Steve Coogan is Bafta-nominated for Best Male Performance in a Comedy Programme for Welcome to the Places of My Life, Sky's revival of the Alan Partridge franchise. Coogan's career is a fascinating case study of the way a brilliant, successful character can be hard to shake off. I first saw Coogan do an embryonic version of sports-jumpered presenter Alan Partridge two decades ago when he won the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival.

It's amazing what you can find when you go rummaging around in your cellar. This feature on Richard Herring and Stewart Lee appeared in Vox (a monthly magazine from the NME's publishers) in May 1995 to tie in with the first TV series of Fist of Fun on BBC2 and was one of the first comedy features I wrote (excuse the clunky bits). It is a real Blue Peter-style time capsule, interesting for all sorts of reasons.

Alan Davies returned to stand-up in 2012 after ten years away with a new show, Life Is Pain, in which he tackled issues ranging from parenthood and pornography to Facebook and feminism. He was as funny as ever and fitted neatly into the new world of comedy where observational humour is king. Critics have called Davies a veteran, which seems to imply he is ancient and feels is a little harsh. He was born in 1966, the same year as John Bishop, and is four years younger than Micky Flanagan.