April 2013
Well, you can't win them all. ITV1 might be on a bit of a roll at the moment, but I'm not convinced that new sitcom The Job Lot is going to keep up their hit rate. Then again, no living creature has ever pressed the ITV1 button on the remote expecting anything groundbreaking or cutting edge so maybe The Job Lot is the right sitcom on the right channel at the right time.
As I've written about elsewhere, May seems to mark the kick off of the comedy charity season. So why not start the month as you mean to go on by supporting a worthwhile cause while also having a laugh.
I had a difficult time working out how to write a fair review of Jimmy Carr at the Hammersmith Apollo at the weekend. I'm not the biggest fan of Carr's sometimes brutal one-liners but I thought he was pretty good. The trouble is that it is hard to say the show was an unqualified success for me when the person three seats down was shouting "Dirty Bitch" at the stage.
Stand ups have always been happy to do their bit for charity, but this May that urge to help out seems to have gone into overdrive. Maybe it's the comedy faction of the Big Society in action, maybe ongoing brutal government cuts mean that organisations have to be a bit more proactive in raising cash and profile. Whatever the reason, these gigs below need you.
There is much talk in media circles about ITV being on a roll at the moment. They've cracked costume drama with Downton Abbey and contemporary drama with Broadchurch. But can they crack that toughest nut of all, sitcom? Well this Monday could be make or break.
Is it possible to have too much politics at a satirical show? That thought lodged in my brain half-way through Political Animal, the semi-regular club night which has transferred to the Udderbelly tent on London's South Bank for three nights.
It was the eminent writer David Quantick who coined the phrase "pop will eat itself" in the 1980s when he was talking about the way musical genres kept cross-referencing each other. Soon afterwards a band formed calling themselves Pop Will Eat Itself.
Maybe I was not paying attention but the new series of 10 O'Clock Live seemed to slip out without much in the way of advance fanfare last night. Perhaps that was a shrewd move. This is the third run but somehow it always seems to need time to bed in, as if the stars, Charlie Brooker, David Mitchell, Lauren Laverne and Jimmy Carr need a while to get their satirical chuckle muscles working.
When it comes to comedy Sky is currently on a roll. From Hunderby to their recent Love Matters series they've been delivering the comic goods with enviable consistency and originality and they have done it again with Snodgrass, which goes out this Thursday and stars Ian Hart as John Lennon. Pretty canny casting as Hart has already played John Lennon twice on film, in The Hours and Times and Backbeat.
David Haig is one of our great comic actors both onstage and onscreen. Unfortunately his latest project, The Wright Way, is not so great. Here is a frank, funny interview with Haig from December 2008 when he was starring in the revival of Joe Orton's black comedy Loot onstage. At the time I speculated that Haig does his best work when he is sporting his trademark moustache.
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