British Comedy

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.”

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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.’

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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.”

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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?

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In a moment of adversity, Sue and Pete gather all their offspring (including one grandchild) to try and celebrate a traditional family Christmas...

Lee Mack’s much loved, multi-award-winning studio sitcom will return for a new series on the BBC in 2025. Not Going Out is the UK’s longest running UK sitcom currently on air and recently joined an elite group of sitcom centenarians when the 100th episode aired during the BBC’s 2023 Christmas schedule.

Alan is settling into life back in Norfolk after a year working in Saudi Arabia, but the adjustment has left him with a deep sense of unease

Stephen Merchant has always been obsessed by the idea of the ordinary man “thrust into extraordinary circumstance”. Since he was a kid in Bristol, the son of a plumber and a nursery nurse, those were the kinds of films he sought out and the stories he wrote, about normal people who experience something that “jolts them out of their life and gives them a way of reframing it”. He’s talking to me from his office in Nichols Canyon, LA, in a house once owned by Ellen DeGeneres, where he lives with his partner of seven years, actor Mircea Monroe. It’s early morning there, the white light offering shadows of shifting leaves, and he wears a black baseball cap and speaks thoughtfully without pause. Is he, I ask, that ordinary man? “Well, possibly,” he says, slowly. “Maybe. Yeah.”

Merchant’s early career is perhaps better known than the success that followed. He met Ricky Gervais when he got a job as his assistant on the radio station XFM and the two went on to write and direct The Office in 2001, quietly changing expectations of British comedy for ever. Then there was some acting, a lot of very popular radio and standup. In his 2011 show, Hello Ladies, which later became a sitcom, he talked about his height: “6ft 7in is too big… Growing up I spent as much time as possible in the distance.”

In 2019, he wrote and directed the feature film Fighting With My Family, a wrestling comedy starring Florence Pugh, and in 2022 played serial killer Stephen Port in the shocking BBC drama Four Lives. Today, we’re meeting to talk about the third series of The Outlaws, a comedy thriller about a disparate group of offenders on community service, which he stars in and co-wrote with film-maker and ex-convict Elgin James. It’s about normal people who experience something that jolts them out of their lives.

For Merchant, the route to his extraordinary circumstances felt “like that frog in the pan of water. It slowly heats up and you don’t realise you’re being boiled alive. It wasn’t like I was an X-factor contestant.” Was there a moment when he realised his life was changing? “I guess there were sort of staging posts along the way,” he says. “Like, you do your first interview for the Guardian, and they spelt my name wrong. I think that was ‘Stephen Mitchell’?” Then there’s an award show. “Then you’re on, like, Graham Norton, and that all seems very exciting.” Then you’re having a meeting in Hollywood, dating a string of beautiful actresses, moving to LA. “And each of the stages seem preposterous in a new way.” Where does it culminate? “I guess, going to Stonehenge with Christopher Walken [a co-star on The Outlaws] on a day trip? Christopher’s a very quiet man. A reflective man. He didn’t say a lot for about an hour, then eventually, as the sun was setting, he said: ‘The bluestones have healing properties.’ It was all very surreal. And yet at the same time, weirdly ordinary.” That was one point where: “You’re just like, OK, now I’m boiled.”

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Last month, Seinfeld joined comics like Ricky Gervais and John Cleese in condemning “cancel culture”, blaming the apparent death of TV comedy on “the extreme left and PC crap and people worrying so much about offending other people”. (Cleese was a childhood hero: “He went to school in Bristol and he was a tall person who was funny, so at some point I was like, well, if you need tall people who are funny from the West Country, I’ll give it a go?”)

Merchant approaches the subject of cancel culture cautiously, as if walking barefoot on stones. “Well,” he says, “it seems to me that there’s always been policing of comedy, of there being… guardrails. I think the difference is that it used to feel like it was the Right that was policing it. It feels like it’s the Left that’s doing it now, and it’s allowed the Right to become the arbiters of free speech. Which does feel like quite a significant shift.”

There are, he adds, carefully: “Sensitivities that seem out of all proportion with the joke. I’ve noticed it in standup, how you’re more cautious because you don’t want to spend weeks on Twitter trying to justify a joke you were just experimenting with. Because putting out the fires is exhausting. But” – and perhaps this is where he differs from Gervais – “I’m also aware that sensitivities shift over time and that people are allowed to criticise and query things, and we do look back at old comedy and think we wouldn’t do that any more.” He takes a breath. “I have no objection to the sands shifting. I think that makes sense and I’m loth to become a kind of ‘old man of comedy’, railing against the younger generation. But you do feel like there’s a sensitivity to the words before they’ve even heard the joke or the context. And that is inevitably a straitjacket of sorts – it quashes experimentation.”

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