British Comedy

The week's best live comedy

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/15007031

It’s time for the Police Federation of England and Wales to apply lavender oil to all available pulse points, because the new ITV comedy Piglets is here. When the title of the sitcom about six recruits to the fictional Norbourne training college was announced, the Federation’s condemnation was swift and lengthy. One can only assume that every investigation had been closed and the last criminal in the country locked up that morning and our boys in blue have been looking for a new project ever since. It was, the federation said, “A disgusting choice of language to use for the title of a TV programme,” and “highly offensive to police officers risking their lives to protect the public every day, providing an emergency service”. And “inflammatory against a landscape of rising threats and violence against officers”. And “incredibly dangerous to incite more negativity and misinformation against a public sector service that’s already under so much pressure”.

Now that they have had a chance to view the programme, perhaps the federation can put the toys back in the pram and note that, by some whim of the comedy gods, there is virtually nothing – given the wealth of material offered almost daily in recent years of endemic police corruption, failures and general inadequacies – in it to distress its members. Beyond that wounding title, of course.

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Piglets was created in large part by the team behind Smack the Pony and Green Wing, and you can see the idiosyncratic ghosts of both shows in the attempts at surreality and absolute silliness. But here they don’t quite come off, and instead just make you feel embarrassed and sad.

Two of the original stars of the hit film Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory will appear at the Edinburgh Fringe as part of a musical parody based on a Glasgow event that left parents fuming and children in tears.

Julie Dawn Cole and Paris Themmen, who played Veruca Salt and Mike Teevee in the 1971 movie starring Gene Wilder, will co-narrate the stage reading of Willy's Candy Spectacular: A Musical Parody.

The show is based on the doomed Willy's Chocolate Experience, which sparked headlines across the globe after being advertised as a "chocolate fantasy" where "dreams become reality" - but instead turned out to be a sparsely decorated warehouse where children were limited to a couple of sweets and a quarter of a can of limeade.

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The cast of the parody was unveiled on Monday afternoon, with a bill that also includes Shelley Regner (Pitch Perfect series), Eric Petersen (Shrek The Musical), Nicole Greenwood (In Plain Sight), Wilkie Ferguson (Motown: The Musical), Cassandra Parker (Cabaret) and musicians Monica Evans and Chris Villain.

The show, created by US producer Richard Kraft and directed by Andy Fickman, will run at the Pleasance King Dome from 9-26 August.

The week's best comedy on TV, radio and streaming

When much-loved children’s author Julian Hartswood (Ben Miller) inadvertently causes a social media storm, his career and that of his illustrator wife Ingrid (Sally Phillips) appears to be over. That is until Austin (Michael Theo), the neurodivergent son that Julian never knew existed, turns up out of the blue. Could embracing this modern nuclear family be Julian’s route back from cancellation? Will Ingrid ever forgive him? One thing is for certain: if Julian thinks Austin is going to be a pushover, he’s in for a rude awakening.

The week's best comedy on TV, radio and streaming

De-clickbaited the headline.

This time around, the star-studded guest cast includes Steve Pemberton (Inside No 9), Sharon Rooney (Barbie), Ben Willbond (Ghosts), Conleth Hill (Game of Thrones), Chaneil Kular (Sex Education), Derek Griffiths (Unforgotten), Gemma Whelan (Killing Eve) and Paula Wilcox (Coronation Street).

"I am so delighted to be back wading around in blood. We have made sure that Wicky has some bizarre characters to deal with this series," Greg said.

From a “renegade, rundown pub” to a stately home: was rags to riches ever so clearly exemplified? When Darrell Martin founded Just the Tonic, he was “an unemployable young man, just out of university in a recession,” setting up a comedy club in Nottingham because he didn’t know how else to become a standup. Thirty years later, he is celebrating the anniversary of a now-thriving chain of clubs with a long weekend of gigs at Melbourne Hall in Derbyshire. Once home to Victorian PM William Lamb, it makes room this week for a roster of top-tier comics that includes an act closely associated with Just the Tonic and its maverick way of doing things: the potter turned standup turned glamping impresario Johnny Vegas.

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“I don’t let Johnny out of the box much any more,” his creator Michael Pennington tells me, on the phone from his native St Helens. “But if Darrell gets me on the phone, I know I’m going to agree to it.” It’s a relationship that stretches back the full span of Just the Tonic’s three decades, to a time when Vegas was just breaking out of Lancashire to make a national name for himself. “I was struggling to get anywhere outside of the north-west,” says Pennington now. “It was like a no-go zone. But Darrell booked me. He got what I was about.”

What Vegas was about, as anyone who saw him gig in the 1990s will recall, was havoc and disruption. In Just the Tonic, then a startup in Nottingham’s unglamorous Old Vic pub, he found a spiritual home. “They let you off the leash,” he remembers now. “There was very little, ‘Here’s what we want you to do.’ It was much more, ‘We want to see what you’re going to do.’ You were given carte blanche. It didn’t feel like a business, it felt like a night of fun.”

Martin says: “I was an encourager of a free-form approach to standup. A lot of clubs look at the clock. But I just used to say, ‘Do what you want. If it’s fun, keep on going.’ I didn’t really know what the rules were. And my nights would be utter chaos because of that.”

You want examples? Johnny has examples. The night he arrived after closing time so staged the gig in the car park. The Christmas Eve when Martin shepherded him on stage, crying in a Santa outfit, after his tour van burst into flames. “It was always that thing of, ‘How can we make tonight unique?’” he recalls. “I’ve done gigs with the Tonic where I’ve sat in a wheelie bin and they’ve passed it around the room. And I’m like, ‘When I stop singing, the table I’m next to wins a round of drinks.’

“One time, me and Ross Noble got into an argument over who’d make the best barber – and punters got up on stage and let us cut their hair. Another night, we had a band playing downstairs, they were so loud. So I went down, brought the singer back upstairs, and we had an arm-wrestling match on stage: if we lost, we had to stop the gig and listen to them playing; if we won, they had to come upstairs and watch our gig. And I beat him! And all their audience came upstairs. It just wouldn’t happen anywhere else.”

The week's best live comedy

The week's best comedy on TV, radio and streaming

The week's best comedy on TV, radio and streaming

Norhtern News and the rest of the week's best live comedy

As Douglas Is Cancelled prepares to air, Moffat talks about career implosions, Bonneville relives past nude scenes – and Kingston recalls the ‘wandering hands’ warnings she used to be given

Dave Gorman is making a return to TV.

Details of his new show are under wraps, but he will be doing some work-in-progress gigs next month to shape the programmes.

In an email to fans, he explained: ‘Well, this is exciting. Unfortunately it's so exciting that a man in a suit won't let me tell you all of it - so, with apologies for being a click-tease, here's the bit I can tell you:

‘I'm in the process of making some more telly shows. I can't tell you what they're called or who they're for... but I can tell you that I'm getting the band back together. And when I say 'band', I mean, my laptops, screen and clickers. Because it's me doing stand up. Simple.

‘As with previous projects, being at a desk, making powerpoint only gets me so far... to shape it, I need to get on stage with it. And so we've put a few warm up dates together.’

The week's best comedy on TV, radio and streaming

The week's best live comedy

Paula Taylor, who has run The Cheeseman at Norwich Market for 24 years, said Coogan visited "about eight or nine years ago, but it was lovely to see him come back to smell my cheeses - he's such a nice man."

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/13120670

While Charlie Brooker might be best known by a wider audience for his science fiction anthology series Black Mirror, the English writer and satirist has a back catalogue that spreads far and wide. Amongst his writing credits on the likes of Brass Eye and Nathan Barley is a hidden gem, a satirical take on the detective genre, A Touch of Cloth.

Arriving a year after Black Mirror first aired on Channel 4, A Touch of Cloth was written by Brooker and Daniel Maier, who had previously worked on Harry Hill’s TV Burp. With the two comic writing masters behind the show, A Touch of Cloth sees John Hannah play police detective Jack Cloth, and Suranne Jones play his colleague Anne Oldman.

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“It’s a gag-packed spoof of dark British detective serials in the sort of Messiah, Wire in the Blood mould,” Brooker had once told The Guardian around the time A Touch of Cloth was being released on Sky One back in 2012. “The idea was to do something that was just outrageously stupid as opposed to dark or satirical.”

The week's best comedy on TV, radio and streaming

The best of the week's live comedy

Ade and Rik worked by knowing what you could get away with – and then pushing the boundaries. I did have some problems with BBC executives at the end of the whole process, and had to cut a scene where Rik pre-ejaculates. Well, I didn’t cut it out, I just chose different shots so that you could see less of Rik.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/12830476

A daft comedy musical about the Post Office scandal has been cancelled by the school where the company’s beleaguered former boss used to be a governor.

The show was scheduled to be performed by sock puppets at the Bedfringe comedy festival in July. However, the event takes place at the Quarry Theatre, which is owned by the school where Paula Vennells was a governor until 2021. She quit after 39 former postmasters had their convictions quashed.

The tree-lined streets of Rotherhithe are an odd place to unveil a West End musical. But this is a suitably odd situation. Graham Linehan – lauded comedy writer turned culture warrior – is about to unveil what he calls ‘a musical that may never be seen’.

For much of the past 30 years, the idea of turning Father Ted, cult sitcom of the 1990s, into a West End musical would have seemed a hot prospect – certainly to the legions of nerdy, largely male fans who still stream episodes decades later. Once upon a time, it looked destined for Shaftesbury Avenue, backed by one of the biggest names in theatre. Now it might be going nowhere.

The company which produced Father Ted offered Linehan £200,000 to take his name off the project

When we meet at his east London apartment, Linehan concedes that, by doing an impromptu read-through, I may end up as one of the last members of the small club of people who have ‘seen’ the show. Father Ted: The Final Episode may be almost oven-ready – songs included – but a Mexican stand-off between Linehan and his former producers means it’s stuck in purgatory.

Never one to hold his tongue, Linehan is eager to air his side of the story. Last month, he launched a social media campaign calling on his former backers to #FreeFatherTed and allow the show to be performed. But before we get to that, I have a bigger question: is it any good?

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So why, then, is this musical stuck in limbo? Like many things in the culture war, it is a long and contested story. But both Linehan and his detractors would agree it largely boils down to one thing: his decision, in 2018, to take a public (and strident) position on questions around limiting access to single-sex spaces for transgender women.

Within months, Linehan’s public image had changed. No longer the affable comic who used social media to say fashionable things about the NHS, he was now – in the eyes of his detractors – a bigoted transphobe seeking to sow division. Naturally, this became a point of concern for the musical’s two major backers – West End supremo Sonia Friedman and the comedy mogul Jimmy Mulville.

Early in 2020, Linehan recalls being summoned to Friedman’s office for a discussion about toning down his social media positions. ‘I had already been getting a lot of pressure at this point about what I was saying,’ he tells me. ‘Then she said something that really triggered me and we ended up having a full on row. She said I was on the wrong side of history – and that really irked me.’

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But there are questions, too, about why the project would have been so difficult. As Linehan points out, similar controversies around J.K. Rowling (who is also routinely branded a Terf, or ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’) haven’t dented the success of the Harry Potter stage play.

Could the show have been disrupted by demonstrators? Probably not: the West End has ramped up its security after protestors from Just Stop Oil managed to halt a performance of Les Misérables last year. The activists have since been convicted of aggravated trespass, having cost the show’s producers £60,000, and are due for sentencing.

Linehan has a more cynical assessment of it all. He thinks that Hat Trick Productions, Mulville’s multi-million-pound comedy company, pulled the show due to industry politics. ‘He doesn’t want to have the Derry Girls walking out in protest,’ he says. The show was a huge hit for Hat Trick, and one of its lead actresses, Nicola Coughlan, is a big advocate for gender politics. ‘I don’t think Jimmy actually believes any of this stuff about gender,’ he says. Instead, he suggests, Hat Trick is looking after its bottom line.

Speaking over the telephone, Mulville gives his assessment of the situation. ‘If you’d have told me six years ago, this would happen then I wouldn’t have believed you,’ he says with a sigh. The decision to pull the plug wasn’t anything to do with Linehan’s views, he insists, but due to the relationship with his former partners souring. Friedman confirmed that her company was no longer looking to produce the show, but declined to offer any comment.

James Corden is back in the UK and characteristically busy. Last year, the 45-year-old left his job as Los Angeles-based chat show host of The Late Late Show on CBS. A Christmas special is planned for Gavin & Stacey, the acclaimed BBC sitcom he created with co-star Ruth Jones. There’s talk of reviving One Man, Two Guvnors, the National Theatre’s critically lauded hit ­comedy that transferred to Broadway, winning Corden a Tony award in 2012.

And later this month, Corden will appear at London’s Old Vic in a short run of Joe Penhall’s new play, The Constituent, helmed by the ­theatre’s artistic director, Matthew Warchus. Corden’s first stage role since One Man, Two Guvnors, it’s seen as ­something of a departure (a gamble) for Corden – a serious work about the escalating risks of public service in politics.

All this, but in the UK at least, a question seems to dangle eternally above Corden’s head, like a public relations sword of Damocles.

Put bluntly, why don’t you like him? Why do sizeable swathes of the British public appear to have it in for him?

The best of the week's comedy on TV, radio and streaming