British Comedy

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?

...

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.’

...

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

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

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.”

...

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.”

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

The best of the week's live comedy

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

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

The week's best live comedy

The best of the week's live comedy

The BBC has released new pictures from the brand-new series of comedy-thriller The Outlaws, from creator, star, and award-winning writer and director Stephen Merchant, ahead of its return to BBC One and BBC iPlayer next month.

Stewart Lee is to tour a new show titled Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf.

Beginning with a run at Leicester Square Theatre in December 2024, the show will then tour the UK across 2025.

The blurb explains: "In this brand new show, Lee shares his stage with a tough-talking werewolf comedian from the dark forests of North America who hates humanity. The Man-Wulf lays down a ferocious comedy challenge to the culturally irrelevant and physically enfeebled Lee. Can the beast inside us all be silenced with the silver bullet of Lee's unprecedentedly critically acclaimed style of stand-up?

"Stewart Lee ("the world's greatest living stand-up comedian" The Times), is in danger of being left behind. He's approaching sixty with debilitating health conditions, his TV profile has diminished, and his once BAFTA award-winning style of stand-up seems obsolete in the face of a wave of callous Netflix-endorsed comedy of anger, monetising the denigration of minorities for millions of dollars. But can Lee unleash his inner Man-Wulf to position himself alongside comedy legends like Dave Chappelle, Ricky Gervais and Jordan Peterson at the forefront of side-splitting stadium- stuffing shit-posting?"

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

The week's best live comedy

In the first episode of his new Channel 4 show, Lycett said four stories that were covered by newspapers and television news were fabricated.

Speaking on Late Night Lycett on Friday evening, he said the fake stories were: a five-a-side footballer from Birmingham having a bruise on his thigh that resembled Prince Harry’s face, research showing men from Birmingham have the longest penises in the UK, a mural of Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz in Birmingham that was declared to be a Banksy, and a statue of H from Steps being erected in Cowbridge.

Jon Richardson and Lucy Beaumont have announced their separation.

The couple have an eight-year-old daughter, Elsie, and the news comes a week after the fifth season of their mockumentary Meet The Richardsons began on Dave.

They have also hosted the panel show Odd Couples on Channel 4 and made numerous TV appearances together on shows such as 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown.

In a statement they both posted on social media they said: 'After nine years of marriage we would like to announce that we have separated.

'We have jointly and amicably made the difficult decision to divorce and go our separate ways.

'As our only priority is managing this difficult transition for our daughter, we would ask that our privacy is respected at this sensitive time to protect her well-being.

''We will be making no further comment.'

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