offensive but is a true reflection of what young lads say (especially the ones hiding their own homosexuality)
• The very very gorgeous Ronny Jhutti as Imran from the cash and carry who joined the other lads in the West Of Scotland Indian Restaurant Football Tournament
• The Wayne's World driving sequence when the lads sang punning song titles: Oven Must Be Missing An Angel, Oven Is A Place On Earth. But 1980s-loving Hamish spoils it by going too far with Feels Like Oven.
• "The first rule of the kitchen: never fuck with the chef's Angel Delight."
• We spotted a boom microphone in shot. Don't you just love it when that happens?
• The mix-up in which the football kit got left behind and the lads had to play in dad's line-dancing outfits – pink polyester numbers with tassels
• We learned the Scottish meaning of the word "scud" when "Losers go home in the scud" resulted in Nitin's team exiting the football tournament naked.
What was bad about it?
The imbalance of ingredients. Stand by for a painful Indian meal analogy: there was too much stodgy rice (the endless bickering) to go with the tasty curry (the surreal, some would say silly, gags).
• The rather overbearing music

Not Going Out, BBC1

Did we like it?
We nearly didn't last five minutes, but after three episodes, we're happy that we've stuck with the Lee Mack/Andrew Collins-scripted sitcom.

What's good about it?
• If we said "the texture" would you think we're being pretentious. It's just that we enjoyed the contrasts between the corny, silly jokes and poignant, emotional moments – and the contrast between scenes which amounted to little more than a snappy one-liner to extended scenes which were allowed to breathe
• With just three regular characters, we get a chance to get to know them well – Lee Mack's Lee, who cracks jokes to create diversions from his real feelings; Megan Dodds as Kate, an earnest American, who couldn't crack a joke in a million years; and Tim Vine's Tim, who cracks the odd joke when he's not cracking up over his latest emotional crisis.
• The scenes outside the apartment really lift the show. Best bits in the opening three episodes were Kate at Clown Club (reversing the bucket of confetti joke and screwing up a trust exercise), Lee trying to amuse the icy psychiatrist, Lee's awkward dinner date with the author whose bestseller details her childhood abuse, and Lee dressing as a maiden aunt at the funeral for Tim's Nan.
• Many of the jokes were too obvious, with the punchline smacking you in the face after just a few words, but that didn't stop us laughing.
• Julia Morris's guest role as snooty Australian Ruth
• We Will Rock You accompanied by armpit squelching.

What's bad about it?
• Lee Mack and Tim Vine sometimes struggle to convince as actors – it's like we're watching a TV comedy duo in the midst of a routine before introducing us to "the lovely Barbara Dickson".
• The American influences – the loft apartment setting/the musical stings and aerial views between scenes – annoyed us.
• The audience laughter annoyed us. This is quite an adult sitcom and didn't need the guffawing.
• Two Thora Hid jokes in three episodes.

Our favourite jokes from the first three episodes
• "She's got letters after her name." "So have I." "No, you've got letters in your name."
• "No man is an island." "What about the Isle of Man?"
• "My Nan died. I thought she was going to live til she was 100." "Were you close?" "Well, 94. I was only six years out."
• "All hands on deck. As the pervert said at the Byker Grove convention."
• "She self harms." "What's wrong with selling farms?"
• "I can't just turn it on like a tap." "Force it." "I can't just turn it on like a faucet."
• "I'm a high flier. I say 'Hi, do you want a flyer'."

Balls Of Steel, Channel 4

Debut: Friday 19 August 2005
What to say if you liked it
It was, hahahahahaha, no you’ll have to come back to me. I’ll try again; it was so funny,
heeeeeeeeeeheeeeeeeeeee. It’s no good, chortle, chortle, chortle, Balls of Steel is just toooooo funny for words.
What to say if you didn’t like it
If the human race devolved to just bags of skin with eyes, this is what they’d watch.

What was good about it?
• As a window cleaner proudly wiped the last part of a shop front clean of grime, the Annoying Devil chucked a bucket of “shit” over it. As he ran away cackling, a passer-by jumped him bringing him to the ground. The Devil’s humour rapidly dissipated as he bleated: “You don’t have to kill me over it.” So, while it’s fine to repulse and harm other people, the Balls of Steel gang expect impunity from reasonable reactions to their japes because they’re on TV? And what made it especially ironic was that the passer-by leapt on the Devil by grabbing around his neck, which just happened to be the gag for Big Stranger Rodeo when “Neg” would do the same with “big strangers”. The audience laughed raucously at Neg’s jape, while the Devil’s assault was greeted with sincere, concerned “oooh”s.
• School bullies at last have a show where they can vicariously live out their former lives of violence, persecution and spite as they sit in their single room bedsit, viewing as some respite from picking bluebottles off the flypaper, cleaning their windows with their own urine and licking the mould from their crockery.
• When the show finished the menu for the rest of the evening’s viewing was soundtracked by Arcade Fire’s Lies.

What was bad about it?
• Host Mark Dolan looks and acts like a slab of lamb tossed carelessly on to a shelf ready to be skewered and trimmed to provide rancid sustenance as kebab meat.
• Alex Zane, the smuggest man on television, and his unoriginal Buzzin’ Game in which a contestant was stitched up with a faulty buzzer. Much hilarity ensued.
• The manner in which Dolan and the various “jokers” snidely analyse their jape afterward, providing no insight or illumination.
• Dolan to Zane: “Well done, Alex!” Well done for what? Zane stood like a hollowed out chimney occasionally piping platitudes while a goon in a t-shirt got angry that he’d been swindled in a fake TV quiz. And Zane won the audience vote for the most hilarious stunt of the night, just to rub salt in our wounds.
• The Annoying Devil putting “dog turds” across the pedestrian path on a London bridge. It obviously wasn’t real excrement for health and safety reasons and so the flaccid joke epitomized the whole show.
• After the Big Stranger Rodeo, Dolan warned sardonically: “We must legally say, do not copy Neg’s actions.” The fact that they must caution against this mimicry because of “legal” reasons suggests they do not endorse such spoilsporting, enabling them to maintain their maverick status whilst simultaneously satisfying the lawyers. Of course, kids won’t take any notice and “Big Stranger Rodeo” will become Britain’s sixth popular pastime by about 9pm next Friday. We expect Neg will be happy slapping old ladies next week so we can have another laugh.
• As Dolan introduced the Pain Men, it initially seemed it was going to be a sub-Dirty Sanchez troupe. In fact, it was worse. It was Dirty Sanchez; at least two of them. Their act centres on doing nothing more than inflicting pain, antics performed with more élan by the Jim Rose Circus, while Laurel And Hardy’s comedy set in an industrial carpenters possessed a wit and timing infinitely above anything Pritchard and Pancho
could muster.
• Olivia Lee’s celebrity interviews. After her piece, Dolan said of the audience: “They love seeing celebrities get shafted!” Wrong. The only people deserving of such derision and scorn are those such as Paris Hilton. And while those gangrenous scabs were the occasional witless target of Lee’s witless attempted humiliation, interviewing the elegant and accomplished Charlotte Rampling with the legend “bucket fanny” affixed to the blind side of the microphone with an arrow pointing at her was cruel and gratuitous.

Man To Man With Dean Learner, Channel 4

Friday 19 October 2006
Did we like it?
After inflicting the infantile Bo! In The USA on us, Channel 4 redeemed itself with this intelligent, hilarious spin-off from Garth Marenghi's Darkplace.

What was good about it?
• It's a bit like Knowing Me Knowing You...With Alan Partridge and, in some respects, it's even better than Steve Coogan's masterpiece.
• Richard Ayoade's straight-faced portrayal of the ridiculous Dean Learner, the suave nightclub owner, restaurateur, publisher and international playboy
• Matthew Holness, who is playing all the spoof guests, started off with his brilliant Garth Marenghi creation, the world-renowned horror writer (all 436 novels are now available in one huge volume with a spine reinforced with genuine cat bone)
• We loved the intimate setting – a luxury penthouse flat in "London's glittering East End".
• The War of the Wasps movie
• Lines such as "I wanted to release books that would give the reader a boner but leave them too terrified to do anything about it. Books to scare you stiff."; "You are the most compassionate man I ever known. And I know God."; “This show is wonderful. It’s such a reflection of the wit and sophistication that’s in you.”; "I'm fucking busting and what's Plato doing about it? Nothing!"; and "All aboard" (you had to be there to appreciate that one.

What was bad about it?
• The audience laughter ruined the illusion at times. With Dean and Garth being so deadpan and understated, it didn't feel right that the audience laughed throughout.

Bromwell High, Channel 4

Debut: Friday 19 August 2005
Episode guide
A 13-part animated series about on three terrible 12-year-old south London girls – Keisha-Marie (cheerful, aggressive and big), Natella (brainy, born leader) and Latrina (brazen blonde) – who attend the "worst school in the world". Features the voices of Doon Mackichan, Nina Conti and Graeme Garden; produced by Anil Gupta, whose credits include The Office; written by the team behind The Kumars At No 42.
Baby Boom: Latrina accidentally takes her new baby sister into school in her bag and then swaps her with the sex education teacher's doll. Geography teacher Mr Bibby finds the child and tries to sell it to fellow teachers Martin and Carol Jackson who are desperate to become parents.
Prefect: Iqbal and Mr Bibble are impelled to act over Keisha’s behaviour. They install her as school prefect with a brief to reduce criminality in the school – a task she accomplishes with relish and a healthy dose of intimidation and violence.
Sweets: The naughty schoolgirls come into possession of a truckload of explosive sweets and Iqbal and Bibby see a chance to exhibit their talents.
Sack Race: Mr Philips gives an old athletics vest to Latrina which magically transforms her into the best runner in the school. But can she perform well enough for Mr Philips to keep his job after an OFSTED inspector arrives at Bromwell determined to sack somebody.
Keisha's In Love: Animated series about three terrible 12-year-old south London girls. Keisha is beguiled by alluring new pupil Spencer, but expresses her emotion in violence rather than kisses, leading to a court appearance. Meanwhile, Miss Dickson and Mr Philips vie for the Head of Year 8 post.
No More Teachers: When Mr Anderson becomes a pop star, the other teachers reflect on their worthless, thankless lives and resign en mass. This leaves the problem of replacing the entire staff, as the former tutors navigate their way to celebrity stardom.

What to say if you liked it
A sharp, witty cartoon satire of chavvy South London high schools.
What to say if you didn't like it
Yet another lazy, smug cartoon show making obvious jokes about the easiest targets.

What was good about it?
• Roger Bibby, the evil deputy headmaster. He sells things from the lost property box, praises bullying and "knocked up" Latrina's mum ("Curse parents evening!"). He likes to make excuses for his behaviour by declaring that he's a geography teacher and when he's asked for advice on normal child health he says "I'm no paediatrician, despite what the graffiti says".
* The style and humour reminded us a lot of The Mr Hell Show, which was the closest thing on TV to Monkey Dust before 2003.
• Keisha Marie, the tough queen bee of the girls who ends almost every sentence with the word "bitch". She's voiced by Gina Yashere.
• The stuff that was on the desk for the sex education lesson – Life-Like Condoms, QY Lube and a ball-gag. And what was written on the blackboard – "Sex Awareness Day- Only Sluts Get Pregnant!" There was also a sign outside the school saying : "Sex Education Day: Let's talk about thingy."
• Headmaster Iqbal Kandallah flogs digital video cameras in the staffroom. "Just don't blame me when it breaks!".
• The general good quality of the animation – it's a little like the animation of Fairly Odd Parents, but it is probably on a much lower budget.
• Nasty plummy voiced girl, Tamsin. She claims to be very intelligent but she confuses Winston Churchill with Bill Clinton. She knows a great deal about bullying though, suggesting they should use hockey sticks instead of bare fists. When she starts stealing the boyfriends of the other girls, they soon start to hate her.
• Mrs Jackson handcuffs Tamsin to Keisha and runs off laughing: "Ha ha, YOUR problem now!".
• Tamsin's parents pull her out of Bromwell High. "All you're doing here is learning about drugs, bullying and underage sex. If we wanted you to learn about that we would have paid to send you to a private school".
• When Mrs Jackson tells her off for being uncooperative, Natella says her parents would stab her and make her marry her cousin if they found out. Mrs Jackson's reaction: "I'm sorry, it's not like me to be culturally insensitive ...since my course".
• The dippy but bitter sex education teacher who everyone hates. ("Sex is not a rude word! Fuck is not a rude word!"). She has a toy baby to teach the kids, but she's fiercely protective of it and breastfeeds it. When asked why she doesn't have a child of her own, she makes it clear that it's NOT because of "malfunctioning ovaries which the GP failed to notice before it was too late... prompting the only man I ever loved to leave me... leave me to gorge myself on chocolate to fill the emptiness I felt inside, crying myself to sleep until I was so fat the double bed no longer felt too big without him!"
• The way the the teachers often corrected the kids on their manners. When Latrina calls the sex education teacher a "fat bitch" she is told "It's the fat LADY!" and when she tells Mr Bibby "you defiled my mum and abandoned her baby" she is told to put "sir" at the end of the sentence.
• Carol and Martin Jackson try to adopt a baby – not because they are infertile; Martin produces mugfulls of sperm – they just think it's unfair when so many other couples can't have children for them to do it the "normal" way. (Bibby thinks it's due to "mutual physical disgust"). They are outbid at the last second when they try to buy a one-armed baby on E-Bay, and are sold the sex education teacher's toy infant for £2,000 by Mr Bibby. They still have some problems with their marriage, though: "Using a prostitute is not cheating!" "Martin, the school dinner lady is not a prostitute?", "Then why did she charge me 200 quid?".
• Latrina's reaction to the sex education lessons. "Sex! Wicked! I'm always wanting to pick up some tips!".
• Keisha's reaction after being told she looks like she's "eaten a shit sandwich". "I thought it was Marmite!".
• Tamsin's question at the sex education lesson: "Can you get pregnant from sitting on the toilet seat?" When told she can't, she further enquires "Even if someone's already sitting on it?"
• It has a wider range of ethnicity than most TV programmes.
• Latrina saying not having babies is "for gays".
• The kids swap the sex ed teacher's toy baby for Latrina's new baby brother, but no-one ever finds out. When she gets home he pukes all over her. "Right, that's it, I'm sending you back to Japan!".
• It's not afraid to make fun of all sorts of people, from the working class chav kids to the dim-witted middle class teachers.

What was bad about it?
• We suspect that the episode order has been messed around with. The whole point of this episode seems to be that Tamsin has taken over the girls' usual roles, but as this is the first episode broadcast, we don't know what their usual roles are.
• Because of this Natella, the intelligent Asian girl who is potentially one of the funniest characters, doesn't have much impact, but this will probably change in later episodes.
• Another thing we hope will change is the focus on the irritating couple Martin and Carol Jackson. Aside from their antics trying to get a baby, they weren't funny at all. Their humour probably lies in how annoying they are, but the problem with that is sometimes it gets... annoying. They are also very bland when all the other teachers are far more interesting.
• Despite the promise of being similar to Monkey Dust, it was far more safe and pedestrian. It was closer to Stressed Eric, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but is still a bit disappointing.
• It was satisfying to see Tamsin getting her comeuppance, but its a shame she's gone, along with the sex education teacher. These two were the most interesting characters in this episode, which probably highlights why it wasn't really a good choice to go out first when the regular characters were more sidelined.
• Latrina's dumb blonde/brainless chav girl persona is funny, but her voice and her Vicky Pollard-esque speech patterns are REALLY irritating.

That Mitchell and Webb Look , BBC2

Thursday 14 September 2006
Did we like it?
Comedy sketch shows always have a hit-miss ratio. David and Robert's transferred-from-Radio 4 show managed eight good sketches and four bad ones – which made it a winner, but only just.

What was good about it?
• The SS soldiers worrying about the skull insignias on their caps (“Hans, are we the baddies?”).
• Crimebusting superheroes Angel Summoner and the upstaged BMX Bandit ("I could just summon a horde of angels. They'd just take care of it").
• The spoof of a June Whitfield-fronted life insurance commercial, offering to replace a dead wife "with someone sexier and kinder" (ie an Albanian teenager).
• The drunken snooker commentators (catchphrase: "Ooh that's a bad miss.")
• The snooty waiter who sneers as a couple eat – one has crab, one has a consommé. "My, my, it's like watching The Generation Game."
• Big Talk, the late-night discussion fronted by Raymond Terrific and described as "a weekly gallop through the massively important with the biggest bunch of eggheads and brainiacs that taxis could be sent to fetch."
• John and Andy's poorly-researched drama Emergency Medical Treatment. "I've never seen anyone looking so peaky. Get me the medicine now!"
• Robert Webb's banana dance

What was bad about it?
• The adventures of Sir Digby Chicken Caesar and Ginger, two ghastly tramps involved in Dick Barton-like larks.
• How Not What To Look Like
• The couple planning a party but not wanting to invite James Bond because he demands Martini and paralyses other guests
• Nonsensical game show Numberwang

Star Stories, Channel 4

Friday 15 September 2006
Did we like it?
Yes, this satirical comedy from the makers of Peep Show was funny. And ultra daft.

What was good about it?
• The crude impressions of Posh, Becks and company made it funnier than if they'd been delivered with Rory Bremner-like accuracy. We loved the bizarre way everyone had to be addressed by name throughout so we knew who was who.
• The spoof gossip magazines and newspaper headlines.
• Kevin Bishop as the Artistic Alex Ferguson, bitterly jealous of Victoria. His was the best performance but we also enjoyed Becks (Oliver Maltman) and Posh (Daisy Beaumont)
• Sporty Spice's moustache.
• The elusion to David Beckham's affair using reverse psychology.
• The send up of Glenn Hoddle. The former England manager became a fortune teller, uncovering the skeleton card (Posh) and fool card (David Batty). A message from the other side helped him decide to put Becks into his side. "Kurt Cobain says I should start you. You're in."
• The portrayal of Geri Halliwell as a child with no confidence and Simon Fuller as a Fagin figure.
• Gary Neville's best man's speech in which he told an "amusing" story about an offside decision
• Victoria staying behind in England, waiting for the man from Hotpoint to turn up to repair the fridge

What was bad about it?
• Yet another swipe at Posh and Becks. (Haven't they been lampooned enough already?) We know that he's a good footballer with very little intellect hence his descent into modelling and we know she'll never ever have a number one single (thanks to Sir Alex's curse)

Will & Grace

Will & Grace Finalé, Living TV, Thursday 7 September 2006
Did we like it?
It went out with a sentimental whimper rather than a bang, but the two-part finalé did have its moments and left us feeling a tiny bit sad.

What was good about it?
• The highlight was Grace's dream sequence featuring a bald, tubby Will, whose wig fell off, an even tubbier Grace, squeezed into a red tracksuit with her bottom a yard behind her, Jack with a nuclear tan and a lovely husband (it's Kevin Bacon!) and Karen (who hadn't aged a jot) in love with butch leather'n'denim-wearing lesbian Rosario.
• The scene when Will and Grace's kids Ben and Lila nervously met in a dorm hall and got together was a fine twist. Ben was a gorgeous version of his father. Which was nice.
• Jack and Karen chatting to each other on their mobile phones – even though they were in the same bubbly bath
• Bitchy Beverly Leslie's demise – being swept off his balcony in a wind – was a rare moment of slapstick silliness and meant that Jack and Karen could live together in tacky luxury.

What was bad about it?
• The silly banter between Will and Grace has gradually ground us down. It's one thing we won't miss.
• Jack and Karen singing Unforgettable didn't fit into the plot and was just a weak attempt to get fans sobbing. Didn't work for us.
• The playing of Queen's You're My Best Friend as the foursome toasted each other in a bar was another play on our emotions. Still didn't work for us.
• Will doesn't deserve hot cop Vince.
• Grace doesn't deserve hot doc Leo.
• We still hate the queer-insulting sponsor's messages run by LivingTV – and will never buy the advertised product as a protest.

Will & Grace, Living TV, Thursday 6 April 2006
Did we like it?
No. This was an airing of the series eight opener that went out live in America, a gimmick that backfired because there was only one set (Will's naff apartment), the shortcomings of the cast were exposed and the audience yelled with undeserved laughter. Plus it meant we had to suffer video picture quality rather than the usual filmy style.

What was good about it?
• Some of the gags were as good as ever, but were spoilt by the hysteria. The best were:
Grace – "Stan's alive? But there was a funeral. We scattered a trash bag full of his ashes." Will – "Apparently, that was just dirt and Rice Krispies."
Jack – "I had the largest glitter-related tragedy since Mariah Carey's film debut."
Jack – "My only crime is being irresistible. Besides, Grace, life is too short to waste time on over-thinking things. When an opportunity comes, I don't question it. I grab it, drop its ring on the nightstand, and swing on it 'til dawn!"
• Karen's callous attitude when told that husband Stan was still alive.
• The story behind Jack's eyepatch. It wasn't a glitter-related incident as he claimed, but the result of some singeing while singing on Jack Talk, his new talk show. The exposure of his missing eyebrow was the best gag of the show.
• Karen causing havoc in her mobility vehicle (used because actress Megan Mullally had hurt her ankle while dancing at home).

What was bad about it?
• The Karen-Rosario mutual loathing routine wasn't as good as it can be.
• Alec Baldwin as guest star Malcolm seemed a little uncomfortable
• The studio audience seemed to love Debra Messing messing about. We didn't.
• The Will v Grace banter wore thin very quickly.

Will & Grace, LivingTV, Thursday 4 May 2006
Lowlights
• The tiresome, unoriginal and rather offensive Muller sponsorship credits that have plagued this final series. We can almost imagine the conversation in the marketing boardroom: “We want to promote the Fruity taste of our yoghurt on TV – I know, let’s play on this by showing a series of camp nancies trying to pull straight men”.
• The episode felt like complete filler, centring on Will’s annual Autumn Festival which for some reason aimed to bring gay men and pumpkins together. After the genuine spontaneity, unintentional humour and bravado of the live opener, this was flat and no different from 50 other Will & Grace episodes. We couldn’t help but wonder also how on Earth Will actually makes any money as a lawyer when he spends most of his time on oddities such as this glorified fair.
• Jack Talk as a catchphrase was never funny in the first place and definitely isn’t half way through yet another series.
• Jason Biggs was a lovely choice for a guest star but was totally wasted, with no noticeable jokes given to him to deliver. It’s such a shame that we can’t remember a time when the show didn’t rely on celebrity cameos and that it will probably be remembered for this aspect rather than any comic flair.
• Will & Grace has always suffered from Predictability Syndrome (like many American sitcoms) and this episode was no different. Jack’s admission that he “can’t carry the whole gay community on his back” was met with an inevitable retort from Will.

Highlights
• There were a few choice lines. We particularly enjoyed Jack’s lament of no one recognising his celebrity with the snappy “I feel like Teri Hatcher six years ago – and six years from now”.
• Alec Baldwin, despite being another addition to the guest star roster, was nicely quirky and kooky as Malcolm. We liked his threat to Grace: “I’m trained in all forms of persuasion: physical torture, sleep deprivation and Jewish guilt”.

Tight Spot, BBC4

The Lift
Wednesday 14 March 2007
Did we like it?
An uncomfortably accurate affirmation of Sartre’s vision of Hell, which sacrificed laughs on the altar of skin-crawling realism.


What was good about it?
• The fact it was an excellent cast acted both in favour of The Lift and against it. Rasmus Hardiker is perhaps the best young comic actor in the country, however, he played the role of Rocco with such pathos that he became as irritating as any teenager seems to an audience of middle-aged conservatives (the BBC4 target audience). He spoke in an intelligible, derivative patois (“Man, this is a well-phat dilemma”) which skinned him of any sympathy as it seemed to have come directly from the RSC stopping off in Brixton only for a cup of tea and some scones. He did, however, have one of the best sporadic one-liners when he claimed he was afraid of paper and “had to do my GCSEs on an Etch-A-Sketch”.
• The same problem existed with Douglas Hodge’s Paul, an uptight TV licence inspector who was like a human version of a cream cake being overcooked in the oven. Yet instead of cream spurting from every weakened egress in the pressurised intensity, from Paul spilt forth casual racism and intolerance.
• While rarely funny, The Lift did manage to snare perfectly that loathsome false sense of community that originates when a group of strangers find themselves trapped together, especially the collective sense of relief when they all believed they were about to be rescued. We remember once being trapped in a local train while a faster train pulled in on the opposite platform and that long-buried sense of annoyance as, banging on the locked doors, commuters made inane, waggish quips that would curdle even the features of Ronald MacDonald into diabolic apoplexy, yet as you didn’t want to offend them you choked a laugh.
• Well, this sense was reborn as each of the characters rejoiced in their imminent rescue after about five hours of entrapment quipping lame jokes, apologising for earlier indiscretions and these indiscretions accordingly being batted away as trivialities mixed with excruciating choruses of Ten Green Bottles, Que Sera Sera and Bohemian Rhapsody. And it was a fitting finale when the doors opened only a little only to slam shut when Paul banged them. After half-an-hour with these people we would gladly have laughed had the punch-line been that the lift plummeted to the bottom of the shaft killing them all – or better still taken inspiration from Omen 2 (a scene that made us always use the stairs for about two years after we saw it).
• As the ordeal wore on each of them seemed to regard the others less as human beings but more viruses that could talk who would sporadically infect one of the others for a few moments of burning irritation.
• Other funny moments included Sunita (Nina Wadia) selfishly calculating that the first lift engineer to arrive injuring himself by falling down the lift shaft “that he is alive and they have to come for him”, and so also rescue them into the bargain; Christabel (Siobhan Redmond), Paul and Rocco eating cough sweets as they are all they had in the way of food; and Sunita’s anecdote about how when she was trapped in a lift in Greece they were in there for so long they eventually ended up eating a pack of playing cards.


What was bad about it?
• Because the cast played out their roles so well, they dragged the viewer into their claustrophobia so instead of standing back and laughing at the absurdity of the situation you felt as if you were in the lift with them – and that is the last place on Earth you wanted to be.
• Some episodes did feel a little bit unnecessary and were only included to bump the time up to the required 28 minutes such as when Rocco was on Paul’s shoulders searching for a way out.
• Given that the clock on the lift security camera ran from about 9am to 1pm, why did the trapped characters feel the need to go to bed; they surely couldn’t have been tired unless it was the oxygen deprivation trapped in a lift veteran Sunita had mentioned earlier.

Tight Spot: HR – An Appraisal, BBC4
Wednesday 7 March 2007
Did we like it?
A lacerating appraisal of soulless modern business verbiage and euphemisms acted out by two masters of their craft.


What was good about it?
• As the jittery Peter timidly entered the office of Sam, the head of HR (“We’re not called ‘personnel anymore’.”), it was furnished with the architecture of a civilisation on the brink of collapse. Drooping, apologetic plants rubbed shoulders with printers weeping leaf after leaf of blank white paper, while a ‘water cooler’ stood against a wall like an abandoned animal carcass waiting for the flock of besuited vultures to gather to discuss last night’s EastEnders.
• Jonathan Pryce as Peter seemed to be reprising his role from Brazil as a downtrodden, unappreciated office clerk who is in trouble thanks to one moment of impetuous recklessness in which he has let slip the mask of corporate politeness and virulently insulted a client, Mr Fish, with an hour’s worth of profanities. But instead of being tortured by Michael Palin in a mask, he must face the altogether more terrifying ordeal of an assessment for his upcoming appraisal with the head of HR.
• While on television, the format, script, sparse single location gave it much more the feel of a theatrical play. What’s more, the absence of almost any physical action meant that its quality relied almost entirely on Nigel Williams’ script – which was brilliant. It opened with Sam hinting at “certain things” Peter may have done in the course of his job that may lead to a poor appraisal, hoping to elicit a confession from his old friend.
• Sam (Nigel Le Provost) eventually revealed to Peter that it involved a call from Mr Fish of SPUK. “SPUK?” queried Peter. “They do packaging… in the UK,” Sam replies drolly. Eventually Peter remembered them as “a wholly owned subsidiary of European Design Facilities”, who “offer facilities in design… for Europeans”.
• As Sam prepares to play the incriminating tape recording of the telephone call, Peter protests of Mr Fish, “Is he allowed to go around abusing people without being recorded at his end?” And then the pair wait as the tape hisses silently. “Is it a hostile silence, Sam?” Peter asks.
• The convoluted, senseless terminology of modern business that seems lost in a labyrinth of its own myopic pomposity such as when Sam urged Peter: “Listen to your own performance, assess your performance, and then give me feedback on your assessment so we can feed it into your appraisal.”
• About halfway through, the balance of power shifts as Sam blurts out about his own fears for his own job, and that “the people upstairs” might have heard him wail “I do not want a naked man in my office” after Peter partially strips to allay Sam’s belief that he is wired as a ruse that will form part Sam’s upcoming appraisal.
• And Sam’s paranoia is exacerbated when the door to his office is opened. This leads to his suspicion that his assistant (“but she doesn’t like to be called ‘my assistant’”) is trying to usurp his position and he cowers in the office while he and Peter feverishly formulate a plan that will enable him to close the door in a natural fashion.
• There were a number of allusions to the fact that in the same way in which people were, and still are, oppressed by a rootless religious fear of damnation if they don’t act according to the strict, dogmatic laws then they will suffer eternal torment in the bowels of Hell, or in this case be fired (“Only they won’t call it that; ‘we’ll cut you a deal’ or ‘we’re going to have to let you go’”).
• But in an optimistic conclusion, perhaps after convincing each other they’re doomed anyway, Sam agrees to bury the tape and they then play out the artificial, pointless, insincere rigmarole of the pre-appraisal assessment.


What was bad about it?
• Because of the half-hour length, some of the simmering rage about modern business practices became too compacted and that on occasions aspects weren’t able to blossom into the diatribes of lethal poison they could have become. While at other times, there seemed to be too many targets and the ire aimed at each became blurred through the sheer haste to attack as many as possible.

Outrageous Fortune, LivingTV

Tuesday 6 March 2007
Did we like it?
Considering you can count the number of successfully imported New Zealand TV programmes on the fingers of a man with no hands (don't try to cite Shortland Street!), this Kiwi comedy drama about a notorious crime family is actually pretty good. A good mix of characters and an inventive and funny script means we'll definitely be staying with it.


What was good about it?
• A good opening – an early morning police raid – introduced us to the West family members quickly and established who was who and their essential characters. Mum Cheryl (the glue of the family), Dad Wolfgang (obviously well known to the police) Alzheimer's suffering Grandpa, daughters Pascalle (the good-looking thick one) and Loretta (the Plain Jane with brains and a smart mouth) and twins sons Jethro (the grad-school lawyer) and Van the inept criminal (both played by the same actor).
• After learning that lawyer Corky's predicted one-year sentence was inaccurate (he got send down for four), Cheryl's rage at the inept brief was superb: "You'll be appealing the sentence till you're blue in the fucking face - now piss off before I clock you!"
• Loretta's blackmailing of the Deputy Principal of the school – who'd been having an affair with Jethro when he was underage – in order to get time off to pursue her dream of being a filmmaker was a nice touch.
• Van getting beaten-up mid-burglary by a Kung-Fu expert old lady and then leaving behind his balaclava with a name-tag sewn in had us in stitches.
• Jethro's pretence that he's half Maori in order to get a job at a politically correct law firm. We've a feeling that this is going to bite him on the arse sooner rather than later…
• It has been billed as the Kiwi equivalent of Shameless and there were similar elements, but the New Zealand setting is a million times nicer than the Chatsworth estate and the West family are nowhere near as despicable as the Maguires.
• There are also elements of At Home with the Braithwaites and Desperate Housewives, which suits us fine.
• Actress Robyn Malcolm doesn't turn Cheryl into a clumsy caricature along the lines of Shameless's Mimi Maguire.


What was bad about it?
• The characters of the kids were just too conveniently diverse - especially the twin boys.
• Police Officer Sergeant Judd as Cheryl's nemesis was a set-up we've seen a million times before.
• The moronic men-wise women ratio was a little contrived

Comedy Map Of Britain, BBC2

Saturday 27 January 2007
Did we like it?
It's a pleasant little show with a neat concept: visiting the places where comedians kicked off their careers or where comedy "classics" were made.


What was good about it?
• Alan Whicker's dry narration ("Bobby Davro, king of impressions, is from here [Staines] but as this is a comedy map, we're going to hang with the king of the Staines Massive instead.")
• The wonderful animated map, like a computer game with 2D clouds and rolling hills. We could have looked at it for hours.
• The irony of a DJ at BBC Radio Bristol praising dangerous Chris Morris (he was sacked for filling the newsroom with helium gas to make the newsreader sound ridiculous) cut with a clip from his own not-at-all-dangerous show ("Tonight we're going to be discussing gingernuts")
• Nick Park sitting among the tortoises in Bristol Zoo as he described the evolution of Creature Comforts. And we also got to meet some of the real voices behind the animated animals.
• Clips of Stephen Merchant as a naff stand-up comic with a yokel persona
• The shock revelations that Bill Bailey used to be a pristine schoolboy!!! and a sulky new romantic pop wannabe!!!! and that DelBoy's home in Nelson Mandela House was in Bristol!!!!!!
• Writer David Nobbs paying his first visit to "Coleridge Close", the home of Reggie Iolanthe Perrin, and the Acton building that was the office of Sunshine Des*erts
• Appearances by Leslie Phillips and Jeff Green and clips of Peter Cook as EL Wisty


What was bad about it?
• Bill Bailey's reunions with his music teachers and his former bandmates in The Famous Five were a bit too pally.
• The chamber of commerce woman's attempt at Ali G's Booyakasha catchphrase. She seemed to be the only person around who didn't feel Sacha Baron Cohen's creation had stained Staines' reputation.
• The glorification of Wentworth because it provides a home for Brucie, Tarby, Ronnie and, probably before long, Beneltony.
• A before-he-was-brilliant Mark Lamarr in 1985 delivering his James Dean of the Dole Queue poem from the mean streets of Swindon.

Late Edition, BBC4

What to say if you liked it
A sharp and smart satire on the week’s news delivered with righteous relish by Marcus Brigstocke.
What to say if you didn’t like it
A disgraceful diatribe of socialist sedition that is made by and watched exclusively by guilty capitalists living in fortresses in Hampstead who only remove the revolver from their mouths to chuckle at the illusory decapitation of conservatism.

What was good about it?
• Marcus Brigstocke’s presentation which almost reads like an extended interview for the position of Have I Got News For You host. But he is also capable of witty improvisation such as “Charles Clarke has not been proved to be a terrorist, but under his legislation that might not be necessary.”
• The satirical barbs often hit the mark and are in the vein of the bits at the beginning and end of Have I Got News For You. (“I’m for a ban on hunting gay dogs with bishops.”)
• Marcus’s analogy of applying Charles Clarke’s policy on locking people up without trial based on what they might do on the future. “I presume that Dido’s going to release another dinner party album; that doesn’t mean I can rip out her larynx.”
• The sketches were often quite funny with the best being Steven Pound MP being confronted by a hunt saboteur angry that the hunting ban had stripped him of the pleasure of “hitting horses”.
• Marcus’s comical routine delivered in the character of an ignorant bigot about the risks of letting thousands of foreigners into the country for the Olympics. “They’ll be pole vaulting in at Dover.”

What was bad about it?
• The first 10 minutes was a solid list of satirical remarks, which while often funny, soon blurred into one another to become indistinctive. It might have been better to introduce a guest earlier.
• Marcus’s occasional sanctimonious slips reminded us of Clive James’s supercilious reviews of Japanese game show Endurance.
• Politically it’s hopelessly left-wing and smug, which was most keenly demonstrated in the treatment of guests. While Steven Green of the Christian Union, who opposed the appointment of gay bishops, was probed with some serious questions, anti-hunt MP Steven Pound was indulged to enter into a diatribe about the wrongs of hunting.
• Sometimes it falls between the two stools of impish satire and hard-nosed political inquisition. When Steven Green remarked that he thought homosexuality was a sin because it was listed alongside child sacrifice, incest and bestiality, Marcus reasonably responded that homosexuality was between two consenting adults while child sacrifice and bestiality didn’t have such moral clarity. Yet even before the audience’s appreciative applause had finished, Green had countered that incest could be between consenting adults, too. But rather than take the discussion further on other inconsistencies in the Bible, Marcus made a weak quip and moved on.

Nighty Night, BBC3

Tuesday 6 September 2005
What to say if you liked it
The return of the comedy which is, in essence, a satanic ritual in the form of a TV show.
What to say if you didn’t like it
The drabbest sitcom to hit earth since My Family, which has no laughter for the very good reason of it being utterly unfunny.

What was good about it?
• Jill's desperation to fleece Glenn, who is now in a psychiatric unit after taking the rap for Jill's crimes. "I spoke to Jesus earlier, " Jill tells Glenn. "He says maybe you could give me your chip and pin." Jill agrees to his proposal of marriage after he kneels out of sight behind the Perspex screen in the visiting area, and when she accepts he excitedly affixes his tongue to the screen like a lamprey and urges her to do the same.
• The traumatised Cathy and Don discussing their sexual problems with a phoney new-age guru in a Cornish retreat. The guru urges the squeamish Cathy to let Don "pop in the tip." "I'd rather he didn't." "A finger… could you accommodate…?" "We did try that. Don hadn’t cut his nails.” “I was learning the guitar”.
• Jill seeming to compliment Linda for losing weight, but then saying it must be because she’d slept with her late husband Terry. “Yeah, they do say it’s good exercise don’t they,” Linda contritely replies. “No,” Jill disagrees icily. “The cancer, Linda. You’ve obviously caught it.”
• “I’m sorry about Terry,” wails Linda pathetically to Jill. “He told me I was special.” “You know you’re not,” says Jill dismissively. "With all due respect, Terry would tell a window it was special."
• While chatting with Sue (whose husband Gordon was supposedly disabled by Glenn), Jill exclaims that she had an intimation Glenn had something of the Yorkshire Ripper about him; but they nevertheless had some happy times together. “I’m sure Mrs Sutcliffe had some super days out with Peter when he was having a break from raping.” A line which dexterously balanced on the comedy high wire above bad taste and only narrowly avoided falling off.
• Jill’s barbaric beauty treatments inflicted on Sue. "You look old. Sue. If you weren't talking, I might try to bury you." So she stabs Sue’s face with botox needles with all the brutal grace of a hunter skewering a boar. Later, Sue complained of her face feeling funny as Jill’s injections had caused half of Jill’s face to collapse like a landslip.
• The vicar suggests Glenn says a few words about casting out the blackness. "The blackies?!!!" The wedding also featured Glenn sucking Jill's finger to get the ring on, Jill refusing to lift her veil for the kiss, and a performance by Glenn of a song he'd composed. "You Jill Tyrell, naughty little squirrel, remind me a bit of my Uncle Cyril."
• The bereavement group where Sue scoffs cream cakes and Jill nuzzles Sue's breasts.
• Boston's More Than A Feeling playing during the caravan theft scene.

What was bad about it?
• The overkill of unnecessary vulgarity such as Dennis forcing Linda into oral sex, Linda cleaning out an old ladies “downstairs” with what looked like industrial cleaning fluid and Glenn being sodomised in prison ("I bent down to pick up my Wash & Go and he came and went"); all of which were not so much disappointing in their lack of humour, but more so that to descend to such senseless, facile jokes was incongruent with the rest of the superb script.
• Marc Wootton's Dennis, one awful character too many.
• The mixed upper and lower case letters in the “HAPPY WEdding” sign at Jill and Glenn’s nuptials was too contrived in its construction.
• The mention-a-biscuit-to-get-a-laugh bit. Glenn – "They had to remove most of my guts. I can only manage a Nice biscuit." At least it wasn't a Hobnob.

Swinging, Five

Friday 9 September 2005
What to say if you like it
A comedy sketch show about sex that Five pulled off quite successfully (geddit?). Although nothing was really hilarious, there were no real horrors, either. Well worth a second date.
What to say if you dislike it
Trust Five to choose carnal activities as the subject for a comedy series. Then again, we should be grateful that they didn't come up with sketch show about their other preoccupations, Hitler and sea mammals.

What was good about it?
• The cast of Clare Wille, Dominic Coleman, David Armand, Jo Joyner, Ella Kenion and Tom Price. Our favourites were Jo, who we loved in No Angels, Ella, who we loved in The Catherine Tate Show, and Tom, who we don't think we've seen before.
• No canned laughter
• The posh old women chatting over a genteel cup of tea. "Nigel took me over the patio table. Big as a rolling pin. Couldn't sit down for a week."
• Suzie introduces her friend to her husband-to-be – the obviously gay Jeremy. "Suzie's gonna take a chance on me and I'm going to be her man after midnight."
• Sex therapist Patty Edwards who is rather disgusted by "the downstairs front business" and was close to vomiting when cunnilingus came up.
• Tim sees old schoolfriend Guy in a gym changing room and reminds him, in a very loud voice, of their days at scout camp, indulging in "salty sucks".
• The man who has been imprisoned in Spain and is in no hurry to return to his wife, despite (because of) being locked up "with vibrant young men, some of them no better than animals."
• The employee who has been caught searching on the internet for porn claims he's dyslexic and comes up with an excuse for all his search terms. Hot Asian teens – "I was actually looking for hot Asian tents. I'm going camping in Cambodia." Big bouncy tits – "Tots. A nursery for Tom. He's massive." Cum all over my face – "Gum all over my face. I'd been chewing bubble gum and it popped." Anal action movies – "banal action movies". Fisting – "fishing". Fucking – "ducking… in the event of a terrorist attack". Big cocks – "opening a chicken farm." Dido – "I was actually looking for dildo."
• The farting lap dancer
• The girl who is told a second before meeting her new boyfriend's friends that he told them she was Spanish so she has to play along immediately.

What was bad about it?
• If we're being picky, a few of the sketches were only quite amusing (but that's better than most sketch shows where there are normally a handful of complete duds). The items that we didn't love quite so much were: the woman who wants her partner to use secret words of love ("Tickle my fairy pocket"); the swinging parents; the compliment-craving wife; the violent, racist new boyfriend; and art teacher Miss Beesley seducing schoolboy Nick

The Green Green Grass, BBC1

Friday 9 September 2005
What to say if you liked it
A skilful spin-off of the best comedy show in the history of our chucklesome island, in which John Challis reprises, and emboldens, his turn as miserly car dealer Boycie.
What to say if you didn’t like it
A spin-off in the sense it was brutally and clumsily severed from the corpse of Only Fools And Horses and spiralled anonymously into oblivion.

What was good about it?
• The biggest challenge facing John Sullivan was to morph Boycie from the sneering spendthrift cipher he existed as during Only Fools… into a believable, profound protagonist whom the audience could sympathise with. And he pretty much pulled it off.
• Sullivan also needed to shape Marlene from little more than a catalyst stooge with whom Delboy could antagonise Boycie with (if Boycie was a “jaffa”, how
did he father Tyler?). And again, Sullivan made her much more rounded than she ever was in Only Fools….
• Boycie’s familiar exasperation at the obstacles life places in front of him.
The sharp script which provided plenty of amusing jokes. “Marlene’s gone off to a beauty spa,” declared Boycie, to which the visiting Denzil replied: “I’ve always admired her Dunkirk spirit.”
• Delboy’s influence was used sparingly, but effectively. Boycie griped that people who drop by always want a favour from him, giving the example of Delboy who’d dropped by the car dealership and flogged him “33 bottles of Latvian chanvier”.
• Boycie’s unease when it was revealed the recently released Driscoll brothers knew they were jailed on the evidence of a supergrass; and his consequent petrification when he learned they knew the identity of the sneak.
• Boycie’s stilted pleasantries towards Marlene after he quickly sold his home and business. “Hello darling, it’s wonderful to see you,” he fawned. “What’s happened!” sha snapped. “Maybe we could have an early night?” “Alright,” she countered, calling his bluff. “Get up to that bedroom!”
• After getting lost and being benignly mugged in the local pub, the Boyce clan reach their resplendent country pile late in the evening. “It’s very dark!” quailed Marlene. “It’s what they call in the country – night!” came Boycie’s answer through gritted teeth.

What was bad about it?
• It’s not that long since another comedy show used pretty much the same plot and title (Simon Day’s Grass).
• As with virtually all sitcom debuts (with the exception of Father Ted), there is an inherent stiffness and awkwardness, like an old man climbing into the bath, as the characters shuffle on display their defining traits and disappear stage left again.
Admittedly, with Boycie and Marlene the process was merely a refresher and so less onerous than introducing their son Tyler, who appeared as a whining, echoing blob of complaints, and farm manager Elgin, whose first scene was overlong.
• The ruinous effect on the jocular momentum of the canned laughter which was like trying to enjoy a pint of sweet cider whilst being pestered by a swarm of inquisitive flies.
• The theme song
• The country bumpkin stereotypes.

The Abbey, ITV1

Wednesday 14 February 2007
Did we like it?
A cracking cast (Morwenna Banks, Omid Djalili, Liz Smith, Reece Shearsmith, Miranda Hart and, er, Russell Brand and Marti Pellow) couldn't disguise the fact that there were very few laughs to be had in this sit-com set in a celebrity detox centre. (The Abbey= The Priory. Geddit?) Taking lazy potshots at easy targets, we were reminded of that dreadful Harry Enfield sitcom Celeb. We expected better from Banks and the Baby Cow production team.

What was good about it?
• Morwenna Banks as faded rock star Marianne (An amalgam of Stevie Nicks and Courtney Love) is always worth watching, but her own script gave very little likeability to the character.
• The running (revolting) gag about Rasmus Hardiker's character's impetigo, and how his soiled facial dressings kept ending up in various drinks and meals.
• Russell Brand was far less painful than we thought he'd be, and apart from a lame bit of slapstick with a cream pie, was almost understated.
• Liz Smith's nymphomaniac OAP raised a few smiles - and turned a few stomachs - with her antics.

What was bad about it?
• We love Reece Shearsmith, but his vet masquerading as a psychologist just seemed like a left over character that hadn't made the cut for The League of Gentlemen.
• The cast really seemed to be wading through treacle with the script. Even the normally reliable Omid Djalili and Miranda Hart couldn't inspire proceedings. We watched it a second time, and reckoned we didn't laugh once, and only smiled a handful of times. We're all for giving programmes time to develop, but will be amazed if this is commissioned for a series.
• Marti Pellow. Apparently a shit-eating grin constitutes acting. Here's a heads-up for you Marti – it doesn't.

TV Heaven Telly Hell, Channel 4

Monday 23 July 2007
Did we like it?
If this show was hopelessly marooned in a lifeboat adrift on an endless ocean sharing the vessel with other comedy kindred such as QI and Have I Got News For You, it would be one of the first to be clubbed to death with a spare oar and tossed overboard (after the arms have been removed should the food supply get a bit low).

What was good about it?
• This show does work as a format and last series produced some splendid comedy moments, as well as genuine enlightenment in how TV can both scrape the sky and drown in the sewer. We remember Johnny Vaughan’s show in which he recalled a fantastic documentary about a group of bikers or David Mitchell’s spluttered venom for the Heaven & Earth Show.
• Sean Lock is usually a very funny host, but even he became waterlogged with despair with the drab Dee.

What was bad about it?
• Jack Dee was perhaps the most apathetic guest on a TV comedy show since Anne Robinson sprawled herself all over What’s The Problem? in the deluded belief that haughtily brandishing her Weakest Link persona would be enough to succeed.
• We hope it’s because he’d writing a new series of the brilliant Lead Balloon, but Dee appeared to have made his three ‘Hell’ selections about five minutes before recording – and what made matters worse is that they were each utterly uninspired.
• Royal It’s A Knockout has been slated so much in the past 20 years that it would probably wish it could have sought sanctuary in a gulag. Dee didn’t add anything more to the bile already spewed; indeed his anaemic observations enhanced the memories of the show as John Travolta and Cliff Richard scarpered about in silly costumes.
• While his alleged hatred of City Hospital and A Question of Sport were little more than gripes that you wouldn’t even bother writing to the council about. In fact, City Hospital had to be ridiculed through clips of the reliably ostentatious Brian Blessed to scrape laughs from the impassive faces of the audience so bland and inoffensive is the show usually. However, David Mitchell managed to hilariously vent his loathing of the similarly bland Heaven & Earth Show, so the real fault here is Dee’s lack of preparation and lethargy.
• Even worse was his soggy diatribe against A Question of Sport, which faltered because, despising sport, Dee had rarely watched the show and so wasn’t perceptive enough pick out the real bugbears. Instead he aimed aimless pot shots at Bill Beaumont, David Coleman and Ian Botham’s hair 20 years too late, and was reduced to mocking the largely anonymous title sequence.
• His ignorance of sport was shown when he moaned about rugby that “we don’t win anything anyway”, oblivious to the fact that he is resident in the nation of the current world champions.
• His sole choice of TV Heaven was also inappropriate as he lauded Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy noting that it was made “when TV took time to do things nicely”. A fine sentiment of what was no doubt a fine drama, but how he hoped to encapsulate the magic of it on a programme that races against itself deliberately not taking its time, and thereby failed to offer a glimpse of Tinker, Tailor’s masterly qualities, was mystifying.

The Best of the Worst, Channel 4

Friday 1 September 2006
Did we like it?
Yes, we liked it but also despaired at how emblematic it was of the dearth of innovation in TV. As Eight Out Of Ten Cats finishes it blurs seamlessly into another comedy panel game in the same way as over-hyped Ibiza DJs segue one monochrome tune into the next.

What was good about it?
• David Mitchell was as ever, except in Law of the Playground, utterly hilarious. When Johnny Vaughan described enforced cannibalism as “odd”, Mitchell launched into a diatribe about how cannibalism was something more than just “odd”.
• Alexander Armstrong, the Prince Charles of Have I Got News For You who must be fed up of waiting for his time to ascend to the throne, has decided to spread his wings a bit and get in some practice at hosting a comedy panel show following in the footsteps of rival Dara O’Briain.
• David Mitchell’s exasperation over the woman who claims to live on a diet of just air and light.
• Johnny Vaughan provided a decent foil for Mitchell, although the relationship did seem a little contrived. Vaughan would add a little detail to the questions set by Armstrong, sometimes approaching them from an amusing angle, before Mitchell would lurch in and jovially cut Vaughan’s observation in two.
• Rob Rouse mentioning those great, lost grumpy bastards of British music The Jesus & Mary Chain. Although, he twice blotted his copybook by: (a) calling them Goths, and (b) neglecting to include a joke in his quip.
• David Mitchell’s impression of an airline check-in operator typing loads of pointless details into their computer, and his glowering rage over the notion of a dog translator.
• Johnny Vaughan (who it must be mentioned has stayed off TV just long enough for us to remember why we liked him so much on the Big Breakfast but also to forget the awful ’Orrible and his BBC3 chat show) complaining about how cameras always pan away from violence or pitch invaders at sporting events while the commentators quickly clamber aboard their high horses to righteously patronise both the viewers and the perpetrators, as even harmless streakers are denounced as scum who should be sent to the gas chambers.

What was bad about it?
• Another Friday, another comedy panel game show. It’s now getting like those spectacular vistas you see on natural history programmes of the millions of wildebeest amorphously trudging across the Serengeti plains. Occasionally, a few will be picked off by lions or crocodiles so why can’t we do the same? Gather together all the tired, familiar faces who appear on these shows and tell them they have to travel 300 miles as a herd across the Serengeti. Sure, some will end up as lion food, but that’ll mean less homogenised comedy panel shows can be produced.
• The dreadful theme music; actually it’s not music it’s muzak resembling as it does The Arctic Monkeys’ … Dancefloor as played by soulless session musicians (or if they’re busy, The Feeling) to be played in provincial East Midlands supermarkets while the shoppers are also poisoned by the asbestos-derived cleaning fluids used on the floor and a sense of eternal despair.
• Alexander Armstrong’s awful joke about the Uruguayan rugby team who ate their dead team mates to stay alive after crashing in the mountains. “One surviving player refused to eat a whole one of his dead team mates as he had a nut allergy.”
• Johnny Vaughan’s efforts to mock his own lack of hair as though by shaving his head he has deigned to let the rest of the world know of his baldness when in fact it was obvious about a decade ago.

Fear, Stress & Anger, BBC2

Thursday 22 February 2007
Did we like it?
The BBC's comedy commissioners have done it again – given time and money to an utterly useless sitcom that no-one will admire and which will join the likes of Blessed, Mad About Alice and According To Bex as a stain on the BBC's reputation for comedy greatness. Dad's Army, Fawlty Towers and The Good Life will be spinning in their graves.


What was good about it?
• Pippa Haywood is in it. We love her. She's far too good for this rot.
• The only scene that was vaguely witty was the dinner party from hell, but that was then ruined by a loo crashing through the ceiling. Ha bloody ha.


What was bad about it?
• Guess what part Peter Davison was playing? Yes, that's the easiest question of the week, isn't it? Of course he was a middle-aged, suburban guy in the midst of a career crisis, family turmoil and car/plumbing/erection troubles. He always bloody is. Enough!
• A brief list of what was appalling: the clichéd portrayal of advertising; the senile gran (dementia – what a laugh!"); the cute dog (accidentally painted green); the horrible teenage daughters; lack of wit; old-fashioned style in the script by Michael Aitkens (of Waiting For God fame); Mariella Frostrup's introductory voiceover; the main character is called Martin Chadwick, possibly the most mundane name imaginable; the C-word "joke" (it was consultant rather than the same word minus six letters); the nod to modernity by featuring a webcam; and monotonous monologues such as Martin's "All that effort and struggle to end up as decaying organisms. Waiting to be mulched up and ploughed back into the ground. To fertilise the next generation of greedy and mediocre nobodies."
• Using Don't Stop Me Now by Queen as the theme song – and as a scene-dividing jingle – only served to get us shouting "Do stop it now. It is rubbish."
• We reckon the BBC hoped they'd have a new Victor Meldrew on their hands. They've got Loser Mildew instead.

Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee, BBC1

What to say if you liked it
Vivid drama full of good characters and amusing aphorisms…
What to say if you disliked it
… but only blessed with a plot (and an implausible one at that) in the final few minutes

What was good about it?
• The use of Mud's Tiger Feet to open the show. Sadly that was the high point.
• Ace Bhatti, one of our favourite TV actors, as Deepak Sharma, "the Prince Charming of Chigwell, with his mock Tudor palace" and a new wife Chila (Ayesha Dharker). She isn't really into material things but pointed out: "It's nice to have a Jacuzzi and a fully equipped utility room."
• Laila Rouass, after lousy turns in Hollyoaks and Footballers' Wives, comes good as Tania, the most Westernised of the three central characters. She's working on a daily cable TV show featuring supernatural pets (an example of the jokiness that often jarred) but is desperate to break into documentaries and make a film for the prestigious Urban Stories strand.
• Indira Joshi doing yet another faultless turn as the mother who is resigned to life's hardships but spends her time clutching at small victories. She's the one who utters the title, but she also brags that her daughter is marrying a millionaire, and sighs: "My poor baby's going to have the dirty done to her tonight."
• Meera Syal doing a Victoria Wood by performing in a play what she wrote – and just about pulling it off successfully. Her character Sunita dropped out of university to marry Akaash (Sanjeev Bhaskar as a rather clichéd psychotherapist) and is now trapped by her two kids (one a teen, one a toddler) and a lousy, lowly job for a legal firm. To cope with her bitter frustration, she indulges in a little bit of quiet self harm in the bathroom (which her complacent husband fails to spot despite all those certificates hanging on his wall).
• The three witches aka the aunts who sit together, united by their disapproving glances and petty criticisms. (Our fave was the one with the spectacular specs)

What was bad about it?
• Tania's decision to sell out her friends – and destroy their lives – by making a documentary called Love Leyton Style. It didn't ring true that she'd indulge in such a brutal betrayal just to boost her career. But it did ring true that her production company boss would cynically, lazily suggest she abandon plans for a programme on people trafficking and make a colourful film about "your community" instead. As one of Tania's colleagues pointed out: "The ghetto is mainstream now."
• Deepak also became nasty just to suit the plot when he told wife Chila that he wanted to start a family: "You're no spring chicken and I want to be fit enough to kick a ball around with my boy."
• Although we loved the three witches, they always appear in Asian dramas so were nothing new.
• The farting horse joke, the grey pubic hair observation, the Elvis impersonator – all felt stale
• The use of the voiceover (from Tania's perspective) which is creeping into too much TV fiction these days as an easy way for writers to set the tone when they should be able to do it through their characters

Comedy Connections, BBC1

Comedy Connections: Monty Python, BBC1
What to say if you liked it
The fascinating story of how the Pythons came together and then drifted apart, coupled with the brilliant archive footage from the BBC's rich back catalogue.
What to say if you didn't like it
The BBC pat themselves on the back for bringing us a legendary TV programme in a fawning documentary that failed to give any information that 90 per cent of Python fans didn't know already.

What was good about it?
• The charming Eric Idle came out with virtually all the best lines: He claimed he wanted Terry Gilliam to join the Do Not Adjust Your Set team because he liked his Afghan coat and fancied his cute girlfriend; he called John Cleese "the great whore" for being the link between all the Python elements; and he described the BBC in the late 60s as "like a retirement home for the RAF."
• The information that Terry Jones and Michael Palin wrote together, as did Cleese and Graham Chapman, but Terry Gilliam and Eric Idle wrote alone. Sketches were then read to each other "over the kitchen table", which must have been a sight to behold (Idle: "It was better if you had a partner because then they could laugh when you read your stuff").
• Michael Palin admitting that all the Pythons, deep down, had a horrible part of themselves that wanted the others to fail after they all moved on. Cleese claimed they all wanted success for each other afterwards – just not too much.
• Some great archive footage of the tremendous body of work this group produced between them over the years.
• The nostalgic retro-style credits and graphics.

What was bad about it?
- Comedy Connections sounds like it should be the title of a daytime game show hosted by Lennie Bennett.
• At times it was depressing. BBC1 controller of the time Sir Paul Fox and the head of comedy Michael Mills simply let these incredible talents make the show they wanted. As Idle put it: "It was the golden age of TV executives... there weren't any." As Doon Mackichan's voiceover hinted at, it's little short of a tragedy that such ways of working in TV are now almost completely a thing of the past.
• While it's great that all the Pythons went on to great success after the show, you can't help but feel a little sad that none of them are doing TV comedy anymore.
• The programme makers managed decent interviews with Palin, Idle, Cleese and Gilliam and one couldn't help feeling cramming this into half an hour was a bit of a waste.


Comedy Connections: Goodness Gracious Me, BBC1
Highlights
1. The sketch about an Asian vermin exterminator called East Meets Pest who recommends a rival Asian contractor after he fails to get rid of an infestation of mice, saying that he doesn’t actually kill the mice but makes them behave so badly they are reincarnated as pebbles “which are much easier to control”.
2. The appalling manners of Mr Cheque Please who in the samples comments gauchely after a woman returns from the toilet where she “powdered her nose” that it
was “shame as I bet that geezer £20 you were having a shit”.
3. Meera Syal bemoaning the prosaic career opportunities for Asian actresses in their 20s in Britain that are limited to “a victim of an arranged marriage; the sister of a victim of an arranged marriage; the best friend of the victim of an arranged marriage”. And that she knew she was getting old when she was offered the role of “the mother of the victim of an arranged marriage”.
Lowlights
1. The Going For An English sketch is still funny but like the Pythons’ Dead Parrott and Radiohead’s Creep it has become an albatross around their necks which distracts attention from the many other hilarious characters created in the series and the subsequent triumph of The Kumars At No 42.
2. We never discovered why the series ended so abruptly after three successful series (although we can probably guess). Perhaps tellingly Kulvinder Ghir and Nina Wadia disclosed their exasperation while Sanjeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal (who both turned up in the excellent Kumars) were either not asked the question or declined to answer.
3. The contributions to Goodness Gracious Me of Kulvinder Ghir and Nina Wadia seemed marginalised and were merely passed off with a number of vague platitudes.

Harry Hill’s TV Burp, ITV1

Harry Hill’s TV Burp
Were the sketches a belch or a hiccup?
• Introduction: Geri Halliwell limbers up for comeback gigs. Emmerdale introduces Yorkshire cocktails ‘A pint and a shut your gob’. Natasha Kaplinsky rejects "dressed like hooker" claims, and Jeremy Clarkson launches a new game show. Belch
• Age Swap. Mike Reid as an unconvincing Rastafarian. Funny when he’s trying to talk rasta to an agent, who then tells colleague the so-called rasta sounded like ….. Mike Reid! Belch
• Holiday Showdown. Delight as family gets holiday travelling round Birmingham Canal System. ‘What’s that?’ says wife. Dad hates Welsh people so, of course, they meet the Jones family round the next corner. Hiccup.
• John Lydon Shark Attack. Pistols man meets Jaws. Hiccup.
• Eastenders. Kat meets baby with words ‘I told you mum she should get rid of you.’ Plus a montage of tea references. Belch
• No Going Back. Chaos At The Castle. Lots of standing about not saying anything, proving "less haste, more speed" isn't always the best maxim. Hiccup.
• Nigel Marven (again). This time it’s meerkats and their cuteness, followed by footage of "evil" meerkats causing Thatcher to fall, Windsor Castle to burn down etc. Belch
• Shark fights toaster and wins. Hiccup
• Corrie's missing bike. Zubin/Jess kiss and Eiffel Tower lights up. Ken Barlow hates quiz shows. Belch
• The Bill. Woman who looks like back of transit van. Kerry’s funeral and dyslexic florists. Hiccup
• Emmerdale. Sam Dingle’s chat-up lines. Cain’s temper. Belch.
• The Real Mrs Robinson. Funniest item on show. Minging mum and daughter try to get bloke to take them to Milan. Faced with the dismal prospect, he sends them both to Milan without him. Mum can’t get babysitter so daughter takes friend. Belch
• Coronation Street. Chesney and Meerkat knickers. Baby Amy Barlow on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Belch.
Totals – Belches: Eight; Hiccups Five.
Note to producers: It is alright to have audience hysteria when the material is excellent, but when it's not, we end up wondering what on earth they’re laughing instead of concentrating on the show.

Harry Hill’s TV Burp
Were the items in Saturday's show big belches of humour or mere hiccups?
• Introduction: Exorcisms on Casualty; machismo on Emmerdale; Alan Titchmarsh claiming there are only 20 mammals in Ireland; indecipherable dialogue in Corrie
and Monarch of the Glen. Big belch of laughter.
• Coronation Street: Ashley’s hand-like feet; Deirdre’s jellyfish wedding hat; a BB Nadia look-a-like; and Dev’s insensitivity to his jailed wife. Belch.
• The Bill: Okaro recruits a new giant police officer; suicidal babies; and how paracetamol can cheer you up. Belch.
• Beyond River Cottage: A lack of hygiene in the kitchen; Hugh’s hearts and tongues special for Valentine’s Day doesn’t receive any takers; and Swiss Toni’s new career as a Dorset fisherman. Belch.
• Casualty: The two blonde pink nurses – the short one who does “lengths” in the scenes and the taller one who does “widths”. Belch.
• Fooling Hitler: How the British fooled Hitler with canvas planes and decoy airfields and women on horseback with trumpets. Belch.
• Second half introduction: Suicidal birds near Titchmarsh, and Beyond River Cottage’s butcher gets his comeuppance. A meek hiccup of humour.
• Wife Swap: Bad tempered Phil’s out of date food. Hiccup
• EastEnders: Ian Beale rebreands; the “full” nail bar; Spencer spreading a piece of toast like a small child; Demi Miller’s birth sounding like a Formula One race; and Kat laughing and crying simultaneously. Belch.
• Search For The Deadliest Shark: Nigel Marven defends sharks, and Nigel’s pal gets bitten. Hiccup.
• Emmerdale: Paul Shane gets a job on EastEnders. Belch.
Totals Big Belches of Laughter: Eight; Meek Hiccups of Humour: Three

Harry Hill’s TV Burp
Were the items in Saturday's show big belches of humour or mere hiccups??
• Introduction where Harry mocked Britain’s worst sniper in Spooks when the assassin shot a dog from two yards away. Belch
• Holiday Showdown, where we were introduced to Mr Jeffries a “bodyguard to the stars”, whose clients included Harry Enfield. “Security for Harry Enfield: the toughest job of them all!” Belch.
• Holby City, where Robert Kilroy-Silk’s doppelganger could be seen in the background. “I’d like to see a white nurse, please.” Belch.
• EastEnders where Pauline is cleaning her bricks in the dark, which led on to EastEnders Top Trumps. “Cleanliness of Bricks: Pauline Fowler: 9; Rose Miller
2.” Belch.
• Jennie Bond’s Royals, featuring Jennie’s stand-up/name drop routine about Diana’s tights. Belch.
• Emmerdale with the imaginary ferret in Zak Dingle’s trousers and the Dingles’ party with Dr Robert Winston Dingle. Belch.
• Trains With Pete Waterman. A meek hiccup of humour.
• British Isles – A Natural History, with Alan Titchmarsh as a Neanderthal compared to Zak Dingle. Hiccup.
• “Jennie Bond” and “Pete Waterman” fight. Hiccup.
• Headlines, including fans of EastEnders’ Ferreira clan hold a benefit for their salvation – in an empty room. Hiccup.
• How To Be A Property Developer, where the host didn’t move his arms at all. Belch.
• Coronation Street, where Baby Barlow seemed to come through the door in his pram under his own steam. Belch.
• Beyond River Cottage, where Hugh stuck his arms into a cow’s rear for warmth. Belch.
• Wife Swap where a husband gave a prejudiced view of the Germans. Belch.
• Rosemary & Thyme, when the pair awkwardly got into their car. Hiccup.
• The Bill, where June and Gabriel were talking in a car but seemed to go faster when June was talking. Belch.
• Mediums, with Gordon Smith who was described as a “psychic barber” (“What’s that? He looks into the future and predicts a hair cut?”) And later, when an elderly supporter of Gordon “stakes her life” that success won’t change him. (“It’s easy for you to say, you’ve had most of it.”) Belch.
• Christmas previews with “Ferreira” Roche Chocolates, Hiccup.
Totals Belches: 12; Hiccups: Six.

Harry Hill's TV Burp
1. Emmerdale’s timid Emily and her fear of clowns. “The way they squeeze into cars. There shouldn’t be so many people in a car!” she wailed.
2. Alan Titchmarsh’s eulogy of the beauty of our nation from British Isles: A Natural History played over grotesque scenes from reality television such as Booze Britain and Wife Swap.
3. Burger Barry from Booze Britain and his “fantastic” anecdotes appearing on Jonathan Ross, Richard And Judy and Frank Skinner.
4. The indestructible Meya from Corrie, who first crashed her car and then was hit by a lorry. At which point Harry takes over and she is crushed by a 10 tonne weight, before he cuts her torso in two – but she still lives.
5. Building on Anotonio Fargas’s nickname of Huggy, Harry gives all the other celebrities monikers – the best of which is Paul Burrell’s of “Traitor”.

Harry Hill's TV Burp
1 The Musicality contenders performing a version of Dry Your Eyes by The Streets
2 Poking fun at the Essex wives version of Wife Swap including the spelling of Leesa, the horse statues, fishing hooligans, the dog muck covered Wife Swap garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, the confusion over Paul's remark "I don't think you should judge a book by its cover, but when it comes to appearance I think you can" and Harry's observation: "When you're sitting at home watching a large lady retching as she picks up dog muck, you're thinking 'John Logie Baird – if only you could see what your invention of television has been used for. You'll be so proud."
3 The tarty old woman in Britain's Worst Mother-In-Law ("Call Wayne Rooney")
4 Coronation Street: Karen's deadly weapon – the cushion.
5 Coronation Street again – The Great Blue Tit In Residence

Harry Hill's TV Burp
1 Britain's Worst Wives: Harry ridiculed the woman who said "Open Sesame" to her microwave because she didn't know how it opened; sneered at the mother who put her kids to bed in school uniform to save time in the morning; and delighted in the woman who served pasta with mayonnaise and corned beef – "Pasta Chavonnaise". "She also does penne con ketchup and linguine al Branston."
2 The Bill: spotlighting "wibbly wobbly", June getting a stitch after just three yards and the suspect distracted by "a fly"
3 Conviction: how Reece Dinsdale's character was always blurred in the BBC3 drama
4 The Codray family's unhealthy diet in Holiday Showdown – and their love of the waxworks
5 The brain-numbing prospect of another Walford Wanderers storyline in EastEnders.

Harry Hill's TV Burp, ITV1, Saturday 17 March 2007
Highlights
• Jim Carver's risqué "Flip him over and have him up the M6" statement in The Bill
• Action man Bear Grylls flapping about like a seal as he tried to get out an ice hole and then drying himself on... "Snow! Of course! Nature's towel."
• Harry cracking a proper joke after a Freaky Eaters clip showing a woman eating Minstrels plucked from between her legs. "She's under pressure. She must have had pre-Minstrel tension!"
• Harry doing the EastEnders theme on bike horns again.
• Smallest Amount of Sick Produced When Being Sick of the Week, preceding a clip from Emmerdale
• Harry's Corrie character rhymes eg "She drinks in pubs, she murdered Charlie Stubbs, Tracey Barlow!"
• The skit with Pearl taking an age to answer the door in Emmerdale, and nicking Harry's Crunchie along the way.
• Australian Princess contender Kylie Booby being too thick to realise what was meant when she was compared with a house where the lights are on but no-one's home.
• The dinosaur crushing the bluetit in the fight.

Harry Hill's TV Burp, ITV1, Saturday 30 December 2006
Top 10 Highlights
10. EastEnder Billy's origami skills being so poor that it sends a baby into a coma.
9. The Worst Limerick of the Week, from Heartbeat.
8. The exploding bra on Heartbeat.
7. TV Highlight of the Week - a table being cleaned in Corrie.
6. Harry noting that there always has to be a wedding at Christmas in one of the soaps, before giving one of his asides to the adjacent camera: "Of course, in real life, no one gets married at Christmas... because it's Christmas."
5. Harry highlighting how he likes to sit down to some uplifting drama at Christmas, only to be greeted by assorted murders, crying, fights, threats and screaming matches on the soaps.
4. The Corrie sketch that resulted from Cilla saying she wanted to swim with dolphins and Les noting that no dolphins live in their area. It featured Wendy Peters meeting the new family of dolphins who had moved in down the road talking about how they'd just been to 'Frainsbury's' (a reference to the cunning name Corrie writers gave to the local food store - Freshco's).
3. Harry complimenting the Emmerdale soap writers for their 'subtle' use of foreshadowing leading up to the murder of Tom King.
2. The Bill's DCI Manson looking at a desiccated corpse (virtually a skeleton) in a flat and commenting: "Been here a while, then?"
1. The footage of the rescue of the whale that swam up the Thames which made the creature look like Hercule Poirot (yes, you had to see this one, really).

Lowlight
The early fart gags. We can only assume that this was a sop to the ITV execs who love a bit of lowest common denominator TV and would probably take TV Burp off if it became too clever

Harry Hill's TV Burp, ITV1, Saturday 14 April 2007
Highlights
• Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber speaking about his new Joseph programme on BBC1 and asking if lightning could strike twice. Harry obliged, crisping Andy very nicely, thank you very much.
• "Do you ever wonder what Ulrika would look like on steroids?" asked Harry, followed by a nice clip from Muscle Worship: Hidden Lives.
• Harry getting in a mention of the mustard shop in Norwich. Last time he made a joke about them their business reportedly zoomed up with alarming rapidity. "Thanks for the hamper," winked Harry.
• Some more mocking of five's Mean Machines series. This week it was cranes. Harry was concerned that he'd been tricked by shows like this before and wasn't convinced that they would include cranes on tracks. He was wrong - "No crane will escape our attention, not even cranes with tracks," proclaimed the narrator.
• The funny introductory piece for Mean Machines: Ordinary Household Items - including a toaster, a kettle and the toilet.
• Billy Mitchell in EastEnders looked like he was having things packed into his trousers. Back to the studio and Harry was unpacking his groceries from his trousers, too. Just by chance, his groceries included his very own DVD. Sly.
• "Have you ever scrubbed the floor while being ridden by an imaginary cowboy?" Harry wondered. Dot Cotton has.
• Classic TV Burp clip - a dalek on Holby.
• Lots more fun with Paul Burrell and his Aussie Princess crap. This week featured a clip of him saying: "It was ox tongue, not a vagina." And then he got very angry about tea-making. Milk should always go in last, he shouted - he described this as the "Cardinal sin of teatime etiquette." Harry thought it more likely that the cardinal sin of teatime etiquette was loading up the van with the princess's stuff while she was indisposed with tea drinking.
• Harry's son Gary as Alan Sugar.
• Harry mercilessly taking the mick out of Aled Jones. Although, Aled is a top bloke. We're sure he didn't mind.
• Bear Grylls was this week trying to survive somewhere really cold. "The trick with avalanches is to read the snow," he explained. Harry revealed that what was written in the snow was: "You're wasting your time."
• Bear proving he can even survive the most inhospitable environment on earth - a Light Entertainment studio - by appearing to sing Bare Necessities.
Lowlight
• Last in the series. What a shame. But what a brilliant run as TV Burp has finally been getting the figures it deserved. Has ITV finally realised what a jewel it has here?

Harry Hill's TV Burp, ITV1, Saturday 31 March 2007
Highlights
• Jadene off The Apprentice saying "Life isn't all biscuits and sandwiches."
• Andy Jackson off The Apprentice explaining he's given up a great job, he has a lovely wife (raised eyebrows from Harry) and how he's worked all his life for his chance. Sir Sugar: "Andy, you're fired."
• Washday on The Bill, where whole estates did their washing.
• Best TV Insult of the Week: from Life on Mars, mainly to do with slang names for homosexuals and supporting Man Utd.
• Derek off of Sleep Clinic always falling out of bed. Harry suggested he sleep in a wider bed, not a "two-foot shelf". This also led into a nice sketch where Derek wandered into Harry's room and trashed it in his sleep, including poor Harry's domino set-up.
• Meryl Streep on Real Extras.
• Another Real Extras person trying to sing. It didn't go well, so he said: "Again, a difficult song to sing without a microphone or music." Harry: "Or if you can't sing."
• Bear Grylls demonstrated how to start a fire, adding "You can put the coal with a coconut tinder bundle to get fire." Harry: "Coconut Tinder Bundle? That's one of Bob Geldof's kids isn't it?"
• Most Inappropriate Excitement at Seeing a Bath of the Week. You'd think they'd only ever seen a wash basin.
• It's raining men on Casualty.
• The Real Extras guy singing Don't Go Breaking My Heart with a radiator. This was OK, but funniest was Harry walking on at the end and yelling "Happy Birthday Elton!" - Best Tribute to Elton John's Birthday of the Week.

Harry Hill's TV Burp, ITV1, Saturday 24 March 2007
Highlights
• Bagpuss ("I is well happy") updated for the kids today in response to Life on Mars' Camblewick Green segment.
• EastEnders – someone suggesting she would get Pat a £50 pampering voucher. "Get her a season ticket," said Harry.
- The brilliant piece about things escalating quickly in EastEnders, as a small nudge resulted in a cat fight and Ian Beale nonchalantly tipping over a pyramid of champagne glasses. This was followed by Harry and various lookalikes doing likewise and having a cake fight with Peggy's birthday cake. Apparently, she was 65 in the show. Mmm.
- The wonderful clips of Bear Grylls again. This week, he got lost in the Everglades, but Harry said that was nothing compared to IKEA on a Saturday and launched into a delirious rant about his wife wanting to buy lots of small candles.
- Leon's Neons in Corrie.
- The Mean Machines voiceover explaining that when tunnelling, the excess rock, when mixed with water, becomes known as 'muck'.
- The hopping in Mansfield Park (which looks dreadful. Also, was it from doing MP that Billie picked up that posh accent that she showcased on Charlotte Church the other week?)
- The cameraman being more interested in some kind of Range Rover on Emmerdale than the characters. Well, you can't blame him.
- From I Speak To Animals (subtitle: story of a charlatan): "Nicole was having trouble getting on her horse Randy". Harry: "Well, wait till you've calmed down a bit".
- The neat stitchback to Bear Grylls, who cooked a turtle (chucked whole on to a fire to boil in its shell, poor thing), as the Animal-Talker explained you can talk a spider to walk into a glass. Cut back to Harry gently encouraging a turtle into a microwave.
- The bizarre clips from Marbella Belles. First there was Lisa looking perplexed when asked about 'Blue'. For quite a while. Until reminded that was the name of her child. Then there was Jo Alexandrou with the most excruciating karaoke ever. Which she then repeated at the end of the show with Harry.

Harry Hill's TV Burp ITV1, Saturday 17 March 2007
Highlights
• Jim Carver's risqué "Flip him over and have him up the M6" statement in The Bill
• Action man Bear Grylls flapping about like a seal as he tried to get out an ice hole and then drying himself on... "Snow! Of course! Nature's towel."
• Harry cracking a proper joke after a Freaky Eaters clip showing a woman eating Minstrels plucked from between her legs. "She's under pressure. She must have had pre-Minstrel tension!"
• Harry doing the EastEnders theme on bike horns again.
• Smallest Amount of Sick Produced When Being Sick of the Week, preceding a clip from Emmerdale
• Harry's Corrie character rhymes eg "She drinks in pubs, she murdered Charlie Stubbs, Tracey Barlow!"
• The skit with Pearl taking an age to answer the door in Emmerdale, and nicking Harry's Crunchie along the way.
• Australian Princess contender Kylie Booby being too thick to realise what was meant when she was compared with a house where the lights are on but no-one's home.
• The dinosaur crushing the bluetit in the fight.

Harry Hill's TV Burp, ITV1, Saturday 10 March 2007
Highlights
• The shouting competition between the soaps. EastEnders won - "Well, they do it every week," reasoned Harry.
• Deano disappearing from EastEnders.
• Harry desperately saving his prized Waterford Crystal vase from all the mad EastEnders tantrums.
• The superb clip from Australian Princess: "I walked in and there was Paul (Burrell) and all the furniture and all the rugs were gone." Harry protested: "Not again! They were gifts from the Princess!"
• The stupid Aussie princesses talking to a vicar and asking him what he does for a living and whether he's busy at weekends.
• The mud fight on Casualty.
• Harry's cheeky dig at the ITV phone line controversy - "I might vote on Dancing on Ice... Bonnie Langford? They've still got the lines open from the last series."
• Most Inadvertantly Funny Title Sequence of the Week - the ludicrous Sleep Clinic, of course.
• The brilliant clips from The Real Extras where assorted wannabe actors tried to act aggressive like football hooligans. Mohammed was the least threatening, but one managed to shout: "Yeah, ya chicken... piece... of... dirt." Had us cowering behind the sofa. Two of them turned up on Burp for the half-time fight, but instead merely levelled harmless insults at each other.
• Lewis from Lewis lying with his feet upside down.
• Freaky Eaters this week was all about a bloke addicted to spaghetti hoops. His girlfriend was forced to eat some too: "That's the most disgusting thing I've ever had to do for my boyfriend," she said, triggering a classic Harry look to camera.
• Two very nice bits from Time Team as well. First Harry questioned why Tony Robinson had only given his team three days to complete their task before reasoning: "I suspect he wants to get back to that young girlfriend of his. 25!" He then pointed out that a ruddy man with a beard on the show appeared to have fallen in love with Tony as well as he looked at him in a bizarre, slightly scary, way.
• The Silver Surfers singing at the end.


Harry Hill's TV Burp, ITV1, Saturday 3 March 2007
Highlights
• Suicidal gnome on Corrie.
• The 'Baldies Unite' sketch which came into being after a comment about baldies uniting on EastEnders Harry ran in to join in the beating, followed by Duncan Goodhew (in towel, with goggles) and the King of Saturday late night entertainment, Al Murray.
• Dave's sister on Freaky Eaters crying while asking Dave if he could just manage to eat a McDonald's with them. Christ this country's gone to the dogs.
• The superb Emmerdale sketch where one character brought in a large framed present "as my way of saying sorry for last night." The TV Burp reveal was a whiteboard with "sorry for last night" scrawled on it.
• TV High Voice of the Week.
• Harry pointing out the increasing absurdity of Casualty – this week a woman was leaning over her balcony only to be knocked off by a bloke abseiling down her building.
• A boy on Casualty shouting "Get out of my house! Get out of my house! Get out of my house!" Harry: "I think you'll find it belongs to the council." Evil. But very, very funny.
• The Life on Meat sketch, a parody of Life on Mars, which came out of a criminal being stopped in his tracks by swinging meat in an abbattoir on The Bill - "Life on Meat - it's ITV's answer to Life on Mars, you know, like they did with Dr Who and Primeval."
• Harry lamenting that Blockbusters can get a bit heavy-handed when you're late returning a video, followed by a clip from The Bill where June's police car is crashed into by a criminal (we know he was a criminal because he had a balaclava on) and then he reached in to grab a video tape on the front seat.
• The QVC-like advertising of jewellery on The Bill.
• TV Highlight of the Week: A fat bloke on Sleep Clinic rolling around mumbling in his sleep before jerking awake. "What did you dream about?" asked someone. "Fish."
• Jason's Book of Nursery Rhymes from Corrie.
• The Corrie cast as Dad's Army.
• And finally, thecustard.tv's own award for most surreal sketch ever shown on prime time Saturday evening on ITV – 1970s TV Burp (added in to accompany some 'new' show about a family living in 1970s conditions, "It Never Did Me Any Harm") complete with TV Burp-style gags from actual shows from the 1970s, a superb 1970s set, and Harry with hair and a moustache.

Harry Hill's TV Burp, ITV1, Saturday 24 February 2007
Highlights
• Paul Burrell on Australian Princess (is there really *another* series of this?): "I was the head of Princess Diana's household for many years." Harry: "Really? You've never mentioned that before."
• The 'extreme sports' Australian Princess wannabe wobbling around uncertainly on a skateboard.
• The horrendously complicated five-number system for setting up tube carriages on Monster Moves (yes, a show about moving large things. Save us all.) Even the foreman had no clue how it worked, although the workman he was explaining it to really made us laugh as he nodded and pretended to understand what was required.
• "Primeval now," announced Harry, "ITV's answer to Doctor Who... it's taken two years, but they've done it."
• TV Expert of the Week: Some bloke explaining that a white out is caused by snow making a whiteness.
•Corrie's Dev appearing to pull a packet of Garibaldi from his pants.
•Corrie's Steve McDonald being careless with his money. Harry nipped in to snaffle up £10 he dropped: "£10 is £10. And when I save that up to £1000, I can leave my wife," chirruped Harry.
• The superb dog-sofa chariot race between Harry and Les Battersby, although the referee seemed slightly unconvincing.
• The clip of a taxi careering into a flock of sheep on Emmerdale: "Richard Hammond gets new job as a shepherd," said Harry, delighted.
• The bad guy in Lewis using a wine bottle to steer his wheelchair.
•Harry's Emmerdale Undertakers list of how to cremate someone, including the Woolpack option of it burning with explosives and being flown into by a light aircraft.
• TV Highlight of the Week: A bloke making sleep noises on Sleep Clinic.
• Harry lamenting the end of Nick Baker's Weird Creatures through song, only to receive a custard pie in the face and a "cheeky git" comment from Nick himself.

Harry Hill's TV Burp, ITV1, Saturday 17 February 2007
Highlights
• Harry's bemusement that Steve Sidwell of Reading (and husband of a 'WAG Boutique' WAG) has his wedding vows tattooed on his back.
• Harry's quizzical look at why the WAGS of WAGS Boutique called their shop 'Bows', before launching into a bit about bow-legged people turning up to buy their clothes there.
• Harry also highlighted how the WAGS failed to get any real stars to attend their opening ("I know Jools Oliver... but she'd never do it," said one, probably called Christelle). They did get Leilani to turn up, though. "Leilani?" said Harry, "Isn't that a type of conifer?"
• The stuff on Nick Baker's Weird Creatures was again top notch. This week, Nick was out looking for a basking shark. Harry explained how David Attenborough would prepare for this by doing copious research. It then cut to Nick's effort as he shouted at a bloke on a boat: "Allo! Haven't seen any basking sharks have you?"
• Nick Baker: "Seeing these otters has more than made up for us not seeing a basking shark." Harry Hill: "No it hasn't."
• Nick's continuing failure to deliver again had Harry exasperated: "Sunfish, seal, some seagulls, three plankton and a sick ferret?! You've got a nerve."
• Sam Tyler on Life On Mars experiencing Jade Goody's perfume.
• Some superb stuff about BBC mega-flop When Will I Be Famous. Harry pointed out "It's on the same time as me," (safe in the knowledge he's deservedly kicking Graham Norton's arse up and down the country and back again in the ratings) before showing a clip of Norton telling viewers not to try the next act at home. What was the act? Two people on elongated unicycles holding a long bar from which a woman was holding on to a rope by her teeth while twirling round and round. "Mum, can you get those two unicycles out the cupboard so I can copy something I've seen on TV?" called Harry.
• EastEnders' Max's boob job.
• Aaron on Jamie's Chef explaining the perils of fire, before carelessly flicking his cigarette away, so TV Burp followed the cigarette's course... as it landed in some hay which led to some petroleum which blew up The Cock pub.
• The wonderful stuff about Kelly Osbourne Turning Japanese. "I haven't made this up," murmured Harry conspiratorially, "This is an actual show." It's so nice to know that you have company in being completely bewildered at ITV's dogged perseverance with this awful, talentless imbecile and her immediate family.
• Most of the gags surrounded a poor Japanese class being subjected to Kelly singing Neverending Story at them and then being asked to answer insultingly easy questions, but the summit saw Harry at his imperious best. Kelly crawled into what looked like a microwave, saying: "I wouldn't like being in here if I was a dog." Cut to Harry with one of his patented sideways glances that bring the house down.

Harry Hill's TV Burp, ITV1, Saturday 10 February 2007
Highlights
• Jewellery Tourette's Syndrome on The Bill. "Earrings!"
• The Bill: PC Reg Hollis looking at CCTV footage of a new suspect. "He looks familiar..." "Yes," noted Harry, "It's Den off of EastEnders."
• The EastEnders beer bottle dismissed by Peggy (is she still on it?).
• TV Highlight of the Week: A woman turning down Phil Mitchell's proposal of a cup of coffee.
• Harry ogling a magazine about manatees after Laurence off of Myths, Magic and Monsters described them as very womanly.
• Harry's evident excitement at the irresistible cliffhangers on the Farm of Fussy Eaters (will someone eat a sausage? will a woman get over the shock of eating her first raspberry?) and So You Think You Can Nurse (what will happen to Gail Porter's blister?)
• The fat appartheid disgracefully demonstrated on Farm of Fussy Eaters when a medium-sized person and an overweight person strolled along a pathway yet were cruelly separated by a white line.
• The real life Mousetrap game on The Bill (a PC falling into a large bin).
• The Most Elaborate Dog Wee of the Week. Inpired. Can't wait for next week's.
• "What's going on on Waterloo Road, then?" asked Harry, before a clip of general mayhem involving flying cushions, some kind of fight, some bottle of fluid being flung about and a girl looking bewildered. "Nothing much then," said a startled Harry, breathily.
• Roddy's pants on fire on Emmerdale.
• The news that Emmerdale is celebrating its 500 year history with a pageant. "500 years?" whispered Harry, "Hmm, seems longer."
• Harry's very funny and overlong rant about wives and their comments when driving and how they don't want to drive so they can have a drink and then they don't so neither of you end up drinking... a glimpse of Harry's own personal hell, there.
• The Reggae Reggae Sauce song by Levi Roots (aka Keith) from Dragons' Den

Harry Hill's TV Burp, ITV1, Saturday 3 February 2007
Highlights
• "When you're insulting someone, you must remember to be as specific as possible," advised Harry, followed by a clip from Emmerdale: "You child-hurting arsonist!"
• Harry breaking it to the Dancing On Ice commentator just why Stephen Gately wasn't distracted by Kristina Lenko's revealing costume.
• Clare Buckfield claiming she takes travel sickness pills to stop herself being ill when being twirled and Harry's clip of her chundering in rehearsal. Route one, but still funny.
• Nick Baker off of Nick Baker's Weird Creatures (why does he need his name in the title? Did we know him from somewhere else?) saying: "The air is so thin up here - it's exhausting just walking around this camera." "Don't do it then," offered Harry.
• Sorry week on EastEnders.
• The brilliant Jade Goody doll proclaiming desperately that she's not a racist.
• The fantastic Junior EastEnders skit, complete with a stupendous child Phil Mitchell, still deflating from last week.
• The injured bag on Casualty.
• Harry's dead-on introduction: "If you're familiar with BBC2's Who Do You Think You Are? you might like ITV's You Don't Know You're Born - which is the same. (Aside) Well, it is."
• TV Highlight of the Week: Alan Davies standing on a street corner.
• Ray Mears' Wild Food - Ray ate some berries, so Harry joined in. Until Ray added, matter-of-factly, "You must remember to spit out the seeds though, as they contain cyanide." Harry introduced some of Ray's range of sweets, too, including a walnut whip with a conker on top.
• Ray Mears looking at a plate of something that looked like faeces and claiming: "That is a delicious meal." "No it isn't," argued Harry, persuasively.
• Emmerdale's Shadrack singing 'I'm Horny'.

Harry Hill's TV Burp, ITV1, Saturday 27 January 2007
Highlights
• Trial & Retribution's DCS Walker's obsession with asking everyone if they owned a computer. No one did. "Yeah, not as popular as they used to be," noted Harry.
• Mia Dolan on Haunted Homes (ITV ripping off a successful format from another channel and attempting to disguise their poverty of innovation with minimal tweaks? Surely not!) saying "We've got a good chance of paranormal activity tonight." - "Never Heard it called that before," mused Harry.
• The delightful extended gag about the Haunted Homes' home being haunted by an egg which eventually segued into a Scooby Doo reference with Harry playing with an egg on a stick. "It's a living," he admitted in an embarrassed aside.
- The superb piece on Nick Baker's Weird Creatures. Harry was piqued because Baker spent a whole hour looking for a pink fairy armadillo... but failed. Harry was angry about wasting his time. Cut to a clip where Baker went to look at his armadillo trap, only to be surprised (brilliantly) by Harry's fist to his face. Some superb editing here and the lovely attention to detail really made this gag.
• Dot's recipe on EastEnders: "Pauline's brain, swimming in blood."
• The brilliant spot that Phil Mitchell seems to be constantly deflating, which included at least 10 examples of Mitchell exhaling (nice one for the researchers to sort through).
• Mr Blobby taking out Pauline's kitchen until Harry beat him down with a frying pan, Reeves and Mortimer style. Far too surreal for the ITV1 Saturday night audience. Which just makes it funnier.
• Colin and Justin's hilarious lovers tiff and their assistant arguing with a trophy.
• Joe from Fat Men Can't Hunt admitting that he's overweight because he "sits around the house all day getting stoned."
• Emmerdale's Viv getting Harry all hot and bothered: "I love my husband and these two little cherubs," she said, motioning suggestively towards her baps. "Saucy," whispered Harry.
• The superb Emmerdale spot of the bloke who accidentally hung himself on the door.

Harry Hill's TV Burp, ITV1, Saturday 20 January 2007
Highlights
• Jade Goody's nonsensical, ignorant questions about Eskimos (they're known as inuits now, love) and why they haven't turned into 'iciclecubes' were mercilessly ridiculed, and rightly so. With all the fuss about her racism towards Shilpa, no one seemed bothered about her awful question: "Why haven't boat loads of them ever arrived here?" which echoed her infamous banana boat rant when she stunk up the Big Brother house the first time around.
• The news that Jermaine Jackson called his son Jermajesty. Harry: "And another son is called Jerroyalhighness."
• Harry's exasperation at the uselesness of Nick Baker of Weird Creatures' rhyme about which snakes are dangerous and then inventing his own one for Wild At Heart: "Tabby cat: can live with that; if it's leopardy, you're in jeopardy."
• The superb spot of Dev in Corrie's flamboyant house-cleaning and Harry's funny sketch as Dev cleaning and re-stocking his shop.
• TV Highlight of the Week: People breathing loudly on Trial & Retribution.
• Relocation Relocation's Phil Spencer shaking the imaginary hair he wishes he has after taking off a crash helmet.
• Colin & Justin gamely singing Bob the Builder along with the girl badly made up as a monkey from Fortune: Million Pound Giveaway.
• Jackiey Goody holding up her handbag as if she was the Chancellor.
• Harry's favourite bit of Big Brother - 12.27pm, a shot of a butternut squash.
• Ken Barlow looking and acting like a ventriloquist's dummy.

Harry Hill's TV Burp, ITV1, Saturday 21 January 2006
Highlights
• The mass Jimmy Savile impersonation ("Starts to get a bit boring after a while," Harry admitted)
• Harry's cheeky sideways glances at the camera
• Zack Dingle in Emmerdale dancing to Rus Abbot's Atmosphere beside the hospital bed of ailing Alice
• Complicated Medical Conversation of the Week (from Holby City)
• Dialogue from The Bill: "What kind of animal shoots a dog?"a distraught shopkeeper asked. "A cat with a rifle?" Harry suggested. "A fox with a grudge?"
• The comparison of You Are What You Eat's table of junkfood shame to Kerry Katona's vast buffet in the Iceland ads
• Paul Burrell insisting to Australian Princess contestants: "It's important to maintain your dignity". Cue footage from Burrell on I'm A Celebrity.
• The conga to celebrate the fortnightly bowel movement of Georgina on Diet Doctors
• PLUS observations that Pete Burns and Homer Simpson are identical; BB babe Chantelle is a little inarticulate; Derek Acorah's Ghost Towns is even more idiotic than Scooby Doo; Rula Lenska is identical to Ronald McDonald

Harry Hill's TV Burp, ITV1, Saturday 28 January 2006
Highlights
• The Jolly Green Giant's appearance on Casualty
• Harry's comments about the build-up to the accidents on Casualty. This week a bloke had decided to do a bunjee jump off a bulding with a proposal to his girlfriend written on his t-shirt. It went horribly wrong of course. Harry: "His next plan was to set himself on fire and when she smelled the smoke he'd write 'Will you marry me" in the air with sparklers."
• The gags about Rosemary & Thyme ("The hit show for the over 80s") and the various ways to describe it: "Cagney & Lacey with secoteurs" and "Ground Force Meets Miss Marple." This was from, inexplicably, an ITV3 documentary about behind the scenes of Rosemary & Thyme. Smell the ratings!
• Harry talking about what different jobs dogs are bred for: "Corgis of course are bred to approve gas fitters"
• EastEnders now, and the hilarious gag told by Janine (is it Janine? We tend to avoid EastEnders these days) that elicited a bizarrely huge laugh from another character: "Princess and the Pea? It's not exactly Shakespeare, is it?" Hilarious!
• The spot that Blanche out of Corrie looks like the Roswell alien when she wakes up. Harsh, but fair.

Harry Hill's TV Burp, ITV1, Saturday 4 February 2006
Highlights
• Adding new music to TV show title sequences – The Sweeney for Corrie, Anarchy in the UK for HeartBeat, Steptoe & Son for ITV News and Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now for EastEnders
• Harry pretending to phone Noel Edmunds on Deal Or No Deal – but later revealing that Corrie's Rita is the banker on the end of the line
• The contrasting car chase music in Life On Mars (the brilliant Ballroom Blitz by the Sweet) and Lewis (some ponderous classic music)
• Ridiculing the acting skills of Derek Acorah and Corrie's Dev
• Harry's question: "What's your worst nightmare?" leading to a scene from EastEnders in which Pat Butcher is massaging a black man – leading to Harry gagging
• The Heath Robinson-like device to illustrate how an email could be sent posthumously
• Paul Burrell boring the Australian Princess contestants with the Royal Anecdote of the Week and telling the girls: "I expect you're wondering why I'm standing here with an empty suitcase." Harry suggested: "You're probably off to Kensington Palace to get more stuff"
• The Napoleon v Nookie Bear fight
• The performance of Two Pints of Lager by Splodgenessabounds, with Harry guesting as Gene Simmons

Harry Hill's TV Burp, Saturday 11 February 2006
Highlights
• The woman on Supersize Surgery who eats catfood and said:" One wouldn't know the difference between that and shepherd's pie if truth be known."
• Harry's attack on Anthea Turner: Perfect Housewife with some origami with towels, putting photographs in clingfilm to eat yohgurt and overcoming stains on the carpet by masking them with photographs of unstained carpets. The item was rather let down by letting thick-skinned Anthea turn up to grab even more publicity.
• The reworking of Coronation Street as a silent movie during a scene in which Deirdre gawped and Ken got bitten by a dog.
• Another attack on the awful Derek Acorah whose psychic ability enabled him to ask a woman: "Did your nan have white hair?"
• The comparison of Emmerdale's Dingles to Oasis
• Harry serenading the ugly Martha from Emmerdale.

Harry Hill's TV Burp, ITV1, Saturday 18 February 2006
Highlights
• The Valentine's Day fever on the soaps – especially EastEnders where all the loving couples were headed for a restaurant called Fargos. "That's a spelling mistake," Harry pointed out. " It should be Argos."
• Harry pointing out that Celebrity Fit Club is such a misnomer. "They're not celebrities; they're not fit; and it's not a club."
• Harry on Holiday Showdown: "This week it was the turn of bisexual video artists the Blackwoods and the ex-military couple the Richardsons, whose hobby is hunting, to take in the gay bars of San Francisco. How can that possibly lead to any friction?"
• The women in Casualty with the disease that turned her face into a plastic bag
• "As Gillian McKeith says, 'You are what you eat'," Harry reminded us before showing a woman from Supersize Surgery whose diet consisted entirely of crackers.
• The funny faces of Corrie's Steve McDonald
• Harry performing with No Comment, the rock group created by Gene Simmons (a thinner Russell Grant) on Rock School

Harry Hill's TV Burp, Saturday 25 February 2006
Highlights
• Observations about Bruno driving sideways and Tre's girlfriend being indecisive about whether to have her jacket open or closed on Footballers' Wives; Fred Elliot taking for ever to eat a biscuit on Corrie; hands turning from white to black on The Apprentice; Alan Sugar resembling Sid James
• Harry trying to break up the Footballers' Wives catfight
• The fake edition of Trisha featuring Corrie's Dev entitled "My dad had a fling with a psychopathic lawyer then married his shop assistant who gave birth to twins and found out he had three kids by various different women."
• Harry's ridiculing of the annoying Jo on The Apprentice (the idiot with the crinkly hair who has been made redundant by MG Rover "FOR BEING ANNOYING") and the attempts by the men to name their team by combining two words to make a new word ("How about stupid and idea to make Stupidea?")
• The messy sexual relationships in Emmerdale and Corrie, and the violence in EastEnders.
• The skit in which Phil Daniels' lines in EastEnders were followed by Harry singing Parklife.
• Emily Bishop's Old-Time Piano Party CD featuring I Predict a Riot, You're Beautiful and Hung Up

Harry Hill's TV Burp, ITV1, Saturday 4 March 2006
Highlights
• Harry drawing attention to the long pauses and wooden spoon shortage in EastEnders; miserable baby Amy in Corrie; the resemblance of The Apprentice horror Jo to Frank Skinner in drag; the resemblance of Rita and Emily in Corrie to the Cheeky Girls; the Carry On Casualty scene in which a nun went flying on a bar of soap
• Harry's suggestion that EastEnders has found a new euphemism for pregnancy: "She gave me one of those put-you-ups in your Aunt Fanny's bedroom."
• The sketches in which Harry showed us "the irritating thing Emily Bishop does with teabags" and took on a stroppy suspect in The Bill
• Harry being knocked flat by Manny's presentation in The Apprentice which turned out to be horribly embarrassing rather than the spectacle he promised
• Tony Blackburn, Peter Dean and Timmy Mallet playing the parts of Emmerdale's dead sheep
• Harry's perusal of the menu of Oscars, the restaurant featured in Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares where the chef cooks Oscar Wilde ribs in Coca-Cola. On Harry's menu were Lily Langtry Pork Chops (cooked in Fanta), Marquis of Queensberry Steak (marinaded in Tizer), Veal Umbongo (which Oscar Wilde ate when he was in the Congo) and Chicken a la Pick'n'Mix with a lovely Vimto gravy

Harry Hill's TV Burp, ITV1, Saturday 11 March 2006
Highlights
• The observations that there was a wooden laptop computer in EastEnders (using Windows 1886), there was a genetically modified cow on Jimmy's Farm (with a plastic head) and there were little people playing on the windowsill on Rebus
• Harry's shock that The Bill's Sgt Dale Smith is banged up in jail with Arthur Fowler. "In for life??? All he did was steal the Christmas Club money."
• Harry slapping The Apprentice's Jo "for being annoying"
• Harry's revelation of Martin Fowler's Business Plan: 1 – Buy more spuds; 2 – Put Pat back on the game.
• Emily Bishop playing strip poker with Rita and Norris, making homie gestures, speaking in a very peculiar way to her deaf pal and kindly giving away late husband Ernest's ancient camera. Harry revealed the results of Ernest's last roll of film: one picture of the armed robber who killed him and lots of shots of the ceiling
• The TV Highlight of the Week: a nasty little tea spillage on Doctors
Lowlight
• Russell Grant singing The Russell Hustle.

Harry Hill's TV Burp, ITV1, Saturday 18 March 2006
Highlights
• Harry spotting excessive headwound dabbing on The Bill, Holby City's Sugababes-like nurses, The Royal's rubbish special effects when a nurse was run over ("Penny for the guy," suggested Harry), Dot's Jewishness on EastEnders and how "a Jackson" became synonymous with "a lesbian" on Albert Square
• Harry's version of Corrie café man Roy's love poem to Hayley: "Roses are red, violets are blue, I am a fella, and so are you."
• Sacked Apprentice star Alexa being ridiculed for her hopelessness at maths (she's an economics graduate) and then showing up to deliver a pizza topped with a whole roast chicken. ("I asked for extra chicken," demanded Harry).
• The TV Highlight of the Week – a very boring breakfast time in Doctors
• Harry dressing up as Emily Bishop swimming with dolphins, the iceberg that sank the Titanic and the half golden retriever/half soul man who was lying injured among the carnage of the Bombastic club on The Bill

Dom Joly's World Shut Your Mouth, BBC1

Highlights
1 Dom tiptoeing up to a lonely Inuit angler on a silent frozen lake and then banging a pair of cymbals in his ear before running off.
2 The tourist who joins a woman who is admiring the Taj Mahal. "It's almost ethereal," she says. "That is shit," he says.
3 The woman in the German tourist information office being asked a mathematical problem. "No conferring and show your working out on paper."
4 The men dressed as schoolboys offering to help a householder. "We can't do it after five o'clock because we go binge drinking then."
5 The old man who is 77-years-old and castigates three skateboarders. "I didn't storm the beaches of Normandy so you can ride bits of wood along here."
6 Three fat men poking fun at people who are exercising. "Who's been eating grapes?"
7 The booths in a park where smokers have to go if they want a ciggie
8 The woman with a shopping trolley being persuaded to join a police identity parade, alongside Hannibal Lecter and willingly shouting "I'm going to eat your face."
9 The stunt where a woman came to the rescue when she heard cries of "let me out" coming from a public toilet – only for a huge turd to leap out and run away
10 British Bob's Amazing Rocket Jumps in which Bob had a cardboard rocket strapped to his back as he prepared to clear the Grand Canyon.
11 The stereotypical German (in liederhosen) occupying a massive beach towel on a French beach
12 The chav pair who introduced themselves to their new neighbour – accompanied by their smoking horse Dean. "At three o'clock, he likes a gallop so you might hear him going up and down."
13 The Pest Control van which pulled up and nabbed a traffic warden
14 The sunbathing couple who were disturbed by Noddy in a remote control car
15 The use of the Teardrop Explodes track in the opening titles

World Shut Your Mouth, BBC1
1 – DJ Dom being booed off at London's Ministry of Sound nightclub for mixing in Terry Scott's My Bruvver into his eclectic garage set.
2 – Dom, wearing an eyepatch and a sling, telling a man outside a hospital: "I think I'm the world's unluckiest man healthwise." His long list of sad stories included: "I got hit by an ambulance. I blame Thatcher because that ambulance was too busy and they had to send another ambulance. And that hit me, too."
3 – The disabled thief dipping into a shopping trolley at a supermarket and a handbag in the street. "I'm a Vietnam veteran," he protested when apprehended.
4 – The business lounge set up at a Putney Common bus stop. "I'm waiting for the business bus, not the ordinary one."
5 – Dom telling a fellow tourist at the Colosseum: "That is shit."
6 – Overgrown schoolboys nervously buying condoms at the chemist
7 – The druids appealing for money – or cider.
8 – The pizza deliverer who ends up in an ID parade.
9 – The man with the noisy machine disturbing folk relaxing by the river
10 – The Colombian gigolo and the Greek ambassador failing in their pursuit of sex


World Shut Your Mouth, BBC1
1 The disgruntled artist chatting to a couple of hick sightseers outside the Saatchi Gallery, moaning about the success of his contemporaries (Damien, Tracey, Chapman Brothers etc) while he has to earn a living doing charcoal drawings of idiot tourists
2 The disillusioned hermit chatting to a couple of picnickers. "I'm thinking of chucking it in. Squirrel omelette isn't my idea of haute cuisine. I was in Stoke Newington before so it's a bit of a jump."
3 The man trying to attract tourists to the burning of Carla Laine for charity ("We tried to get Jade Goody")
4 The tourist at the pyramids. "This is shit."
5 The You Big Fat Liar reality show in which brash presenter Tommy Gold picked on the wrong cheating man in a restaurant

World Shut Your Mouth, BBC1
1 Creeping up on a man idling away his time in the Middle Of Nowhere, USA, and crashing a cymbal in his ear.
2 The Goth's chat with the lovely, cheery old picnicking couple. "My parents raised me in a coffin."
3 The nerds mocking skateboarders. "Bet you don't know the speed of sound."
4 The disappointed audience members who paid 50p to see Michael The Human Onion
5 Making a telephone booking at a country inn in Wales as Mr and Mrs Smith and turning up with a sheep
6 The stunt in which a cabbie was told to "Follow that taxi" and ended up in a warehouse full of cabs with their gagged owners tied up.
7 The Greek ambassador tries to chat up a man in Cheltenham
8 The fake London bus whose driver asked directions to a chemist. "I need my anti-depressants."
9 The Great Wall of China – "It's shit."
10 The 77-year-old going out of control on his mobility vehicle.

World Shut Your Mouth, BBC1
1 – The bitter town crier who walks along the same street on the hour throughout the night, moaning loudly about council cuts that have cost him his job
2 – The Radikal Facial Improvement Centre which offers cheek blasting – "In experiments on animals, some of their skin comes back in a month" – and features screaming customers
3 – The gay toilet attendant, chatting with his urinating customers with Soft Cell playing in the background.
4 – Dom crashing his cymbals behind a golfer preparing for a tricky putt.
5 – The room service waiter who ignores the fact that a customer is sitting by the window with a rifle in his hand
6 – An England skinhead slags off French literature to a group of American tourists in Paris. The former hooligan has studied at the Sorbonne so he knows. "I've read it all and it's rubbish."
7 – The man dressed as a parcel addressed to Miami trying to sidle into a sorting office, and the man dressed as a turd shopping for toilet roll
8 – The men dressed as schoolboys trying to buy four bottles of whiskey. "We're going binge drinking in the park."
9 – Dom accosts a tourist outside Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum. "That is shit. Total shit."
10 – The sad Goth shopping for a gas oven. "I need it quite quickly. I want to get it over with this evening."

World Shut Your Mouth, BBC1
1 – Dom faints in an art gallery after being told a crappy sculpture costs $28,000. And he faints in an opticians after being told a pair of glasses cost $1100.
2 – A traveller bores a nice couple as they look at the Eiffel Tower. "I love travelling. I've been everywhere," he tells them. His tales include: "India – what a dump! There's poverty there that I haven't seen since I went to Dorset."
3 – The 77-year-old man's mobility vehicle goes out of control – and despite help from a kind woman, he still manages to crash into fences and walls.
4 – A Hari Krishna troupe fight over a tambourine and then beg for money to buy beer and kebabs
5 – Dom is being flown over the Grand Canyon. "That is shit," he tells the pilot. "Can we go back?"
6 – Dom creeps up on an artist painting the Notre Dame and crashes his cymbals before running away
7 – A busker is bundled into a van by pest control officers
8 – A perspex VIP lounge containing Dom and two dolly birds slides on to a nightclub dancefloor
9 – Dom sticks a "closed due to unforeseen circumstances" on the window of a psychic's premises in America
10 – A funeral cortege gets lost on the way to St Dennis's church
11 – A wideboy at a carboot sale offers weasels and a gun– plus cushion covers for £1m each. "That's London prices."

French & Saunders (including solo projects), BBC

A Bucket O' French And Saunders, BBC1
Did we like it?
TV has been giving far too much time recently to "alternative comedians" at the fag ends of their careers (eg Harry Enfield, Ben Elton, Lenny Henry, Robbie Coltrane, Rik Mayall) but this greatest hits collection was a deserved, and largely successful, celebration of Dawn and Jennifer's repertoire before they became embarrassing, repetitive and rubbish.

What was good about it?
• It wasn't French. It wasn't Saunders. It wasn't And. It was Joanna Lumley as a brilliant all-purpose TV presenter mixing clichés with clumsiness as she flounced around TV Centre to link the clips and upstage the duo with consummate ease. We'd have been happier seeing much more of her than Dawn and Jennifer's new material.
• C'Est La Vie by a spoof Abba, featuring those guys from Raw Sex.
• The fast-moving best of... montages including the many Madonna moments and the pair's take-offs of awkward teens. The only duds were the two fat men who took their randiness out on any surface at the right height.
• The realisation that BBC comedy shows used to swimming in cash. Some of the old sketches must have cost a fortune – and not all of it was wasted.

What was bad about it?
• The new sketch (proof they've lost the magic albeit many years after their respective husbands became utterly unfunny). In a Gordon Ramsay parody, which missed the topical boat but they did it anyway, Jennifer was in white chefs' clothing with bleeding animals attached round her waist, shouting at Dawn and serving up a pea in spit. About as funny as eating the dish.

The Life And Times Of Vivienne Vyle, BBC2
Did we like it?
Like many character-based comedies it’s very difficult to judge on the first episode just how humorous it will ultimately get; but there are some promising signs especially the dilemma of Vivienne as she strives for the paradox of huge ratings and critical credibility.

What was good about it?
• The human detritus talkshows are all too easy to parody, but thankfully Vivienne Vyle has sewn the small details together to make up the whole sorry tapestry rather than relying simply on an egomaniacal host. Most keenly felt was the vacuous applause that greeted Vivienne and her guests on to the stage, it really did make us question the validity and purpose of applause – if such empty endorsement can be tossed away so thoughtlessly, does applause have any value left? The symptom of this social ill, however, is far more advanced at Wimbledon where the crowd claps as senselessly and automatically as they breathe.
• The supporting cast featuring Miranda Richardson as the beastly Helena offering the viewer some hope that Vivienne still has some way to go before she is lost forever, the deceptively steely Abigail (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) who is either going to be the voice of reason and the viewer’s moral coat hanger or degrade into Vivienne’s despoiled apprentice, and Dr Jonathan Fowler, an intellectual psychologist who is seduced by the lust of fame when Vivienne asks him to contribute his expertise to the show.
• Vivienne being caught between wanting to emulate Oprah Winfrey but having to do so by stirring up hate between morons for a living – “We’d all love to be Oprah and hold hands with Susan Sarandon. She owns the fucking channel, she doesn’t need children!”
• Not only are the idiots who appear on these shows vilified, but there’s also a pop at those people who watch the shows simply so they can bathe in the glow of their supposed superiority. Vivienne is the worst culprit claming “I shout at them [the guests] because it’s all that they know!” But at the same time, she at least understands them unlike Dr Jonathan who sits glibly in the gallery spewing intellectual epithets at Vivienne encouraging her to speak to her audience in impenetrable verbal hieroglyphics.
• The tufts of Dr Jonathan’s balding scalp gelled into place making them seem like limestone stalagmites.

What was bad about it?
• A drawback of parodying trashy talk shows is that you need some pretty sharp observations to make it distinct from the crowd as it’s a regular target for sketch shows (including Peter Serafinowicz about 15 minutes afterwards). But Vivienne Vyle seems satisfied to coat itself in the tepid vulgarity, and the strongest scenes often appear away from the studio – a case in point being the slapstick of a burly security guard crushing Vivienne during an altercation with a guest; all scenes of grotesques being crushed must pay homage to Alan Partridge under a cow and the fact that “Cliff Thorburn isn’t under a cow!”
• Placing the banner ‘Next: The Peter Serafinowicz Show’ while Vivienne Vyle is still on air. Oi, you people in TV productionland have you no concept of real people, do you view us like some inferior labrats to be moulded to your specific design? Putting such an intrusive banner on, ruining any enjoyment we’re getting from the current programme makes people hugely resentful of the interloping legend and induces viewers to deliberately not to watch the show they’re being ordered to watch. Fools.

French & Saunders, BBC1
• Dawn has been to a Norah Jones concert and wants to buy the singer shoes. Not funny
• Dawn as Madonna reads a story to a musclebound Jennifer. Not funny
• Jodie and Jordan's advice. Not funny
• Dawn and Jennifer face competition for a BBC commission from two queens (David Walliams and Matt Lucas) who have "a whole slate of pink programming." Funny
• Stylists to the Grand Masters work for Monet (and suggest that glitter be affixed to the naked model using spunk and spittle). Funny
• Dawn and Jennifer pitch their ideas to the BBC controller (Ruby Wax) who remains unconvinced by Dawn's promise – "We're going to do something a little bit more kind of upbeat yet quite comedy but more new, youngish, quite modern, quite hip, new young thing." Also featured Dawn doing the David Brent dance. Funny
• A Footballers' Wives-style reworking of King Lear featuring Michelle Collins, Denise Van Outen, Amanda Holden and Brian Cox (and French & Saunders in very minor roles). Very funny.
• The haughty mother of Coldplay's Chris Martin telephones him about the christening arrangements. "The name Apple. Are we sure about it? Your Auntie Plum says there's fruit for names and there's silly fruit." Very funny.
• Dawn gives Norah Jones the shoes. Not funny.
Totals: Funny – Five Not funny – four

French & Saunders
• Mark Lamarr ignores Dawn in the lift. Not funny.
• Stroppy teenager wants to go on Pop Idol. Not funny.
• Producer Liza Tarbuck asks for more film parodies. The pair refuses –leading to a bloody parody of Kill Bill. Funny
• Jennifer practises curtseying because she's been invited to Buckingham Palace ("I'm a PRs dream. Me and Floella Benjamin") and Dawn hasn't. Funny
• Stylists To The Old Masters. Clever but not funny.
• The pair check for nasal hair. Not funny.
• The parody of LivingTV's Most Haunted. Not funny apart from "Yvette" being scared witless by the automatic hand drier. (Full marks to make-up for making Dawn into a convincing Derek Acorah).
• Mark Lamarr comes to apologise. "I thought you were Pauline Quirke." Not funny.
• Parody of the incontinence ad. Funny
• Penny Smith announces Jennifer has kicked and headbutted the queen. Funny
Total: Funny – four; not funny – six

French & Saunders
Were the sketches in Dawn and Jennifer’s new series Guff, Gusts of Laughter or Gales of Hilarity?
• The duo arrive at the BBC for work but can’t remember their internet password. Guff.
• Dawn tries to attract Jennifer’s attention with ever more absurd claims. (“Jen, Jen! I suspect I was penetrated by Mick Jagger on holiday as my baby…”, and then shows Jennifer her infant which has huge lips.) Gust.
• French and Saunders are interrupted by their irascible producer, and look at a welcome video of new BBC Director General Eve Pollard. Guff.
• Dawn and Jennifer play two country bumpkins who are altering their farm through Rural Diversification. Gust.
• The pair get drawn into the seedy world of the internet, and enter Eve Pollard’s name for a tour of a porn site. Gale.
• French and Saunders become Sonny and Cher. A gale, largely for Dawn’s impression of Sonny where she looks like a Neandethal dwarf. Gale.
• Producer Liza Tarbuck gives the duo advice. Guff.
• Dawn as Catherine Douglas Spartacus Zeta Jones in her kitchen. A gust for the conclusion where Michael summons her for “afternoon shagging” by banging on the
bedroom floor. (I’ll bet you think that’s a broom he used.”)
• Eve Pollard’s visit to the office of French and Saunders is interrupted when an animation from the porn site they visited starts shouting: “I want to come all over you, Eve Pollard.” Gust.
• More from the country bumpkins. Guff.
Totals Gales of laughter: Two; Gusts: Four; Guffs Four.

French & Saunders
Were the sketches in Dawn and Jennifer’s new series Guff, Gusts of Laughter or Gales of Hilarity?
• Dawn and Jennifer make their way to the BBC for a meeting with their novice producer (Liza Tarbuck). Gust.
• The pair have a meeting with their agent, producer and PA. Might have been amusing it had not slipped into the terminally unfunny comedic condition of the funny
song. Guff.
• Jordan and Jodie Marsh solve your problems. This sketch suffered because the real Jodie and Jordan are so much more vulgar and grotesque than Dawn and Jennifer portrayed them. Guff.
• A difficult schoolgirl is chastised by her mother. Gust.
• Dawn and Jennifer continue their discussion over the new series with the producer and PA. Gust.
• Dawn visits Dr Saunders for a check-up. Guff.
• Dawn and Jennifer gossip about a style magazine. Guff.
• The much heralded Cold Mountain spoof, with “Nicole Kidman” performing the DVD commentary. Gust.
• The pair leave the BBC after a day’s work. Gust.
Total Guffs: Three; Gusts of Laughter: Six; Gales of Hilarity: Zero

French & Saunders
• Dawn and Jennifer get lost in Television Centre. Not funny
• Stroppy teen has a tattoo. Not funny
• Dawn and Jennifer are late. Not funny
• Jill and Jo are living in a gated community in Florida where everything's very big. But things go wrong, thanks to the vacuum packing machine and AK 47. Funny
• Dawn and Jennifer get lost a bit more. Not funny
• Chris Martin's mother makes Christmas arrangements. "If the worst comes to the worst, we'll have to blow up the lilo." "Your father says, would you stop writing on your hand. It's looking scruffy." Funny
• Liza Tarbuck warms up the audience with a joke – but keeps forgetting the word "pitchfork" Funny
• Dawn is looking after the baby of the giant next door. Not funny
• Pauline McGlynn plays a mad fan who gets an aftershow introduction to the pair. Funny
Totals: Funny – Four; Not funny – five

French & Saunders
• Dawn has been invited on to Celebrity Fit Farm ("There's plenty of other fit people they could have chosen. Sally Gunnell. Tessa Sanderson.") Funny
• Dawnie Scissorhands, cut-price beauty specialist. Not funny.
• Producer Liza Tarbuck wants ideas; Dawn and Jennifer want lunch. Not funny.
• Karen welcomes Barbara to Indonesia. Not funny
• Dawn and Jennifer work out how much of the script they've written in their heads. Funny.
• Jodie and Jordan give advice on potato peeling. Not funny
• Catherine Zeta Jones Not funny
• Parody of Troy. Not funny, but Jennifer's Brad Pitt was good
• Dawn appears with Anastacia on Top Of The Pops. Funny

The French & Saunders Christmas Special, BBC1, Tuesday 27 December 2005
Did we like it?
We remember when Dawn and Jennifer were brilliant. And when they started to get a bit mediocre. Now they're well on the way to being downright bad.

What was good about it?
• Jimmy Krankie in The Graduate, Chicago and as Billy Elliott
• Rufus Wainwright (aka Loofah Wetwipe) appearing at the Beckenham Folk Festival trying not to be upstaged by Dawn and Jennifer's efforts as backing singers, dancers and musicians.
• The impressions of Jackie Stallone and Brigitte Nielsen
• The pair as extras on EastEnders was nowhere near as funny as it should have been, but we liked it when they asked Shane Richie: "Any chance of you touring in Grease again? We missed you in Basingstoke."
• The docusoap at Peartree Farm Kiddycrash Nursery was nowhere near as funny as it should have been, but we liked it when the rural pair tried to make money by renting out the babies as lookalikes ranging from Margaret Beckett to Abi Titsmarsh, Cher to Charlie Dimmock, Rula Lenska to Beyoncé (or, if turned round, J-Lo)
• The parody of Vera Drake was nowhere near as funny as it should have been, but we liked it when "Imelda Staunton" was sentenced for the extreme seriousness of her acting to two award ceremonies in Hollywood Prison where she'll be tortured by flattery.

What was bad about it?
• The White Room sketch in which Dawn wrote begging letters from Madonna and Elton John
• The Nuns excited about the new pope and the Vatican Shop's tat
• Boy George and George Michael in the White Room
• Dr Tania Byron trying to get the girls to grow up
• Abigail Wilson getting no points on Mastermind on her specialist subject of ceramic teapots
• Elton John and Kiki Dee

Entourage, ITV2

Sunday 10 August 2006
Did we like this?
Wow. This was snappy, funny, witty. And our American friends (Chuck, Chuck and Maureen) tell us it gets better and better (they've already reached series three over there). The story of hot young actor Vincent Chase – star of action thriller Head On with Jessica Alba – and his three buddies from New York is one we'll stick with.

What was good about it?
• The best character is Eric (twinkly-eyed blonde Kevin Connolly), the moralistic friend that Vincent trusts to read scripts and make decisions – and is so unfazed by Tinseltown bullshit that he can stand-up to Vincent's tenacious agent Ari (Jeremy Piven). It's sensible Eric who decides Vince shouldn't appear in Matterhorn, despite the $4 million temptation – and who looks a bit sick at that end when he hears Colin Farrell has taken the job instead.
• Adrian Grenier as Vincent. He looks sensational and plays the charming, well-rooted actor just right, mixing outward confidence with inner fears.
• Kevin Dillon as Johnny 'Drama' Chase, Vincent's narcissistic older brother who gets minor acting roles (soft soap Pacific Blue rather than NYPD Blue) and will never reach stardom. Kevin is Matt's younger brother and was probably born for this second-fiddle role.
• Jerry Ferrara as Turtle, the tubby clown, who's not afraid to exploit Vincent's fame as a way of getting girls who'd never normally look at him twice (“Come on, make out with me. I’ll show you where Vince eats breakfast.”) – and was the one forced to wear gridiron gear to make friends with Vincent's ferocious new guard dog.
• The plot races along and every scene is a grabber. You needn't care a jot about the movie business to find it absorbing.
• The best scene came when an angry Ari (he always is) confronts Eric who, 14 months earlier, was the night-shift manager of a New York pizza parlour. He needs Eric to persuade Vincent to take the role in Matterhorn. “I don’t have business with people like you," yells Ari. "I don’t do this! Do you think Hugh Jackman calls and says, ‘Hey, Ari, love the script. Gotta run it past the pizza boy’?”
• The star-spotting opportunities. Mark Wahlberg, who is the series' executive producer, has a cameo in the pilot; later episodes feature director James Cameron, Scarlett Johansson, Brooke Shields, Bono and Jessica Alba.

What was bad about it?
• Joe Walsh's Rocky Mountain Way was faded from the soundtrack far too quickly.
• It relies too much on Hollywood when the best moments come when the old gang are together, away from the spotlights, paparazzi and never-ending supply of blonde women.

After You’ve Gone, BBC1

Friday 12 January 2007
Did we like it?
If British comedy had gone for a night on the tiles, feasted on a banquet of banal sitcom set-ups and washed it all down with pint after pint of tired joke juice before throwing most of it back up in the street on the way home, then this would be the vomit-spattered remains being avoided by nauseous shoppers the next day.

What was good about it?
• Perhaps because the script had been ethnically cleansed of all humour, the cast deserved plaudits for battling on in atrocious conditions like soldiers in the trenches having to crap in No Man’s Land, picking the lice from their comrades’ hair for lunch and maintaining their sanity that at any moment they could be shot by the enemy, or even their own side.
• Celia Imrie as the incorrigible harridan Diana delivered each line as if poking a needle into someone’s eye, valiantly squeezing line after line of all its comedy like she was sieving the modesty from Simon Cowell’s heart.
• And Lee Oakes as Jimmy’s mixed up son Alex showed promise as dressed in his sister’s clothes and duelled verbally with his grandmother Diana. He resembles, both in looks and mannerisms, David Tennant’s Dr Who in his more slapstick moments.

What was bad about it?
• Comedies need laughs, this had none. The situations Jimmy stumbled into were simple variations on scenarios employed hundreds of times before

Sacha Baron Cohen

Ali G In Da USAiii, Channel 4
• Ali G's interview with Sam Donaldson of ABC News, confusing Waterworld for Watergate. Not funny… apart from Ali's suggestion that newspapers should try to get more readers by printing the headline "War Begins" on page one and then putting "With A W" on page two.
• Borat's wine tasting (seen in Borat's Television programme). Funny
• Ali G interviews Daryl Gates, ex-LAPD chief, confusing the OJ Simpson case with The Simpsons ("Aint it wrong for police to be getting involved with murders on a cartoon?"). Funny
• Ali G talking about gang hand signs with a Washington detective. Not funny
• Ali talking to a police dog handler: "Why do you use canines when you could use dogs?" "When they find a bomb, how long does it take a dog to defuse it?" Funny.
• Bruno meets the pastor/gay convertor (seen in Borat's Television programme). Funny
Total: Four funny; two not funny

Borat’s Television Programme, Channel 4
• Borat helps Republican candidate James Broadwater gain election. Borat: “Women not equal to one man. In Kazakhstan we say God, Man, Horse, Dog, Woman, Rat.”
Funny.
• Borat visits the Republican Party offices in Oklahoma where he makes a committee stand for 10 minutes in tribute on the anniversary of a bogus massacre in Kazakhstan, and later remarks: “I would like to do a romance inside of you; but only if she want to.” Funny.
• Bruno chats with Pastor Quinn: Gay Converter. Best Bruno quotes: “After I’ve converted, can I spend my life with a chick with a dick?”; “How many years have you been straight?” Funny.
• Borat drops in on American wine growers Norman Harris and Jack Taylor. The best bit was a Stan Laurelesque sequence where Borat couldn’t grasp how to drink from the wine glass. And later a drunk Borat laments that his mother never loved him: “Sometimes she say: ‘I wish I were raped by some other.’” Funny.
• Bruno gets macho students at the Spring Break Daytona Beach to flex their muscles before revealing he works for “Austria Gay TV”. Funny.
• Borat teaches Country & Western dancers a Kazakh dance that has the moves “beat the gypsy” and “walk like a homosexual”. Later he entertains a C&W club with his
song that contains the lines “In my country there is problem, and the problem is the Jew” and “Throw the Jew down the well, so my country can be free” by which
stage the audience are enthusiastically singing along. Funny.
Totals: Funny: Six, Not Funny: Zero

The Kumars At No 42, BBC

The Kumars At No 42: Fern Britton and Phillip Schofield and Jennifer Saunders
1. Mum, to Fern and Phillip: “I think you’re wonderful, but some people don’t like daytime TV. What do you say to scum like that?”
2. Gran, to Phillip Schofield about his stint in Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat: “What was it like filling Jason Donovan’s loin cloth?”
3. Dad, to Jennifer Saunders: “You were born in Lincolnshire, where the sausages come from. Do you enjoy sausages?”

The Kumars At No 42: Gaby Roslin and Charles Dance
1. Mum: “Mr Dance, when you were working on Jewel In The Crown you got herpes didn’t you?”
2. Dad to Gaby: “If your new show was a biscuit, what kind of biscuit would it be? A fancy biscuit like a custard cream or a Viennese whirl, or a plain biscuit? Or not a biscuit at all?”
3. Gran to Charles Dance: “You’ve been in Alien 3 and Space Truckers. Would you ever do a film just for the money?
4. Gran: “Charles, your fans are known as Charlie’s Angels. Is this because there are only three of them?”
5. Dad: “Mr Dance, you produced, wrote and directed your new film. Is this so you could get paid three times?”

The Kumars At No 42: Jools Holland and Tom Jones
1. Dad: "Mr Holland, your current band is a rhythm and blues orchestra, how many are in it? Because isn't it true if you employ more than five people you are obliged to offer pension plans? Have you thought about forming smaller orchestras to get around the law."
2. Granny: "Tom, had you heard of Jools."
3. Dad: "Michael Jackson blamed it on the boogie – is that fair, Mr Holland?
4. Mum, to former Hoover salesman Tom Jones: "Our Hoover isn't picking up. Could you have a look at it, Mr Jones."
5: Dad: "Mr Holland, could you explain why ‘it's cool for cats' – cats do their business in a litter tray."

The Kumars At No 42: Donny Osmond, David Baddiel and Kelly Holmes
1. Dad: “Mr Baddiel, I’ve got all of your novels. I ticked the wrong box on my book club form. Should I read them?”
2. Gran on Baddiel’s “soft, elegant hands”: “It’s almost as if you haven’t done a decent day’s work in your life.”
3. Sanjeev after Kelly Holmes had explained Seb Coe regretted not racing like she did and winning two golds at one Olympics: “So, he basically wished that he ran like a girl.”
4. Mum: “David, you shared a flat with Frank Skinner for many years. When did you realise you weren’t gay?”
5. Gran innocently to Donny Osmond sitting on the floor: “Are you dirty?” Donny: “No.” Gran lasciviously: “Would you like to be?”
6. Dad: “Are you a modern father, Mr Baddiel? Do you change nappies and smile at your child?”


The Kumars At No 42: Boxing Day
1. Dad to Anne Robinson about when he sold some contaminated bush meat and was concerned about Anne and Watchdog: “I was worried you would come after me. I’ve never felt more alive!”
2. Gran on Phil Collins’ Oscar win: “When they read your name out, were you as surprised as everyone else?”
3. Dad, after learning Anne had attended a Beatles concert in the Cavern Club: “Do you remember a small Indian man being ejected after jumping on stage and handing Ringo Starr a business card?”
4. Granny: “I have a traditional Christmas dinner – turkey, roast potatoes, stuffing – then it all gets liquidized and I drink it through a straw.”
5. Granny, on Anne’s trademark winks: “In my village everybody used to wink, but that was because their nervous systems were shot to bits by the mercury in the water. Is that why you wink?”
6. Dad, on the 40 foot high posters of Anne in New York’s Time Square to advertise Weakest Link: “I saw the posters, Miss Robinson. Brooding and powerful, like a jungle cat about to pounce.”
7. Dad: “Mr Collins, I once heard a story at my rotary club that you paid a man £8,000 who you’d never met before. For my peace of mind, please tell me it wasn’t true.”
8. As Mum fretted in the kitchen, Dad remarked to Phil: “Maudhri’s a bit starstruck, she’s just met Anne Robinson.”
9 & 10. Mum to Anne: “You’ve had lots of cosmetic surgery, haven’t you?” Dad: “That’s no way to talk to an attractive woman. But you have haven’t you?”

Monkey Trousers, ITV1

Highlights
1 – Professional Footballers' Wives, a 1950s version of the show, sponsored by Norton's cigarettes ("now with an extra-safe asbestos tip"). Alastair McGowan played gentleman footballer Stan, Alex Lowe was teammate Ted, Ronni Ancona was Stan's wife Constance, who dutifully irons his shorts, and Patsy Palmer was Constance's maid Aggie (who was also Ted's pre-op transsexual mistress). The best bits were Stan's claim: "Everyone gets beaten by Blackpool. I can't imagine a time when they won't be the most feared team in the country." And Stan's outrage when Constance revealed she ironed her petticoat in the presence of the insurance man. "Filthy whore! I'm going to get roaring drunk on pale ale."
2 – Bob Mortimer’s clueless estate agent with limp hair who picked up on all the banal irrelevant features of the home he was guiding the prospective buyer around:
“Here we have the first of a number of corners I’ll be showing you throughout our little tour.”
“The breakfast bar is finished at a 90 degree angle which could prove really useful if your son’s studying geometry.”
"This window is shaped like a mandarin segment. It gives the property a fruit salady feel."
"The cupboards open outwards rather than inwards so you food doesn't get crushed."
But the moment he’s asked a question, he responds with a uniform, “I don’t know.”
3 – John Thomson as the public face ("I'm an ex-copper, did I mention that?") of the amoral insurance claim firm Ablett Associates, promising compensation (minus his cut). Each sketch was incrementally funnier than the one that preceded it. In the first, a chef picked up a hot saucepan (an injury); the second saw the chef’s hair turn ginger (a gingery); in the third, a different chef was assaulted by a ninja (a ninjury); and the conclusion saw that chef trip over an electric flex and a saucepan was pushed wilfully onto him causing him multiple injuries (a minjury).
4 – The appearance of Burnside and Roach from The Bill in a sketch which was ruined by the appearance of Vic Reeves' Monkey Trousers, a character which seems to mock the mentally ill and is in no way funny. (Vic also flopped as the lazy vicar who can’t be bothered to finish his sermons and as one of the three Geordie astronauts who had to abort their mission when Mickey complained that he didn't have an ashtray.)
5 – Mackenzie Crook’s sneezer who ruins a giant leaving card for a workmate and stains his friend’s new £4,000 plasma screen TV with his huge gobbets of snot.
6 – Bob Mortimer as the Croc Botherer who spies a dog in the park but mistakes it for “some kind of bush hound that looks like a freakin’ panda.” On closer inspection he whispers: “I reckon it’s got two… maybe four plus legs. C’mon let’s dive on the shit!”
7 – Rebecca Front advertising Poltisan Fructose Gauze Express pads that contain gunpowder essence and cleanse the skin when exploded near to the face. “It hurts for three to six weeks. I’ve had my face blasted six times this year and I’m 52 not 49 like yous wa’ thinkin’.”

Monkey Trousers: episode two
1 – The latest episode from the 1950s archives of Professional Footballers' Wives (sponsored by Norsons Meths, the sportsman's meths) in which Stanley and Constance are the subjects of an at-home photo feature in How Do You Do? Very Pleased To Meet You! magazine (the one that's so racy it printed a picture of Princess Margaret without her hat on).
2 – The advert for Bullwinkle Face Cream, with Exhausted Multiplum, which will beat all seven signs of aging: decrepidnessness, hunchbackery, grimness, Fatiguery, slow-thinking, odour release and death's doorness.
3 – The customers at Roy's Toys seeking a farmyard set and being offered one depicting a farm after the foot and mouth outbreak and the suicide of the farmer.
Monkey Trousers: episode three
• Bob Mortimer's useless estate agent values a house and is impressed by several of its attributes. "The first floor is directly above the ground floor so there's no need for maps. The road outside is going to be a boon because it comes up adjacent to your pathway, so whoever built that road was very forward thinking. The garden is outside the premises. People like that these days."
• The mission into space by the three Geordie astronauts is aborted because Brian's nagging wife shows up. "You can't go to the moon, You promised to paint the fence."
• PMTv presenter Penny Smith losing patience with John Thomson’s foul-mouthed celebrity chef
• Professional Footballers' Wives, sponsored by Norsons Pies ("the sportsman's pie with an extra layer of fat") in which Constance catches the eye of new Italian signing Gino, who cost £312, eight shillings and fourpence.

Al Murray shows

An Audience With Al Murray, ITV1
Highlights
• Al's ability to humiliate his audience yet still get them laughing. This was the best Audience With for years.
• Al's jingoistic routine with the inflatable globe beginning with some boasts about how Great Britain invented time: "We're in charge of what time it is all over the world. It means the Germans don't sit down for their lunch until we say it's one o'clock."
• Al on Ireland – "Our cheeky sidekick. We're like a motorcycle and sidecar. They'd be going nowhere without us. Twenty years ago, Westlife would have been digging the M25. They've done well for a bunch of spud-faced, tone deaf chancers."
• Al on Anglo-Franco relations: "I don't know why we don't grow a big hedge up the English channel. Spoil their light."
• The attempt to get teetotaler Frank Skinner back on the booze
• Al on Switzerland – "Pity the Swiss. They've got France to the left, Austria to the right, Germany up above, Italy down below. You'd never sell that flat."
• Al on the Middle East – "They want to calm down, those Israelis. I don't like the people down the end of my road but I haven't bought a tank."
• Al to Dean Gaffney – "I used to worry about you being acted off screen by that dog."
• Al on Pop Idol – "A get-rich-quick scheme for chavs." And his question to Neil Fox – "Can you sing, son? No? Then who are you to judge?"
• Al to Gordon Ramsay – "F is for food, mate; wash your mouth out, you're filthy."
• Al's claim that the screech of Scots means they "can communicate directly with modems".
• Al on women. "They see themselves as hens, puffed-up clucking creatures; little more than egg-laying machines, woken up each morning by a persistent cock".
• The impression of a 14-year-old boy having his first pint. "Oh Christ," he spluttered, spitting out the vile concoction. "That's disgusting."
• Al on men who are sleeping with the wives of other men. "You're riding the horse. Someone else is paying for the hay."
• Videoing Abi Titmuss and the twin girls from Emmerdale saying "filthy." And telling Edwina Currie, who was alongside them in the totty box: "Not you, Edwina. This isn't a specialist video."
• The surreal routine about how the National Anthem protects the Queen when her yacht goes off course or she falls into the freezer while trying to get some chops.
• Al's equal opportunities policy – "I let my female staff work longer so they can earn the same as the men."
Lowlights
• The presence of pointless "celebs" such as Foxy, Bushell, Gaffney, Sorrell, Titmuss.
• The rutting stags routine with Neil Fox
• The overdone jibes at gay Corrie actor Anthony Cotton
• Dean Gaffney stumbling through the National Anthem
• Al's murder of It's A Wonderful World
• Rustie Lee wasn't in the audience. We thought there was a legal requirement for her to appear on such shows.
• The Pub Landlord's inability to pull a pint that wasn't 90 per cent froth.

Al Murray’s Showbiz Fights, Channel 4
Highlights
• The programme lived up to its promise of being more kickboxing than WWF – it wasn’t afraid to cover the nasty side of famous fights, showing violence in all its gruesome glory.
• Interestingly, the most common example of this was in football. From Cantona dropkicking a spectator to 20 players beating each other senseless, the sport came across as more of a battering, not beautiful, game.
• The schoolchildren acting out famous fights sketch. An amusing addition to the show’s format, especially the Posh (complete with oversized shades) and Jordan catfight - “Your songs make people sick” was the glamour girl’s insult to Mrs. Beckham.
• We still love Robbie Williams’ tactic of sending Noel Gallagher a wreath after hearing a new Oasis album. We felt like doing the same earlier this year.
• Gail Platt AKA The Chinless Wonder versus Eileen Grimshaw in Coronation Street, a fantastic handbags at dawn routine. On finding out her future son-in-law was secretly gay, Mrs Platt greeted his builder brother with the line “Oh look it’s the rest of the Village People”.
• The Prescott Punch. Still not as shocking as the mullet of egg-slinger Craig Evans’ though.
Lowlights
• Al Murray as host – a good idea on paper but no longer performing as his comedy landlord character meant he was rather stiff and uncharismatic.
• Lizzie Bardsley and her bloody bridal-style scrunchie. A horrifically vile hybrid of Jabba The Hut and ASBO recipient, this reality ‘star’ no longer deserves any more exposure. As demonstrated in her interview with Murray, she is also desperately in need of a sports bra.
• Goldie Lookin' Chain as talking heads. The joke really isn’t funny anymore guys.
• Vic & Bob’s play fights in the Top 10 – they rather diluted the programme’s raison d’etre.
• Chris Eubank, a catalyst for narcolepsy.

Al Murray's Happy Hour, ITV1, Saturday 13 January 2007
Did we like it?
It made us happy and it featured Al Murray The Pub landlord – so it did its job.


What was good about it?
• Al Murray is so endearing. He straddles satirical comedy and light entertainment – a precarious divide – and never fails to amuse. Nothing is off limits when he's in his Pub Landlord persona, even his admission that he masturbated to Myleene Klass's bikini-clad appearances on I'm A Celebrity.
• Al pointing out the lack of ingenuity shown in concocting the 1999 bar snack of the year – sausage and bean bake.
• Al's observation that Neighbours "is like National Service in Australia. Draft dodgers are all backpacking across Europe."
• The gag about Kylie. "It was terrible, tragic news last year... that she was going out with a Frenchman."
• The guest interviews all went well, despite rather bland material to work with – Jason 'feelgood' Donovan, Torville and Dean and Amanda Holden, who spoke in a weird Cockneyish manner. And we loved the grunts and strange noises Al made as they told anecdotes.
• We loved his analysis of Jason's songs Too Many Broken Hearts ("Can you put a figure on it?") and Any Dream Will Do ("Any dream?")
• And his jokes about the ice dancers. eg "You've got the keys to Nottingham. Can you cut me a set? Last time I was there I had to throw pebbles at the window" and "Dancing On ice – there's not an ounce of fat on that title."
• Al's mistake in thinking his guests were Keith Harris and Orville not Torville and Dean worked well, causing him to scrap his pre-planned questions such as "Is bird flu affecting your bookings?"
• Al's suggestion that ITV1 should make Where The Wild Hearts Heartbeat On Ice.


What was bad about it?
• Al's opening monologue/humiliation of the audience went on too long. It may have been better if he'd spread his interaction with the crowd throughout the programme.
• Al's mimicking of the West Country accent to receive some too-easy laughs.
• The raucous singing and overblown chimp impression got on our nerves.
• We like the idea of forcing musical guests to perform a Queen song, but Kate Melua's Crazy Little Thing Called Love was lame.

I Am Not An Animal, BBC2

As the All Star Comedy Show and Chelsea FC have recently proven, throwing together a host of star names is not enough for a recipe for success. This new animated comedy features such luminaries as Julia Davis, Simon Pegg and Amelia Bullmore. It's the creation of Steve Coogan (along with Henry Normal) and, after unpromising Tony Ferrino-like beginnings, it soon transformed into a warped Alan Partridge.

A group of animals have been doctored, giving them human characteristics including speech, so they believe themselves to be humans. They reside in a single room at the Vivi-Sec UK laboratory where they all yearn to be chosen to go through the door marked London they believe leads to a life of fame and fortune, but in fact it is an exit to the experimentation lab where they will be cut up and discarded.

The deliberately amateurish animation employed here, akin to South Park and Monkey Dust, is effective for this kind of adult cartoon. The patchwork backdrops of vivid colours and distorted photography also works well but the dark subject matter and eerie locations initially seem to be a pallid disguise for the lack of jokes.

The mood is soon lightened, however, by the inspired presence of a rabbit that has had as much human brain forced into his skull as possible. As a result, all he can say are scripted phrases from the lexicon of computer technicians such as “Through to support, this is Niall speaking” and “I’d just like you to open up Start Menu for me, please”.

It’s blackly comic sparks like this that indicate there is more to I Am Not An Animal than first meets the eye. When it becomes apparent it is a caustic satire of Big Brother and the increasing vacuous celebrity-hungry nature of television and society in general, the humour materialises as if by magic. It all adds up. The dubious scientific merits of vivisection and Big Brother equates as does the gradual “eviction” of the animals from the safety of the lab into the big, wide world.

It’s in this world where their delusions of fame are soon dashed – Big Brother contestants sell their story to a tabloid and are then forgotten, while the animals endure a metaphor of that fate when strapped to a chair and torn to pieces before being flushed away. The only anomaly is that all of God's creatures are less deserving of internment in a vivisection lab than any Big Brother contestant – and Davina McCall.

The main drawback with this comedy was the subtlety of the central gag. Taken as a straightforward comedy, I Am Not An Animal is only sporadically funny, and as a result may lose a huge amount of casual viewers who don’t perceive the humour immediately. But if you bear with it and get swallowed up in the remarkably sharp running jokes you may soon be rewarded with a modern classic.

Dead Ringers, BBC2

Dead Ringers, BBC2
• Natasha Kaplinsky interviewing John Reid as Victor Meldrew. Not funny (although we enjoyed Natasha's statement "Later, the chief medical officer will be giving his views on the risk of passive smoking while I stare at him like a heavily tranquillised Burmese cat." But we thought Jan Ravens' impersonation was poor)
• EastEnders Revealed. With chirpy Shane Ritchie and the foppish, monocled, out-of-touch scriptwriters. Funny
• Fiona Bruce reading the news. Funny
• Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall destroying Jimmy’s Farm. Not funny
• The sexed-up trailer for Imagine: Arthur Miller. Funny
• Condoleeza Rice "I'll be dishing out oppression for a change." Funny
• EastEnders: Sonia/Martin switch from love to hate. A new ethnic family arrives – the Black and White Minstrels. Funny
• Anne Robinson works at a department store customer service desk. Funny
• BBC4 promo for The All Star Documentary Show with Joan Bakewell, David Starkey, Griff Rhys Jones and Billy Connolly. Funny
• On Breakfast With Frost, Boris Johnson blames his hair for his bally foolish behaviour Not Funny
• ITV1 promo. Not funny
• Kirstie and Phil present new show Repossession Repossession Repossession ("the Johnsons have relocated to the pavement". Very funny.
• Blair/Chirac Press Conference. Not funny
• Richard Whiteley's Countdown puns provoke an orgasm in Carol Vorderman. Funny
• Band Aid 20: Bob and Midge, Bono and Robbie Williams. Not funny
• Judge John Deed parody. Funny
• David Blunkett campaigning for Super Ministers 4 Justice on a ledge – "a ledge!!!!". Very funny
• TV gardeners get the pest control treatment. Funny
• Steve Irwin in the fruit and veg shop with unsuspecting customers. Funny
• Band Aid 20 again – Dido being dreary; Bono fighting Justin Hawkins. Funny
• Prince Charles on job row. Not funny
Totals Funny 14 Not Funny 7

Dead Ringers, BBC2
1. The death of Yasser Arafat (or Yasser Crackerjack, according to George Bush) provokes global politicians “to be neither happy nor sad”. “He was a hateful terrorist who will be missed by all.” – Jack Straw.
2. Bill Oddie goes spying in the countryside on eminent historians where he catches sight of Simon Schama verbally jousting with David Starkey. “Dressed as a cavalier, I’m able to get close to the historian without frightening him away.”
3. Jeremy Clarkson defending the environmental impact of cars. “All air pollution is caused by sparrows farting.”
4. Gordon Brown taking over at a customer services desk in Allders where he employs government psychobabble to answer customer queries.
5. Crimewatch with new community policing methods based on the practices in Heartbeat, where drug dealers get a clip around the head.

Dead Ringers
• George Bush addresses the nation. (Hello, my fellow merry Christmases). Not funny
• Breakfast With Frost in which David is joined by the near comatose Henry Kissinger, and they both talk utter gibberish. Funny
• Fiona Bruce. Not funny
• An advert for a Trumpton 2004, a blockbuster film in which the village gets hit by Al Qaeda, and can only be saved from "semi-rural armageddon" by Russell Crowe and his son Tom Cruise. But they must first root out the enemy: "Pew, Pew, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Bin Laden." (and also get the maypr's hat out of a tree). Very funny
• Tony Blair pours scorn on Europe after Bush's win at the polls. Not funny
• A new show on C4: "Too Dead To Wash With Kim And Aggie.". Not funny
• Dr Who catches the Eurostar to Paris (or possibly the blackhole of Azarius). While on board he asks a bemused Aussie: "Do you know my companion Tegan Jovanka." Funny
• John Kerry graciously concedes defeat to Bush, who cannot stop sniggering. Not funny (Phil Cornwell looked a bit annoyed that all that work he's put into perfecting Kerry has now been wasted)
• Little Angels with Tanya Byron, who advises a mother to punch her obstreperous child. Funny
• ITV to show unseen episodes of Trisha which means "all of them.". Not funny
• On Newsnight, Kirsty Wark interviews Tony Blair, in which the PM reveals he will adopt a new policy of tinkering – "Taking things that don't really matter and messing them around a bit" to produce "a land where everything is just a little bit more complicated.". Funny
• Madonna's Desperate Tour. "I'll belt the ancient hits out and get these tired old tits out." Very funny
• Fiona Bruce on News At Ten: "Two brothers were found guilty of sending spam emails, but the judge delayed sentencing to see if the miracle pills had doubled the length of his penis.." Funny
• The Osbournes fall out after Sharon admits swearing at another man – Simon Cowell. Not funny
• Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer present Witness Relocation, Relocation, Relocation. Funny
• An ITV1 ad for a new series featuring Peter Andre and Jordan. Not funny
• Ariel Sharon pays premature tribute to the ailing Yasir Arafat in a bed nearby, but remedies matters with a cushion. Funny
• Dr Who continues his trip on the Eurostar. "Wake me up when I'm Peter Davison."; "The TARDIS was destroyed when I took it to Quickfit.." Funny
• Breakfast presented by Dermot Murnaghan, where Tessa Jowell convinces him of the benefits of casinos. Funny
• June Whitfield and Frank Windsor revel in how they've cashed in on making ads aimed at pensioners. Frank: "I've looked concerned and sympathetic in over 5,000 ads.." Funny
• ITV1 Frank Skinner ad. Not funny
• Fiona Bruce: "Dick Cheney broadcasting live to his victims.." Funny
• Ozzy Osbourne auditions for Simon Cowell and Sharon Osbourne. Not funny
• David Dimbleby counts down to the 2008 Presidential Elections. Funny
Totals – Funny – 11, Not funny – 9

Dead Ringers, BBC2
1 CBBC4's Brian Sewell Inda House (a more intelligent version of Dick and Dom's show) where posh kids throw caviare and the cartoons are drawn by Michaelangelo (CBBC4 also shows Ingmar Bergman's Balamöry – we loved the accent)
2 The Sopranos starring busty Lesley Garrett and smoky Charlotte Church, intimidating a dowdy amateur operatic group
3 Breakfast With David Frost featuring Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness, insisting that Lord Lichfield or Lord Snowden take the photographs of the decommissioned weapons
4 Adrian Chiles making the business news easy to understand on Working Lunch. "What do you mean by money? You've lost me."
5 Up Pompeii starring Russell Crowe as Lurcio ("Titter ye not")

Dead Ringers, BBC2
1 Parkinson conducts interviews with women at a bus stop with little success. The only real response comes when he asks a chav girl why she is wearing a dishcloth. "It's a bandana not a dishcloth."
2 Trevor McDonald (with his trademark dreadful intonation) conducts another "pointless sensationalist interview" – with David Blunkett's dog Sadie. "Join us again as we pad this ludicrous farrago out for 15 more minutes."
3 Ozzy Osbourne appears on the family tree show Who Do You Think You Are and is reunited with a longlost relative he doesn't remember – wife Sharon.
4 The Life Of Grime tackles an infestation of lifestyle gurus including Kirstie and Phil in the attic and Laurence Llewellyn Bowen beneath the floorboards
5 A history of the doomed Top Of The Pops including footage of Jimmy Savile miming that idiotic sound that he makes and Adolf Hitler's recollections of his time as presenter

Dead Ringers, BBC2
1 Back To The Jungle Book "The bare celebrities, the nearly new nonentities."
2 Fiona Bruce reads the news about world reaction to Rowetta's elimination from The X Factor. Ukraine: there's uproar; Putin – "We have always supported G4"; Bush – "it's a travel suite of justice."
3 Ellen McArthur struggles to sell her new Waft Of Brine fragrance which is a mix of o-zone, haddock and wet sleeping bag
4 Location, Location, Location looks at imaginary houses. "The fact that they don't exist keeps building costs down."
5 Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne's Crimewatch

Dead Ringers Christmas Special, BBC2
Highlights
1 Countdown's 2004 Christmas special, recorded in the mid-80s, with Richard giving Carol a massive mobile phone and Carol giving Richard Michael Jackson's Thriller. "Such a clean-cut lad and never in any trouble." The contestants are Freddie Mercury and Princess Diana.
2 David Blunkett arrives in Albert Square. "I'm ideal for EastEnders. I'm tough, I speak in clichés and I have an incredibly complicated personal life."
3 The ad for Panto Direct, the insurance company dealing with pantomime-related injuries. Featured a testimonial from Su "Goldilocks" Pollard: "I took the furry scum for every bowl of porridge they had."
4 Ozzy Osbourne performing at Proms At The Park, thinking it's Glastonbury
5 The Queen's Message available on DVD "packed with bonus features" including outtakes, on-set capers and the Japanese version. The message ends with: "See ya, wouldn't want to be ya."
6 Tanya from Little Angels tackles Regan. "A child possessed by Satan. We've all been there."
7 After They Were Famous: Gandalf. "I never imagined I'd be typecast as a wizard. Same thing happened to Catweazle. Poor bastard ended up working in Threshers." He auditions to be Santa Claus, but loses out to Brian Blessed whose booming voice startles a boy
8 Lesley Garrett Sings All Your Favourite Christmas Rows
9 Britain Goes Wild with Bill Oddie camouflaging himself as a small boy in order to spot Father Christmas
10 Norah Jones is ignored by dinner party guests
Lowlights
1 Crimewatch on the scourge of drunk shopping
2 George Bush on the Iraq election
3 Star Wars featuring the Auf Weidersehen, Pet gang
4 Tony Blair introduces a sliding scale of fines for drunks
5 The Time Team archaeologists rob a bank

Dead Ringers Election Special, BBC2
1 – "Dale Winton" campaigning in the streets for The Lovely Party. Policies: police in burgundy slacks, invasion of Ibiza, on-the-spot fines for colour clashes, increase in fake tan.
2 – "Dale Winton" interrupting BBC News' George Alagiah and recommending they co-host Strictly News together
3 – Tony and Gordon as Little Britain's Lou and Andy, with Gordon getting out of his wheelchair and denouncing Tony ("Blair stinks") as soon as he was out of earshot.
4 – Peter Snow's madcap graphics, representing Michael Howard as a gypsy trying to set up camp outside Number Ten, with the addition of caravans and rubbish bags to represent Tory gains
5 – Tony Blair's response on Question Time when he's asked: "Why did you invade Iraq? Why? Why?" "Oh mind your own business," he said. "If you don't like it, you can not vote for me. I'm going to get in anyway. Have you won two General Elections? Why don't you come back when you have."
6 – David Frost (Jon Culshaw's best impression) giving an easy ride to the leaders. "Is that chair comfy enough? Really? Really?"
7 – The Linda Barker Celebrities So Desperate To Keep In The Public Eye They'll Endorse Anyone Agency featuring David Dickinson, a Chuckle brother, Isla St Clair, the Roly Polys and that bloke who used to be Beppe in EastEnders.
8 – Charles Kennedy promising to replace levity with whimsy, Countdown with 15-to-1, Getting On With Each Other with Unpleasantness, War In Iraq with Sorting Things Out Over A Nice Cup Of tea.
9 – John Prescott's balletic victory dance
10 – Fiona Bruce being so, so full of herself she makes Nitwit Natasha seem like a shrinking violet

Dead Ringers, BBC2
1 – The parody of ITV's sexed-up version of Miss Marple. There's lesbianism ("That sort of thing doesn't happy in Agatha Christie," cries posh Dolly just before Miss Marple snogs a waitress in a twee tearoom. "It does now we're on ITV," Miss Marple says. "You'll get used to it in time.") The episode also features Ninja fighting and a gunfight with the maitre d' when the bread turns out to be stale.
2 – The Grim Reaper appears on Breakfast With Frost to complain about the ban on hoodies. "It's disgraceful. I'm not a troublemaker. I don't wander around decked out half the time in Burberry, listening to drum & bass."
3 – Celebrity autopsy performer Gunther Von Hagen's School Dinners, a new Channel 4 show in which he feeds kids on a Dulwich estate agent including testicles garnished with eyeballs and a colon in the shape of a smiley mouth (and Jan Ravens did a brilliant impression of dinner lady legend Norah)
4 – George Galloway turns up at Washington airport, claiming to be the scourge of New Labour and slayer of Oona King
5 – CJ and Toby are called into the Oval Office in The West Wing for the shock admission by President Bartlet that he's only a fictional president. Before their arrival, he insists Charlie stays in the room. "If anything terrible happens, I need you to look big eyed and soulful over some music."
6 – The Queen complains about the Queen's Speech. "Forty five bills for pity's sake, all more tedious than the last. I tried to put a few gags in but they cut them all out."
7 – Osama Bin Laden becomes the new owner of Manchester United. "Alex Ferguson has always been a role model to me. One day, I hope I can be as ruthless, brutal and bloody minded as him." Playing down accusations that he is not really a fan of the club, Osama insists: "That season i spent supporting Norwich City is all ancient history now."
8 – Fiona Bruce announces: "This week, Britain saw the premier of a much-hyped special effects-laden epic that costs millions of pounds to bring to the screen. Unfortunately, most people said they still preferred the old BBC weather report."

Dead Ringers, BBC2
1 – Jon Culshaw's Ozzy Osbourne meeting his fans on the streets of New York and adopting a cut-glass English accent when his docusoap crew turn the cameras off. "I created this character of the drunken Brummie rocker and I knew that it was my destiny."
2 – Trevor McDonald reveals how the BBC strike is affecting ITV News. "We copy all our news off Ceefax, simplifying it and adding references to Abi Titmuss. Today, we had to go out and buy a newspaper."
3 – The strike forces BBC1 to reshow a 1939 edition of Breakfast With Frost, in which David is joined by Adolf Hitler, who is offered a spam-flavoured biscuit and grilled by the legendary interviewer. "I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you the question many people want me to put to you: Is the hotel we put you up in nice?"
4 – BBC2's cutprice version of The Simpsons, called The Stimpsons, featuring Captain Pugwash as Homer, Mr Benn as Marge, Charley the cat as Bart, the BBC2 logo as Lisa and Bagpuss under a blanket as the sofa.
5 – Grant Mitchell's return to EastEnders, where he shows up in the café and demands: "An angry cup of tea and a furious bacon roll with menacing brown sauce on it." Then he declares: "I'm back in Walford after six years with nothing but the angry facial expression I left with." But when he departs, the producers need to find new villains. First, the Krays turn up, then the Luftwaffe ("That means we must be up against Emmerdale," Pat tells Sonia)
6 – The TV announcements:
"Coming up, 18 Stones Of Idiot. In this case, Johnny Vegas. Alternatively, three of Girls Aloud."
"This is ITV1 and Celebrity Love Island. It's like the bits you fast forward in real porn."
"Viewers can now turn over to ITV2 for the Celebrity European Cup Final: Liverpool versus Abi Titmuss."
7 – Ellen MacArthur's life story being made into the movie ("That's American for film," she points out) Voyage Into Courage starring Meryl Streep as the violin-playing Helen Mac Arthur, Jack Nicholson as her wisecracking companion and Brad Pitt as her husband-to-be Prince William.
8 – The parody of Gwen Stefan's What You Waiting For? video. "Don't listen too closely, it sounds pretty crummy. Just look at the pictures and my nice flat tummy."
9 – Judge John Deed as a superhero. "No sitting on the fence or wasting time with evidence. I will judge on instinct and instinct alone."

Dead Ringers, BBC2
• Desperate Newsreaders featuring Fiona Bruce (as the equivalent of Bree) who is busy ironing husband Andrew Marr's script for the Six O'Clock News; Kirsty Wark (Lynette) who married Jeremy Paxman and is the harassed mother of three little Paxmans ("You've been avoiding the question'" she tells the kids "so I've got to push it. Did you clean your teeth?"); Nitwit Natasha K (Gabrielle) who denies she's being unfaithful to husband Dermot Murnaghan but is worn out after flexing her pout at the gym; and Sophie Raworth (Susan), the ditsy one who has a crush on the man across the street (David Frost in a mobility vehicle),
• The State Opening Of Big Brother in which Her Majesty enters the house. "In the time honoured tradition, she is flanked by a mouthy lesbian and the bodybuilder with weird hair." Part of the ceremony involves Black Rod calling the wannabe model a minger three times.
• An embittered David Frost jumping out of the window in despair after the final edition of Breakfast With Frost – and then realising there was only a badly-painted backdrop outside.
• "Lesley Garrett" telling a financial advisor that she wants to take out insurance against turning out like Jane McDonald and droopy boobs
• The Crazy Frost ringtone
• CSI Balamory in which Gil Grissom arrives to investigate the theft of PC Plum's bicycle. "If we can't crack this," said a determined Gil, "PC Plum won't be able to deliver that sponge cake to the children's picnic."
• The out-of-touch cops in New Tricks being joined by Brother Cadfael from the 13th century
• Real Story reporting on how Bob Geldof is luring rock stars into doing good.
• Monty Don charming the ladies on Gardeners' World. "I'm wondering what to do with my jasmine. Shall I have it in a bed or up against the wall?"

Dead Ringers, BBC2
• You Are What We Edit, with pretend doctor Gillian McKeith unhappy with Trevor from Hull because he's not fat and depressed enough to be on primetime TV and is not nearly unhealthy enough to give viewers a smug sense of superiority.
• Caroline Quentin stars as Pope Judy in a new heartwarming family drama coming soon on ITV1. The "down-to-earth mother of two with relationship issues" gets the family off to work and school and moans about jam getting on the Dead Sea Scrolls before addressing the faithful in St Paul's Square
• Jeremy Clarkson as Dick Dastardly in Wacky Races, with Ken Livingstone as Muttley, screwing up Penelope Pitstop's chances of winning with the congestion charge
• Bill Oddie's Christmas Watch, looking out for the earliest signs of Christmas
• Real Story with Fiona Bruce, rifling through the rubbish bins of news for the greasy kebab of truth by asking the question, Has the chimp-loving mutant [Michael Jackson] been treated fairly by the media?

Dead Ringers, BBC2
1 – Carol Vorderman advertising nutritious drink Banolyactru by bandying around words such as acteroids and electrozones and calling on a boffin (actually a lollipop man) who quoted the findings of Denmark's world-renowned Institute for Spurious Statistics. Carol promised: "Drinking two bottles in the morning could be more beneficial to your health than 18 buckets of whelks."
2 – Chas and Dave revealing, through a song, that they actually write the hits for The Streets. "It's easy writing for this bloke, we just slow our old songs down and put in references to coke. It's not really rap, it's just a Cockney singalong, with a little bit of swearing added so the kids'll buy the fucking song."
3 – Amanda Redman trying to get the male stars of New Tricks to try a few new acting methods rather than twitching and garbled shouting (Denis Waterman), being calm and understated (James Bolam) or simply wearing a woolly hat (Alun Armstrong). She passed on a handy tip: "When I get really really frustrated, I stare, sigh and look off camera."
4 – Clare Short and Glenda Jackson squabbling over who hates Tony Blair more. Clare wanted him to be stabbed in the lung, but Glenda hit back: "I am the true anti-Blairite for I am the only one calling for him to be eaten by a bear."
5 – Christopher Eccleston upsetting his family by becoming Doctor Who. "We've always been Trekkies," moaned his father. "When I think of all the sacrifices we made to bring you up a Trekkie."
6 – A dumbed down Real Story "stripping the underwear of lies off the supermodel of truth."
7 – John Craven on CountryFile visiting a farm breeding Bruce Forsyths where the farmer sees off stray Les Dennises with her shotgun.


Dead Ringers US Election Special, BBC2
How many sketches were witty vote winners, and how many were pathetic poll platitudes?
• A film depicting why John Kerry should be president. (“John has a CD collection of inspiring Aaron Copland music.”) Poll platitude.
• Fox News (“Keeping America scared since 1996”) where one banner headline revealed a link “between voting Democrat and cancer”. Vote winner.
• A spoof of Misery called Hillary where Hillary Clinton has her philandering husband tied to the bed for supporting Kerry, thus damaging her chances of being president next time. Vote winner.
• A character assassination of Michael Moore – “the social conscience of America” – called Taking The Michael, produced, directed etc by Michael Moore. Vote
winner.
• Fox News – “Dick Cheney announced the terrorist threat to America is so great there aren’t enough colours for all the necessary colours of alert”. Vote winner.
• A Republican anti-Kerry film. “We’re not saying he’d use his sharp chin to stab children. Just imagine if he did.” Vote winner.
• David Dimbleby is in Washington on the BBC junket where he and Peter Snow compare their hotel room whirlpools. Vote winner.
• George Bush carries out an impromptu speech in Leicester Square. Poll platitude.
• Fox News, where viewers are asked who is to blame for the recent bad weather – John Kerry or running mate John Edwards. Vote winner.
• A spoof of the West Wing. Poll platitude.
• ABC News bulletin in which Arnold Schwarzenegger gets increasingly desperate for Republican celebrity backers. Poll platitude.
• Another Republican anti-Kerry advert revealing he encouraged the reading of books while governor of Massachusetts. Vote winner.
• George Bush outlines his manifesto through the medium of hip hop. Poll platitude.
An address from Osama Bin Laden where he states that Bush should be voted out, that cuts to Donald Rumsfeld handing him a cheque. Vote winner.
• Channel 4 boasting about the Simpsons. Poll platitude.
• ABC News reporting that apathetic citizens are to vote for Bush just to see if Kerry’s face could get any longer. Poll platitude.
• Michael Moore continues his own masochistic film about his failings. Poll platitude.
• ABC News says the CIA, after studying Osama Bin Laden, has concluded he is “paranoid, delusional and a Capricorn with a good sense of humour.” Poll platitude.
• The Apocalypse Now spoof where Kerry journeys into “the heart of darkness” to seek Bill Clinton’s endorsement. Vote winner.
• Bush denies he was receiving guidance during the TV debates. Poll platitude.
• Another Republican anti-Kerry advert that blames him for the increase of “monsters in your cupboard”; a menace for which Bush has pledged three billion dollars to combat. Vote winner.
• David Dimbleby interviews a police officer from the town of Small Minded Florida, who is one of the Ku Klux Klan who states his intent to intimidate black residents into voting for Bush. Vote winner.
• ABC News report on a poll in Britain that saw Homer Simpson voted the fictional character most Britons would like to be president of the US. Frasier Crane was second and George Bush third. Vote winner.
Totals Witty vote winners: 13; Pathetic poll platitudes: 10.

Dead Ringers, BBC2, Monday 8 May 2006
Did we like it?
In the past, this comedy sketch show has occasionally managed to score more hits than misses – but flops swamped winners in this edition.

What was good about it?
• Da Rolf Harris Code starring Tom Hanks as "the same character he plays in every film" and Sir Ian McKellen as "the token British expert", examining the Opus G'Day cult headed by three Jake the Pegs.
• The mutation of the Arctic Monkeys into George Formby
• Hazel Irvine presenting an impoverished, doomed Grandstand (after putting 5p in the meter) and interviewing Sven. "Steve McClaren has proven he's a worthy successor to me with his clandestine affair with his secretary."
• The quality of the impressions of John Simm as Sam Tyler, that horrible witch from 10 Years Younger, Charles Clarke, Ozzy Osbourne, Noel Edmonds and Patricia Prescott
• The continuity announcement: "On EastEnders tonight, Sonia and Martin fight for sole custody of the scowl."
• Shane Richie in Hollywood trying to impress a camp, grinning agent with his plans for Daz Doorstep Challenge: The Movie – "this time it's biological"
• Cherie Blair's everything-must-go sale before she leaves Downing Street

What was bad about it?
• With the Labour government in disarray, the time was ripe for scathing topical humour, yet the Tony Blair sketches were forgettable, Charles Clarke as a Jamaican crimelord failed to work, Gordon Brown hiding in the cupboard was a neat idea but could have been funnier, and there were only lame jokes at the expense of John Prescott, a sex god in a dressing gown
• The rubbish impersonations of Steve McClaren and Adrian Chiles
• Failed parodies of Dragon's Den, The Apprentice and Deal Or No Deal
• None of the pretend news items raised a smile

Dead Ringers Christmas Special, BBC2, Friday 23 December 2005
Did we like it?
Yes it had more hits than misses so even a topless Jon Culshaw couldn't diminish it.

What was good about it?
• The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe parody in which the kids ended up in Linda Barker's Magical Kingdom of DFS. "I told you we shouldn't have gone through the cheap wardrobe," moaned one of the disappointed adventurers.
• Judge John Deed takes over the trial of Saddam Hussein. "If finding you guilty is what the fatcats of the establishment want me to do, then I'll do the opposite."
• EastEnders Revealed including Nana Moon (the only entry on her list of dying wishes without a tick was "Have lesbian sex with Dot"); the Mitchell brothers not sure if they're coming or going; and Shane Richie bragging about going off to be a Hollywood star (ruefully admitting: "I'll probably be back in two months.")
• The version of that banned-because-it's-too-scary talking heads promo for digital television. "Get digital TV or we'll make an even scarier ad where we'll turn into Natasha Kaplinsky."
• The exposé of the soap-operafication of Dickens' Bleak House, highlighting the staring into middle distance, the zoom noise used before close ups, the shots of people's mouths, the sudden cuts, the scenes lasting no more than 30 seconds, the Matthew Kelly comic cameo, the EastEnders drums and the lighting (this entire series is being lit by two nightlights and a pocket torch)
• Kirsty Wark saying "My lumps, my lumps, my lovely lady lumps" before interviewing Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley about their civil partnership. Ian loved Gerry's crooked teeth poking out from his beard; Gerry liked Ian's shouting; they nearly fell out over who puts out the bins; but they kissed and made up.
• The parody of the James Blunt video in which "James" sang "It's bloody cold, it's bloody cold, out here".
• The Queen canvassing the opinions of passers by in Windsor on how to make her Christmas Message more appealing. She wanted to know if she should introduce catchphrases eg "Is one bothered?" "Does one's face look bothered?" "I'm the only monarch in the village."
• The ad for Osama Bin Laden's stand-up comedy DVD Live & Extremely Dangerous. His material included: "There was an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman... and they're all corrupt heretics who'll roast in hell." and "My mothers in law are so fat their burkhas have their own postcodes". As a special offer, purchasers would also receive a free copy of Robert Mugabe's Fuck Democracy Tour DVD.
• The appeal for Tossers (The Organisation for Saving Stray Experts on Reality Shows). Best bit was the arrival of a postman at the Osbournes' house. "Is this the Osbourne residence?" he asked. "Don't you bring my family into it," shrieked Sharon as she threw water in his face.
• Hogwarts School gets a visit from an Offsted inspector
• Robert Winston and Jonathan Miller making a CD called We Wish You A Rational Christmas

What was bad about it?
• The Des Lynam on Countdown sketch
• The Fiona Bruce inserts
• The mock continuity announcements lacked the usual satirical bite
• Poirot, Alan Sugar Jose Mourinho and Sven Goran Eriksson
• Johnny Vaughan's Space Cadets launching David Cameron and William Hague into power
• Tonight with Trevor McDonald on Charles Kennedy's assassination

2DTV, ITV1

2DTV, ITV1
1. The tooth fairy leaves little Leo Blair £20, a new train set and tickets to Disneyland, but over at No 11 Downing Street, John Brown must pay his father £1 for “the cost of tooth disposal, plus VAT.”
2. George Best’s new liver finally gives out while he is down the pub, so a new liver is called into action from the substitutes’ bench.
3. The new Formula One grand prix around the streets of London is blighted by the school run, the congestion charge and dogs befouling the streets.
4. Banned from hunting foxes, the hunters and dogs around the country resort to pursuing rats through the filthy sewers.
5. The Queen gets her servants to vote the gatecrashing Prince Charles out of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here.


2DTV, ITV1
1 Tony Blair is keen that hunting dogs find new employment – a dishevelled David Blunkett gets one has his guide dog, while John Prescott tries out some Korean cuisine
2 Abi Titmuss dates and fellates the pig that Rebecca Loos masturbated on The Farm
3 Tony and George record a single called Kill The World. "This single's going to bomb," says Blair. "So are we," says Bush.
4 Kirstie and Phil from Location, Location, Location try to find a new home for The Old Woman Who Lived In A Show. "She needs more space, ideally with off-street parking."
5 Polo Match Of The Day hosted by Gary Lineker in a top hat, featuring the Royal Family versus Argentinean millionaires

2DTV, ITV1
1 Tony Blair putting on a fireworks display for son Leo in which the skies over London light up majestically, including Leo's name spelt out in sparkles, while Gordon Brown puts on a less impressive display for son John – he holds a match in the air.
2 The robotic BBC2 logo shoots itself when the announcer says The Good Life is on yet again. And the bird in the title sequence flies away and defecates on the yellow blob in the logo.
3 The Rooneys as The Flintstones, with Wayne shagging a slappersaurus and then smashing up The (carved in stone) Sun so Colleen doesn't hear about it
4 Sven Goran Eriksson has been unfaithful again – he's been coaching France, Brazil and even Scotland behind the backs of the England players
5 Top Gear 1908 with the silent Jeremy Clarkson saying "Throw away the horses, they've invented the car" before going for a drive in a vehicle that was slower than a hedgehog
6 President Bush chanting "four more wars" then getting a kiss-arse-a-gram from Tony Blair
7 Celebrity Street Fighter: Prince Harry v the paparazzi
8 Location Location Location finds a new home for Gordon Brown ("I want a place in Downing Street with an even number") – No 12 Downing Street
9 A mugger nicks an iPod but destroys it when he finds it contains Phil Collins
10 Osama Bin Laden's Cave Workout (a fatwah on fat)


2DTV, ITV1
1 Arnie becomes president, requesting his coffee with "milk and two steroids" and telephoning "kleine poodlehund" Tony Blair
2 Trinny and Susannah give a snowman a makeover. "He looks so last winter." "He's melting. It's so next spring."
3 Police Camera Action! features Santa being chased in his 4x4 sleigh. He was 5,000 sherries over the limit.
4 David Beckham has to spell out what he's bought Brooklyn for Christmas. B-I-K-E. Victoria: "A book? A bikini?"
5 David Beckham puts on his hiking gear for his walk to find his favourite Ferrari in his massive car park (twinned with Los Angeles)
6 A kangaroo is impressed by another kangaroo's impression of Joe Pasquale. "That's not an impression. Bastard Paul Burrell ate my knackers."
7 The Tories bring zombified old people back to life to vote for them – but they vote for UKIP instead.
8 Camilla arrives home at Dunnothin to find Prince Charles shagging a daisy called Daisy
9 George Best's public service announcement: "Do drink and drive. How else am I going to get another liver?"
10 David Blunkett has a note saying "shag me" attached to his back and Tony Blair isn't happy with the childish prank. Blunkett reveals he put it there.

2DTV, ITV
1 Tony Blair demands to know from the cabinet if any more scandals are about to break. Gordon Brown admits that he has broken his promise to balance the books – he's 3p over – and David Blunkett's dog is revealed to have been at the Queen's corgis
2 It's London 2027 ("Henman reaches semi finals," cries a newspaper seller) where Prince Charles is crowned – but then Trinny and Sussanah show up to say it looks "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong" and put a fez on his head instead.
3 The craze of people using catchphrases from Little Britain is sweeping the nation
4 Parkinson tries to boost his appeal by fighting Emu (with no Rod Hull attached)
5 Mary Poppino, the Filipino nanny who got a visa to work in the UK

2DTV, ITV1
1 The Friends theme song reworked by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. "Surely now my time is coming near. "It won't be today, this week or even this year. I'll be here not you, until my dying days."
2 The Johnsons (based on The Simpsons) with Boris, Tony Blanders and Blunsky the Clown
3 Rupert The Chav
4 Location, Location, Location relocates Australian insects fleeing from the D-List celebrities
5 Kim and Aggie clean up a nuclear power plant. "This reactor has never seen a duster."

Black Books, Channel 4

Bill Bailey's Manny, who has surely claimed his place in the pantheon of comic fools alongside Baldrick, Trigger and Father Dougal, manage to persuade Bernard and Fran to go to a party in the final episode of Dylan Moran's series.

Fran was keen to show off her new haircut, even though neither Bernard nor Manny had noticed. "Men have a way of noticing a change in appearance, and that is not noticing,” Bernard morosely responded when confronted. Meanwhile, Manny was keen on Rowena, a girl he knew would be at the party. This all took up the first part could have been condensed into a much shorter space of time.

The second half was much better and began as the trio stumbled drunkenly back into the bookshop. Manny was despondent that his romantic aspirations were ostensibly thwarted by his choice of conversation – offshore wind farms. “I couldn’t think of anything else,” he moaned. Bernard was characteristically unsympathetic towards Manny’s plight, claiming that aggressive people exclusively enjoyed a good love life, while people like Manny would never reproduce and were a “genetic cul-de-sac”.
Manny for once stood up to his irascible boss and claimed that Bernard was heartless, but Bernard played for sympathy and claimed his last girlfriend, Emma, had died. That made Manny feel guilty until Fran revealed that Emma was not dead and that was simply her ruse to get out of the relationship.

She pleaded with Manny not to tell Bernard but, rather predictably, in true Father Dougal fashion, that was the first thing he did. Bernard didn’t believe him, and this set up a brilliant sequence where Fran produced evidence to prove Emma wasn’t dead including her dental records, her birth certificate and, best of all, a photograph of Emma holding yesterday’s newspaper wearing a T-shirt bearing the legend “I Love Life” plastered over it. Bernard’s misery was complete when Rowena turned up and she and Manny disappeared upstairs to “make tea”, leaving a lonely Bernard to complain about the happy noises they were making, which was a fabulous conclusion to one of the wittiest sitcoms of the year even if this episode was one of the weakest of the run.

My Hero, BBC1

What is it?
BBC1's cult (but strangely, primetime) sitcom about a superhero from the planet Ultron living in Northolt, Middlesex (well we did say it was a cult show).
What to say if you like it.
An hilarious meeting of Red Dwarf and Terry and June.
What to say if you don't like it.
Red Dwarf meets Terry and June.

What's good about it?
• It's developed from a vehicle for comedian Ardal O'Hanlon (Thermoman) into the best ensemble piece on the box, with a defrocked superhero cousin, a vain doctor and evil receptionist, in-laws from hell and a barking-mad neighbour all contributing strongly to the comedy.
• It co-stars Emily Joyce, who manages to combine perfect English womanhood with a hint of the seriously deviant. She's simply irresistible.
• For a supposedly gentle show, it has two of the most challengingly nasty characters in British sitcom - Mrs Raven, the hate-filled, patient-taunting receptionist, and Dr Piers Crispin, the GP for whom fame and gain come before medicine every time. The endless mother-in-law jokes are a bit un-PC, too.
• This week Piers (Hugh Dennis) ended up on I'm A Celebrity, stuck in a box full of live snakes after Mrs Raven conned into thinking they'd be plastic. Serves him right.

What's bad about it?
• The plots can be, er, thin. This week's was about their creepy, new, future-predicting superbaby foreseeing mass deaths (not perhaps in the best of taste right now), but turning out not to have realised that everyone was actually asleep. Still, the quality's in the detail, as they say.
• Nastasha Kaplinsky had a cameo role.

What makes a good sitcom? If there was a simple answer to that one then we probably wouldn’t have the dire My Family or the truly dreadful Eyes Down. My Hero doesn’t provide many clues either, because on paper it’s even worse than the other two, while on screen it’s actually quite good.

The basic idea is, quite simply, rubbish. An intergalactic superhero takes on the form of a bumbling Irishman and operates out of a flat in north London, where he lives with his Earthling wife and talking baby. He has in-laws straight out of Keeping Up Appearances (domineering mother, hen-pecked father), while his wife is a nurse at a health centre populated by a vile receptionist and an arrogant doctor. Oh, and there’s also a mad Scouser and a fat American (married to the receptionist), who are somehow mixed up in the superhero business.

So far so what’s-on-the-other-side then, but somehow this lot shakes out into an enjoyable half hour’s viewing. Ardal O’Hanlon is, of course, perfect for the part of Thermo Man, the superhero who hasn’t quite got the hang of electric toasters, while Emily Joyce is the wife every man secretly wants to marry, all 1950s-typist sensuality in tight jumpers and over-ruffled hair. The doctor’s surgery, meanwhile, is satirised as a place of unremitting vindictiveness, greed and incompetence, a cruel depiction guaranteed to have NHS patients tuning in by the million.

The quality is all in the detail then, but what really makes My Hero likeable is the fact that, like Ardal O’Hanlon’s persona, it’s very unassuming. Utterly dependent on getting the audience on its side, it does so by not pretending to be anything other than a slightly patchy script with daft plots and occasionally funny jokes, solidly played by a cast who bring personality to their roles and seem to enjoy doing it.

You can see the same quality in shows such asTwo Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps, contrasting sharply with the slick self-satisfaction of My Family and the patronising aren’t-proles-funny attitude of Eyes Down. Perhaps that’s a good starting point for a General Theory of (Relatively) Good Sitcoms.

Have I Got News For You, BBC

Have I Got News For You, BBC1, Friday 13 April 2007
Did we like it?
A mere four out of 10 for this 33rd series opener.

What was good about it?
• Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Michael McIntyre were cheery yet unspectacular guests.
• Paul Merton's flamboyant shirt. So metrosexual!

What was bad about it?
• Jeremy Clarkson as a guest host. He still thinks swearing is clever. What a child! He thinks being bombastic is amusing. What a prick! He has a disgusting pot belly. What a slob!
• Paul Merton overdid his confused looks.
• The Steve Irwin joke not because it was tasteless but because it was unfunny coming from Clarkson.
• The clips are getting increasingly unfunny, gleaned from YouTube's less amusing postings.

Have I Got News For You v QI
Hosts: HIGNFY was hamstrung by the ineptitude of former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook; you may as well have put Keith Chegwin in charge of the Home Office.
He delivered the witty script as if it was a dull appendix at the end of a cumbersome Parliamentary report.
Meanwhile, Stephen Fry was being as sharp and erudite as ever, even allowing the wilful Philistine Alan Davis to playfully wind him up.
Winner: QI
Panellists: HIGNFY was bolstered by the ever amusing Paul Merton, whose highlight was explaining the mechanics of the European Parliament in the style of Long John Silver. Merton’s team mate Dr Phil Hammond was pretty good, too, especially when he asked Robin Cook: “Do you think your life is futile?” But on the other side, Ian Hislop tempered his seething indignation; while PJ O’Rourke seemed to merely churn out lines he was given half-an-hour before recording.
Over on QI, Alan Davis enjoyed baiting Stephen Fry, while Jeremy Hardy came up with a few gags in his usual exasperated manner and Barry Cryer was quiet. But the heavy stone around the bag of cute kittens was Jeremy Clarkson. His boorish dismissal of Birmingham and incessant diatribe about cars were neither funny not intelligent.
Winner: Have I Got News For You
Rounds: HIGNFY’s rounds are so well-practised you would imagine they would run smoothly. And this may have well been the case again had a competent host been presenting, instead Cook blundered through them with all the élan and grace of Margaret Thatcher performing Swan Lake.
QI mixed in some amusing remarks into quite an informative set of rounds, that was slightly let down by Alan Davis becoming increasingly circumspect on the General Ignorance section, where his adherence to wrongly held beliefs is always very funny.
Winner: QI

Have I Got News For You? BBC1
1. Marcus Brigstocke on Prince Charles’s views on careers: “Says a man whose primary occupation is to wait for his mother to die.”
2. Guest Michael Buerk’s wistful adoration for the charms of former BBC Arts correspondent Rosie Millard.
3. Robert Mugabe: “We don’t believe homosexuals have any rights at all.” Marcus Brigstocke: “Which infuriated Peter Tatchell, but won him the freedom of the state of Texas.”
4. Paul Merton: “Here’s Prince Charles, a man who got where he is today through complete dedication.”
5. Marcus Brigstocke: “George W Bush’s bodyguards were accused of being over zealous (exasperated) by the Chilean military police.”


Have I Got News For You, BBC1
1 The comments on the David Blunkett scandal. Paul: "I was touched by the Daily Mail headline, The Man Who Loved Too Much." Ian: "It was a misprint. It should have been The Man Who Lied Too Much."
2 Ronnie Corbett's jolly handling of the show from a huge chair borrowed from The Two Ronnies set. Great delivery of gags such as "David Blunkett has resigned to spend more time with someone else's family."
3 The picture of the floral tribute in the shape of a cigarette that featured at the funeral of a woman who smoked until she was 100 plus.
4 The awful joke that followed the story about Jeanette Krankie's panto fall from a beanstalk. "Doctors say her condition is fandabidozi."
5 Hearing once again those immortal words from Ronnie Corbett: "And now, ladies and gentlemen, Miss Barbara Dickson."

Bremner, Bird & Fortune, Channel 4

Highlights
1 – During Michael Howard's meet-the-people on the streets of London, he encounters a black traffic warden. "You got in before we closed the doors so there's nothing we can do about you."
2 – Michael Howard saying: "People say you've got to be cruel to be kind. I say why can't you just be cruel? Leave it at that."
3 – Carolyn Pickles' tremendous impression of Camilla 'Ghastly' Parker-Bowles, as Prince Charles complained about his mother ("stuck up cow") and the press. "People seem to enjoy chasing poor defensive creatures and tearing them to pieces." Rory Bremner also revealed that Charles and Camilla's wedding list was at Ikea in Edmonton. "The place was stormed by ardent monarchists."
4 – Tony Blair's election broadcast, appealing to the nation as if he's a husband who strayed. "Michael Howard doesn't love you. Not like I do."
5 – John Fortune's George Parr is a junior Home Office minister this week, defending the counter-terrorism measures. "We're trying to prevent terrorist things happen so obviously there's no evidence because these things haven't happened yet."
6 – Pauline McGlynn as the anniversary dinner party guest who turns up with a present (a bowl for the wife to keep her Botox in) and reveals she was influenced by Princess Diana. "Her haircut, her eye shadow. I got really into bulimia." And she disapproves of the forthcoming wedding. "Is there anything more last year?"
7 – Tony Blair had a meeting with the leader of the opposition. "Gordon, can you nip out for a Chinese?" "Where?" "To China."
8 – John Bird's bishop: "Rowan Williams has given tremendous leadership. He tries not to talk about anything."
9 – "Mr Blair hears the voice of God. Not directly. I think what happens is Mr Bush hears the voice of God and tells him."

Thieves Like Us, BBC3

Monday 22 January 2007
Did we like it?
An enjoyable comic romp about a pair of thieves that owes as much to the classic pre-war humour of Laurel and Hardy as it does to contemporary sitcoms.


What was good about it?
• The central pairing of Bex (Tom Brooke) and Ollie (Fraser Ayres) seemed to be based on the glorious partnership of Laurel and Hardy, with Bex as the wise, yet deluded one and Ollie his buffoonish sidekick. And while they are obviously nowhere near to that harmonious double-act (closer to Delboy and Rodney in places), there were certainly moments where a hint of a similar chemistry was apparent.
• A classic scene from Laurel & Hardy’s The Music Box was also ‘appropriated’ as Bex and Ollie broke in to a compound to steal some widescreen TVs. Bex had to gamely clamber over the wall, getting his leather jacket shredded by the razor wire in the process. But Ollie, meanwhile, had simply tried the door, and finding it to be unlocked helped Bex as he climbed down the other side.
• But even before then, we’d cottoned on to the way in which Bex was the one forever formulating hare-brained schemes to get rich, while the dumber Ollie seemed happy to go along with things, and this relationship was the clear attraction of the first episode and hopefully the series.
• And the comparison is given further, welcome, credence by Bex’s rampaging girlfriend Mel, who is furious he has forgotten her birthday. She then drives around town in a murderous rage after he turns his mobile phone off until she corners him at the warehouse, where he whimpers in the shadows. This was reminiscent of Stan and Ollie’s Blotto when ‘Mrs Laurel’ hunts down her errant husband to a bar where he is enjoying a dissolute night out with Oliver, and sets about the pair with a shotgun.
• David Bradley as the gnarled, grizzled pawn shop owner Electric who buys most of the lads’ contraband.


What was bad about it?
• New Order’s celestial Thieves Like Us wasn’t used as the theme music.
• As with almost all first episodes of new sitcoms, there’s those unavoidably clumsy moments when characters must be introduced to the viewer. And while Thieves Like Us navigated this quite well, we were a little confused by the contradictions of the charismatic Bex. One moment, he could be poetically describing the thief’s lot in life, but the next he could be using the vocabulary nicked from the dumbly ruminating jaws of a Nuts-reading Neanderthal, such as by referring to his girlfriend Mel as his “bird”.
• The BBC3 CGI puppet, that lurched into view as Bex and Mel played out the final scene to trail the next programme, was annoyingly intrusive.

Don't Watch That, Watch This, BBC4

Don’t Watch That, Watch This, BBC4
What’s it all about
The speeches of world leaders are cut up and re-edited by the makers of Bremner, Bird & Firtune to make their banal platitudes look absurd and self-absorbed.
What to say if you liked it?
An acidic satire on world leaders, hanging them with their own mendacious petards.
What to say if you didn’t like it?
A complacent, anachronistic manipulated library of malapropisms by world leaders that offers little comical sustenance beyond the meagre nutrition of insipid satire.

What was good about it?
• Some of the music, such as Tricky, New Order and Talk Talk, was fantastic.
• David Blunkett “slagging off” his cabinet colleagues were funny. “Tony Blair, on the streets binge drinking.” “John Prescott is total evil.” "Gordon Brown – no chance of avoiding reoffending".
• Some of the messages Cherie Blair was inserting into books during a signing session. “We hate Gordon.” "Gordon is a moron."
• The running sketch on assisted suicide, in which subjective statistics supporting the practice were flashed on screen to a soundtrack of a couple taking her mother to Switzerland to be killed. After the mother decided she didn’t want to die after a sight seeing trip, the husband complained as they had only booked two tickets for the flight home.
• Bono on working with Busted; Chelsea's José Mourinho on adding God to the squad

What was bad about it?
• It seemed very out of date, as though it was made six months ago and left on the shelf until now. Examples included too much David Blunkett; Osama Bin Laden in a cave; and Kilroy still involved with Ukip.
• Many of the targets – George Bush, Tony Blair and Donald Rumsfeld – have already been satirised to death by Dead Ringers, Rory Bremner and 2004: The Stupid Version, and often with far more wit and originality.
• The tiresome scornful narratives that lectured on the obvious division between the developed and undeveloped world, that BBC4 viewers would be already well aware
of.
• The assisted suicide piece ended with a highly biased conclusion about the absurdity of denying the practice here in the UK, but considering the ambiguity of the ethical quandary such a conclusion was inappropriate without first presenting the converse argument.
• Some of the music was very bad eg Huey Lewis And The News played while Michael Portillo dressed in fishnet stockings.
• The contrived, gloomy finale where the narrator mused that “we’ll destroy ourselves in the next few years” was as bad as the Fox News propaganda that Arab terrorists all around the world are plotting nuclear Armageddon to scare voters into electing George W Bush.

Highlights
1 – Doctored footage of yachting superstar Ellen McArthur getting very tearful during a storm as her drinks tray slid around, the chandelier swayed and the piano fell apart
2 – Bush and Rice accompanied, ironically, by REM's Shiny Happy People
3 – Doctored footage of Dinner With Portillo, showing the highbrow guests discussing immigration while tucking into fry-ups, accompanied by bread and butter and Fanta.
4 – Gordon Brown making a dramatic speech while Tony Blair giggles along
5 – Tory Theresa May on sex with Tony Blair – "I was taken 66 times in many different ways."

Don't Watch That, Watch This, BBC4
1 – Footage of a lofty conversation about immigration on BBC4's Dinner With Portillo doctored to include a clown among the guests. He made suitably intelligent expressions, but let himself down by beeping his hooter occasionally.
2 – Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley singing Suspicious Minds
3 – The serious bit highlighting the scandal of weapons sales to India and Pakistan so they can fight over Kashmir
4 – Buzzword-laden speeches by Blair, Howard and Letwin ("I will make this country a deeply unfair place to live in.")
5 – John Prescott: "Old Labour. New Labour. Full fat Labour." And "John Prescott" doing his own hair and make-up before appearing on Richard & Judy
6 – The Court Circular announcement: "This afternoon, Prince Harry annexes Sudetenland and marches on Poland."
7 – Tim Henman exchanging balls with a ballboy and never getting round to serving
8 – Robert Robinson on Call My Bluff defining words which have become twisted by politicians
9 – Blair putting black lines through the 1945 Labour manifesto, accompanied by him singing Jerusalem
10 – New Order's Blue Monday playing during footage of Tony Blair doing a lot of pointing

Don't Watch That, Watch This, BBC4
1 – An eskimo fishing on BBC News' big white round desk while the newsreaders deliver the latest
2 – Tony Blair and President Mitterand singing Wannabe.
3 – Alex Ferguson mocking Arsene Wenger: "Got your new goalie yet?"
4 – John Redwood's speech accompanied by Duran Duran's Wildboyz. "I'm an embarrassing, disgusting Conservative. I haven't got a little cock."
5 – Sven Goran Eriksson doing the long-term weather forecast
7 – Jack Straw banging on about security on Radio 4's Today while the presenters make and drink cocktails
6 – Michael Howard grinning away as Margaret Thatcher shrills: "We need more materialism, class division, lies and mediocrity."
8 – Prince Charles umming and erring
9 – Nelson Mandela singing Me So Horny
10 – Mrs Bush holding up an "I'm With Stupid" banner wherever she went with her husband

Don't Watch That, Watch This, BBC4
1 – The serious bit on America's hatred of Cuba and its attempts to find a pretext for an attack (including sabotage, funerals for mock victims, blowing up a US ship and blaming Cuba etc)
2 – Postman Pat guesting with the Righteous Brothers on You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' in 1968 before he left the music industry to become a postman
3 – Tony Blair having to endure a long railway journey accompanied by a boring old man who went on and on about Aberdeen and a drunk whose tower of cans toppled over
4 – Arsene Wenger at the Manchester United training ground, calling Ruud Van Nistelroy "a big girl cheat" and then bragging about it to a colleague.
5 – Ariel Sharon singing The Power Of Love (the Huey Lewis version)
6 – The Iraqi Election Special featuring Sunni & Shia singing I Got You Babe
7 – John Prescott marking out potential homes in Country Life magazine
8 – Jack Straw's doctored speech – "I'm proud of this government's record in fighting for injustice at home and injustice abroad."
9 – Newsnight Review analysing the painting of Bill & Ben
10 – Saddam Hussein singing Somebody Help Me

Don't Watch That, Watch This, BBC4
1 – The serious bit about how celebrities are ranked higher than people who do good: driving badly on television is more important than curing the sick, eating insects in a jungle is more important than feeding the poor.
2 – A glimpse inside the Queen's carriage where there are crisps on the floor and muck on the upholstery
3 – A doctored version of Mastermind in which the contestant's power of anticipation grows until he provides the correct answer before Magnus has even opened his mouth.
4 – Michael Portillo doing a runner after clocking up a huge taxi fare
5 – Blair and Howard making speeches while doing the naked balloon dance
6 – President Chirac putting on his iPod to drown out Tony Blair's speech
7 – A doctored version of Blankety Blank in which all the celebs (Tony Blackburn, Ted Rogers etc) hold up answers referring to Terry Wogan's wig.
8 – Osama Bin laden singing Mamma Mia
9 – BBC newsreaders preening themselves
10 – Politicians singing Perfect Day

Shane, ITV

The jokes in Frank Skinner’s new sitcom, about a taxi driver who feels life is passing him by, were so typical of his humour on Baddiel And Skinner: Unplanned, that this was almost Frank Skinner: Planned. The drawback is that more elaborate humour is expected of a sitcom rather than two witty blokes on a sofa.

The scene-setting opening was painful. A succession of awful puns and extended gags about American TV audiences, Tarzan’s primate pal Cheetah and wasteful conversations (if a tree falls out of earshot does it make a sound?) initially indicated a dreadful working class My Family.

The cause wasn’t aided by the sparing use of Shane’s wife Myrtle (Elizabeth Berrington) who delivered great comic timing yet only really appeared in this scene. Meanwhile, Shane’s son Lenny (Tony Bignell) was let down by lines that made him appear as a huge irritant rather than the precocious 11-year-old he is supposed to be.
Shane’s daughter Velma (Kelly Scott) appeared as nothing more than a plot device after she brings home her American pal Audrey, a beautiful blonde, who confounds Frank’s lowly expectations of her appearance to set up the storyline.

And that was pretty much all that was seen of Shane’s family, which was unusual for the start of a new show. This was largely because the story was a spoof of American Beauty which concentrated on Audrey tempting middle-aged Shane with lines such as “You don’t look old enough to be Velma’s dad” and then asking him to meet her the next evening. The spoof was spoiled by the characters actually talking about American Beauty, as if the viewers won’t be literate enough to spot the comic references. The best of these was in a fantasy dream sequence when Shane bursts in on the alluring Audrey in the bath, where she is covered in pickled onions.

And this was one of a number of great visual gags that compensated for the earlier excruciating puns, notably Shane opening the fridge to cool his engorged amorous ardour after Audrey propositions him. And later Shane accompanies his distraught colleague Bazza (David Schneider) to the vet’s where his dog is very ill. Shane tells Bazza that if his dog survives, he will go through with his liaison with Audrey; if the mutt dies, he will remain faithful to Myrtle. The camera focuses on the American vet as he solemnly informs Bazza that his dog didn’t survive the operation, off screen there is the sound of inconsolable whimpering. The camera then cuts to Shane sobbing on Bazza’s shoulder. However, the vet tells them that he was only jesting as part of an American festival to play as many practical jokes on people as they can. This makes Shane fear that Audrey’s interest in him is one of her own jokes and decides not to meet her.

Unfortunately for Shane, Audrey was serious and she waited in futility for him to arrive on their illicit date. And it was a good thing he didn’t as this would have meant the end of Shane’s marriage as well as the end of the series, and, despite a weak opening, there was enough wit in the script to suggest it could get better. The real acid test will come in establishing the cast – Bazza and Myrtle (what we saw of her) were great foils for Shane, but his children weren’t on screen long enough to form any definite impressions.

Nighty Night, BBC3

Julia Davis was half of the duo (with Rob Brydon) who made BBC2’s Human Remains, the dark, cruelly funny portraits of a series of emotionally dysfunctional couples. Now she’s written, and starred in, a dark comedy drama of her own, billed by the BBC as “A West Country version of Fatal Attraction.”
Nighty Night stays pretty much in Human Remains territory, except that now there’s a whole district full of dysfunctional people leading lives of quiet desperation. Davis plays Jill, owner of Hair By Jill, to whom humanity is apparently an alien concept. When her husband Terry (Kevin Eldon) is diagnosed with cancer she packs him off to hospital and signs up with a dating agency, only to find herself matched with a twitchy widower (Mark Gatiss) who steals a sly poke at her breast. Dumping him, she goes off to milk sympathy from a Fun & Fellowship group, only to fall for Don, the sex-starved doctor husband of multiple sclerosis sufferer Cath. And so it goes on, as the network of damaged people inflict further damage on each other.

Any idea that subjects such as cancer and MS might be treated with delicacy are soon dispelled, as Jill tells Terry that the small pyjamas she’s bought him will fit eventually “because you will get smaller”, and Don fetches his wife’s neck brace so that she can perform oral sex on him. The jokes are, however, carefully aimed at the uncaring able-bodied rather than their victims. And there’s plenty of razor-sharp detail, from Don casually marooning the wheelchair-bound Cath by some steps to Jill’s deftly professional brushing-off of an unhappy customer (Vicki Pepperdine), who eventually commits suicide due to her ravaged appearance.

There are first-rate performances too, from Davis as the monstrous Jill (even if she is just a bit like a West Country AbFab Patsy) and Rebecca Front as the painfully stoical Cath, plus a show-stealer from Marc Wootton (My New Best Friend) as the outrageously camp dating agency boss. Angus Deayton doesn’t do too badly as Don, either, sporting a prison-escapee beard presumably designed to prevent senior BBC executives from noticing that he’s working for them again.

For all that though, Nighty Night is fairly hard work, due to the unrelenting nature of its dark side. Determinedly low-key, and lacking any thread of light relief such as Alan Partridge’s buffoonery or Rob Brydon’s manic cheeriness, it becomes a bit depressing after a while, as misery is piled upon misery. Sharp comedy, yes, but it could do with the occasional laugh.

Coupling, BBC2

Coupling is what used to be called a comedy of manners. Such pieces deal with the minutiae of social etiquette between members of the “mannered” (i.e. elite) class. If you count young urban professionals who hang out in designer bars and restaurants as an elite, then this one fits the bill. If that also sounds quite a lot like Friends, then it’s not surprising, as the format – six twentysomethings in permanent friendship plus shifting states of relationship – is pure Friends-on-Thames.

True to its purpose (and unlike the real Friends), Coupling is obsessed with codifying the unwritten social rules of smart urban life, and to this end the characters sit round telling each other about them for what seems like most of the time.

The plot in this week's repeat concerned one of the Friends seeing the naked backside of his girlfriend’s best friend, who is also a Friend. This was the cue for the Friends to divide along gender lines and head off to separate designer bars, where they could endlessly discuss whether the butt-view constituted the crossing of a line, how the “head laugh” was a giveaway of a Friend With Something To Hide, and so on. At times it was more like an Open University foundation course (“Unit S492 – Introduction To Smart Urban Living”) than a sitcom, and about as visually immobile, too.

The show’s underlying formality is made worse by an almost total lack of chemistry between the characters. Now in their third series, they still seem as if they’ve met for the first time in rehearsals that morning. At times Gina Bellman, the Phoebe figure, seems as if she’s wandered in from a different sitcom altogether, something the real Phoebe, Lisa Kudrow, manages to avoid. But with scripts as textbook (literally) as these it would be hard to achieve anything more naturalistic.

There are some very good punchlines, as in this week’s anecdote about Patrick (the Joey figure) dating twins who pretended to be the same woman and wore him out. “If they’d been identical it would have been even harder to tell them apart” he said, giving us a neatly surreal insight into how much attention he paid to the women he slept with. But these lines are spaced too far apart, the gaps filled by yet more mannered interactions.

One reference book notes that comedies of manners are “usually written by sophisticated authors for members of their own coterie or social class.” That’s exactly how Coupling feels – smart media professionals making a show for other smart, sophisticated professionals. Nice of them to let the rest of us watch.

Not Tonight With John Sergeant, ITV1

What to say if you liked it
It featured the marvelously dry John Sergeant.
What to say if you didn’t like it
An ailing mongrel doomed to being put down as it lurches decrepitly about its kennel seeking sustenance from the waste deposits of its superior satirical forbears.

What was good about it?
• The report on Leo Blair’s life as son of the Prime Minister had a few good ideas such as blurring and pixelating the child’s face, in the same way as neurotic tabloids do for any pictures involving minors, and Leo’s birthday party where he reshuffled his friends. Out went boring Nicky Raynsford etc.
• Will Smith’s report on how the Revenge of the Sith alludes to the corruption of US government. But the humour was slightly blunted by the fact that George Lucas was indeed partly inspired by his country’s telescopic tyranny when writing the script.
• John Sergeant was a promising host and struck an acute balance between acting as a straight presenter and spoof newscaster.
• The Look Welsh segment presented by John Sparkes as Barry Welsh. The punchlines were so glaring they blinded you as soon as the presenter’s mouth opened to start the gag. But Sparkes did a good parody of news reporters' exaggerated hand gestures and the joke about how the Welsh language helped make people better had a spark of originality.
• Linda Smith: “Ever since cloaks and top hats moved out of fashion, you hardly ever see young women tied to railway lines.”
• Jeremy Hardy: “Prescott is tasked with shafting the workforce in their own accents.”

What was bad about it?
• There was too much factual information as though it assumes the show will be the first exposure to the week’s news for its viewers. The sketch in which Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s dispute over the Labour leadership is played out in a scrap between giant robots representing the pair was inventive but was needlessly accompanied by an over-detailed history of their feud. And wasn't exactly up-to-the-minute topical.
• Whereas Bird And Fortune both enlighten and amuse in their imagined conversations between those in authority and skilfully weave into them fresh information and humour, Jeremy Hardy’s observations of the week’s politics was hindered by the laborious enunciation of information followed by a quip because by the time he’s reached the punchline you were already bored of the well-trodden topic he’d been twittering on about.
• Katherine Jakeways reporting on which mobile phone to use to best record your acts of teenage delinquency was another good idea hampered by too much information, this time about the handsets she was appraising.
• The breaking news sketch, which was returned to on about three occasions, was a poor imitation of The Day Today’s merciless lampoon of TV journalism in which Peter O’Hanrahanrahan’s reports were torn to shreds by Chris Morris’s dictatorial anchorman.
• Explaining the financial markets through Sudoku was yet another good idea that, inversely to other sketches, assumed too much knowledge on behalf of the viewer. Sudoku is a puzzle game in which numbers have to be strategically placed into boxes to achieve some sort of mathematical nirvana; unfortunately its intricacies are largely bewildering to those who don’t attend the kind of middle class dinner parties in which guests regularly have to chew their own toes to prevent themselves falling comatose through the neck-breakingly numbing conversation.
• One of the last items saw Sergeant discuss the week’s events with a panel of Jeremy Hardy, Linda Smith and Robert Bathurst. Hardy and Smith were both quite funny, but Bathurst seemed only to have been invited on to do an impression of Boris Johnson (whom he’s currently playing on the stage). But he refused to do so without the wig and failed to contribute anything else. Embarrassing.

Comedy panel games

They Think It’s All Over or Bognor Or Bust? What was better?
Hosts
TTIAO: Nick Hancock comperes like a greedy schoolboy with his face in a cream cake who sporadically makes witless remarks to the teacher.
BoB: Angus Deayton’s timing and script are both amusing and topical; unfortunately he looks as uncomfortable as a singer used to playing stadiums
plonked in front of the audience for the Romanian version of Name That Tune.
Winner: Bognor Or Bust.
Guests
TTIAO: Tommy Docherty made one obviously scripted contribution and Phil Tufnell led the enthusiastic, though inherently forced laughter (of the type Phill Jupitus has perfected) yet the audience didn’t titter at all. We can’t remember anything that Adam Woodyatt said. Usually the show has only been watchable in recent series for Jonathan Ross’s rants, but this time he was subdued and only an attack on Mark Thatcher raised a chuckle. Meanwhile, Rory McGrath gave the answers he had been fed 20 minutes before the show and very little else.
BoB: A terrible error was made in inviting Tara Palmer-Tomkinson as a guest on this new comedy show, which is like preparing for a modelling audition by gouging your cheek with a screwdriver. James Dreyfus made the occasional caustic remark when he wasn’t being shouted down, as the show descended to feeding time at the zoo in parts. We’d never heard of Rob Rouse (tried far too hard) or Justin Fothergill (who was quite funny).
Winner: They Think It’s All Over. Rather a case of the lesser of two evils, but TTIAO weren’t burdened with Tara Palmer-Tomkinson.
Rounds
TTIAO: After almost 10 years, there has been an effort to revitalise the format. The most striking new round is where the teams cycle on an exercise bike to reveal photographs of sports stars. Also they indulged Ian Wright and McGrath with a question about how glorious their beloved Gunners are.
BoB: The rounds seem to meld into one another and were only distinguished by an ad break. And it all appeared so rushed.
Winner: They Think It’s All Over.
Humour
TTIAO: The new team captains are a disaster. With the clean cut David Gower and Gary Lineker, Ross and McGrath were forced to be inventive with their humour to make them the butt of the jokes. But now Ian Wright just shouts all the while, and Phil Tufnell is a one joke entity. David Seaman had much more potential than either of them.
BoB: More like a school playground than a studio. Some of Deayton’s asides were funny, as were Dreyfus and Fothergill, but the need to get questions correct to win the prize diverted the focus away from the comedy too much.
On a 1993 edition of Have I Got News For You on UKTV People later in the evening, Paul Merton was given a headline Tube Train Drama, from which he concocted a hilarious, surreal tale of a tube train standing in for an ill Ian McKellen at the theatre. This illuminates how far both programmes are behind the true benchmark of comedy quiz shows.
Winner: Bognor Or Bust. For Deayton’s calm quips.
Verdict: 2-2, but both will be fighting relegation to oblivion in six weeks' time.

School's Out, BBC1, Wednesday 5 April 2006
Did we like it?
There's so little to watch on BBC1 before 9pm nowadays (and most shows are totally unwatchable eg Davina, docubores, DIYbores, EastEnders) so it's a nice surprise to be able to recommend this amusing early evening quiz show.

What was good about it?
• The format and set was much better than the similar That'll Test 'Em.
• Danny Wallace didn't exactly convince us that he's much of a comic (a dearth of jokes in the script) but his ad libbing was okay and he held the show together well.
• Richard Bacon was on it, and we love him, but he was overshadowed by the wonderful Shelley Rudman (Britain's Winter Olympics medallist), who was a lively, nutty and thick guest and deserves to get a lot more TV work.
• The French oral exam, with subtitles, worked brilliantly, thanks to the severity of Mademoiselle Virginie. "Do you speak French?" she asked Richard Bacon. "A pea," he replied. Shelley did a little better, coming out with lines such as "I have play at athletics."
• The terrifying pupils who posed the maths question.

What was bad about it?
• The third contestant was Richard Hammond, that eager-to-please twerp from Top Gear and that ITV1 talk show flop.
• The pathetic boast that the winner could donate "a massive £2,000" to a school of their choice.

Skins, E4

Thursday 25 January 2007
Did we like it?
After seeing the flashy trailer, we were expecting an As If-style drama with lots of pace and great Asboed-up characters. It fails to hit that mark (these kids even sit down to breakfast with their families!), yet is still watchable.


What was good about it?
• The teenage gang is a good mix (albeit unrealistic because birds of a feather flock together) featuring cool guy with very white pants, sassy girl, beautiful girl, kooky girl with eating disorder, gay gay, cheeky guy, Muslim guy with attitude and geek guy with specs.
• Mike Bailey is the best actor and his geeky virgin Sid is the best, most realistic, most engaging character. Mike isn't to be confused with Rasmus Hardiker (of Rotters Club, Saxondale and Lead Balloon fame) but they are similar.
• Joe Dempsie brings a cheeky innocence to the role of party animal Chris, a refugee from the rave generation in Ali G garb.
• Mitch Hewer's Maxxie is a non-camp, non-stereotypical gay character, which is a relief. And he even gets his straight mates to go along to the gay pub's disastrous Big Gay Night Out.
• We love insecure psychology teacher Anjie. In episode one, she's been dumped. Chris tries to reassure her: "There's plenty more sports science teachers. It doesn't matter how big his dick is."
• There's quite a lot of flesh on display if you like that sort of thing.
• The mobile phone chats are integrated well into the action – including one scene when Tony is juggling calls from everyone in the gang.
• There are some great set-piece scenes: Sid in the brothel, the mad Polish girl, the destruction caused by the gang at a posh girl's party ("Mummy had this carpet imported from Iraq. We have to be so careful with the pile.") where the DJ is upper-class twit MC Hugo.


What was bad about it?
• Nicholas Hoult of About A Boy fame doesn't quite cut it as the coolest kid in town. He's too posh, too feminine looking and too clean cut to be a loveable lad. But he does have some good lines eg "I've been home, showered, done t'ai chi, had a wank, subtly undermined my dad, put new clothes on, and here I am ... with my English coursework."
• We disliked Hannah Murray's kooky Cassie in episode one because she was just too spaced out. She's better in episode two when the storyline delves deeper into her story (centring on her eating disorder). The rest of the girls don't make much impact in the opening episodes, apart from looking very nice.
• There's no real style to the show. It's quite a straight, conventional drama which just happens to be about modern youth.
• The cameo appearances by adults are thrown away a little. Only Harry Enfield as Tony's fat, foul-mouthed father gets much to bite on. Danny Dyer and Arabella Weir only had a fleeting scene.
• The writers overindulged on metaphors when it came to Sid's dream to lose his virginity. eg "flying solo down the tunnel of love" and "introducing Mr Happy to the furry room".
• The car-in-river scene to end episode one had us groaning.
• Drug dealer/certified lunatic Maddison Twatter (aka Mad Twat) is so sinister he's hateful. And his comedy moustache is plain ridiculous

Comic Aid, BBC1/BBC2

How funny was each act?
Jonathan Ross and Jack Dee’s introduction. Dee to Ross who is dressed in his pyjamas: “You look like a chav Hugh Heffner.” 6
Ardal O’Hanlon. “The reason why men get sicker than women is that there is always part of a woman’s brain thinking about shoes.” 7.5
Graham Norton on Prince Harry’s Nazi gaffe. “Not the brightest thing putting himself up for a member of the master race with ginger hair and one O-level.” 6.5
Alistair McGowan. “Roberto De Matteo translated into English is Bob Matthews.” 7
Omid Djalili. “I’m the only Iranian comic in the world. Technically three more than Germany.” 7.5
Jo Brand on those little bags that are dropped off on the doorstep. “They ask you to put something useful in it and pop it out on Wednesday. I put my husband in one.” 7.5
Jimmy Carr. “I once broke up with a girl because she had lied about her weight. I say broke up, but she died in a bungee jumping accident.” 7.5
Dawn French as Catherine Zeta Jones. “Michael told me about the giant satsuma attack on Africa.” 6
Eddie Izzard. “You may have gone horse riding when you were younger. You didn’t, it was horses experiencing child wearing.” 8
Jon Culshaw as George W Bush. “My fellow animaniacs…” 6
Lee Evans on going out in the evening. “My wife left the landing light on. ‘What for?’ ‘Burglars.’ Ah, yes. Burglars are going to come up to your house and go ‘Oh, no. They’ve all gathered on the landing’.” 7.5
Jon Culshaw as the Gladiator. “Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. That’s when I phoned Claims Direct.” 7
Julian Clary. “Can you hear me at the back? Yes? You’re receiving me at the rear.” 7.5
Derren Brown performed a rather elongated coin trick with a member of the audience. 7.5
Bill Bailey. “Supermarkets try to soften the blow of eating meat. You get RSPCA approved chickens. But it’s not 24 hour vigilance is it?” 8
Jessica Stevenson and Simon Pegg trade insults which culminate when she calls him a “podgy, balding little freak” to which he responds with “According To Bex”. 7.5
Dylan Moran on actors who get the “dark places” they have to journey to in order to get in character “shipped in in liquid form.” 7
Dave Spikey. “What’s worse than finding a worm in an apple? Being sick down your nose.” 7
The League of Gentlemen sketch in which Miranda Richardson encounters Papa Lazaru. 7.5
Jack Dee sifts through audience text messages. 6.5
Bo Selecta’s the Bear and Jonathan Ross take a question from the audience. 6
Rich Hall as Otis Lee Crenshaw on Shania Twain’s claim That Don’t Impress Me Much. “You’re Canadian, Shania. Anything would impress you and you know it.” 7
Johnny Vegas insulting members of the front row. To a posh-looking man with a leg in plaster: “How did you break your leg? I’m guessing fuckin’ skiing.” 8.5

Revolver, BBC1

The BBC’s other “new” comedy of the evening will surely top the shortlist for Bizarre Programme Of The Year. The idea was straightforward enough – a sketch show featuring comedy/light entertainment stars of yesteryear – but the result was quite astonishing, a sort of surreal Fast Show On Liver Salts/With Liver Spots which had us gaping at the screen in disbelief.

The performers were genuine A-listers from the TV world of the 1970s and 80s. They included Julie Goodyear (Corrie’s legendary Bet Lynch), arch screen-smoothie Leslie Phillips, former Avengers star Honor Blackman, and – the surprise stand-out presence of the show – Melvyn Hayes, best known as Private Gloria in the dismal (but popular) army sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. They were good, too, their timing and delivery no doubt kept in working order by decades of pantos and seaside shows.

The programme’s bizarre nature came from its scripts, which were unbelievably bad. Sketch after sketch turned out to have a punchline so weak it could barely draw breath, or simply not to have one at all. A man is buried alive, so passes the time playing on a games console (er, that’s it). A soldier is rescuing his comrade from the battlefield, but drops him to pick up an alluring woman instead (incredibly, this was reprised as a running gag, using puppies and a trifle in place of the woman). The best on offer was Goodyear doing a Silent Witness-style description of a corpse’s evisceration and third-degree burns, which turned out to refer to a cooked turkey.

The professionalism of the actors made the show watchable in places (Honor Blackman was great as a gran trying to buy control of her grandchildren through promises of inheritance), but the overwhelming feeling was of disbelief that performers of this quality could have been lumbered with material as rotten as this. So bad was it, in fact, that it could almost have been a post-ironic joke by the producers, a Pilot Show-style reality piece designed to see how low these oldies were willing to sink in order to get their faces back on screen. They deserved much better.

Joey, Five

What to say if you liked it
A sparkling spin-off of Friends, in which the adorable Joey journeys to LA to fully realise his acting ambitions.
What to say if you didn’t like it
After the death of Friends all of its elements were considered too diseased with familiarity for transplantation to a new host except for Joey, the dumb useless appendix.

What was good about it?• The character of Joey, though made slightly more intelligent, carries much goodwill from Friends being the only character, along with Phoebe, who was universally liked. For instance, if this show had been called Ross we would have put a brick through the
screen after five minutes.
• The distinct Tribiani-esque characters of Joey’s possessive sister Gina (Drea De Matteo) and his handsome but geeky 20-year-old nephew Michael (Paulo Constanzo) who she gave birth to when just 14.
• The witty lines that carry an obvious thread back to friends such when Gina remarked: “I thought you and Chandler should’ve moved to LA a long time ago. There’s a vibrant gay scene.”
• Other funny lines included: Michael confiding to Joey how much he and his mother have in common because “she had me when she was 22”, to which Joey responds:
“Yeah, 22. That’s why we had to change churches.”
• And Joey’s hapless audition for presenting an entertainment show. “Welcome to Hollywood minute, I’m name...?”
• At the rehearsals of Joey’s doomed ultra-violent new cable cop show where the more he punches a suspect in the face the more his white t-shirt gets soaked in blood.

What was bad about it?
While the first episode in the double bill relied on Joey’s Friends persona, the second tried a little too hard to move Joey on as a character and was crippled by the wilful shallowness which was established in Friends. The over-sentimental speech about why Joey moved to LA was particularly clumsy.
The audience’s sympathetic groan when it was revealed that Joey’s next door neighbour Alex was married after the pair had flirted the day before.
The jaunty, bland theme tune that’s even worse than I’ll Be There For You.

29 Minutes Of Fame, BBC1

Highlights
1 – Sean Lock: “Jackie Stallone looks like a Muppet before they stick the fur on.”
2 – Jo Brand guessing “Liam Gallagher” for Jason Wood’s impression of Barbara Cartland in a moment of passion.
3 – Jo Brand: “Is Antony Worrall Thompson insured as a bouncy castle?”
4 – Sean Lock regarding a picture of a haggard Ozzy Osbourne: “Is Ozzy taking part in a special event for druggies and alcoholics with Liza Minelli?”
5 – Jason Wood to Jo Brand: “Do you like Dolly Parton?” Jo: “No, I think she should be hit in the face with a frying pan.”
Lowlights
1 – The group of teenage girls in the audience who seem to have been hired to laugh raucously, but with little sincerity, at any unfunny joke to bridge what would otherwise be painful silences.
2 – While Alistair McGowan’s impressions are excellent and frequently amusing, his jokes are not.
3 – Annoying Jason Wood talking over Sean Lock’s punchlines.

29 Minutes Of Fame, BBC1
What to say of you liked it
The pristine, prodigious offspring of Have I Got News For You and Never Mind The Buzzcocks.
What to say of you didn’t like it
The heinous hybrid of Space Cadets and Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner.

What was good about it?
• Sean Lock on what Joseph Stalin and Johnny Vegas have in common. “They were both ruthless on hecklers. But Stalin would always go that touch too far, moving the whole family up to Siberia.”
• Alistair McGowan doing bad impressions of some of the celebrities mentioned.
• Stephen Fry’s faux derisive ignorance of transient, trivial starlets such as Rachel Stevens. "Who is this Rachel Stevens?" Sean Lock informed him: "She like a Norfolk Britney." “Does this Rachel Stevens, as you call her, have webbed feet?”
• Although the rounds are often derived wholesale from other comedy panel shows and merely given a celebrity tweak, it did mean minimal explanation is needed for the audience to get the joke.
• Host Bob Mortimer’s distant quirky echoes of Shooting Stars. “In my opinion, what is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s best film?”
• When Sean Lock and Amanda Donohoe couldn’t guess from McGowan’s impression that it was Professor Robert Winston indulging in a Moment of Passion.
• Jo Brand’s