Comedian Mark Thomas is to present the inaugural Linda Smith Lecture at the Gulbenkian Theatre in Canterbury on May 12. The talk is being put on by The British Stand-Up Comedy Archive as part of a series of events this year. Thomas was a long-time friend and colleague of Smith, who died in 2006. Both of them have memorabilia from their careers stored in the archive at the University of Kent.

Comedian Stewart Lee stood in for Stuart Maconie and presented the BBC6 programme Freak Zone last night. During the show Lee played tracks by some of his favourite bands including Midlands post-punk outfit The Nightingales, prog-rockers Henry Cow and jazz legend John Coltrane.

I turned on the radio yesterday afternoon and heard a comedian telling people not to go to his gig. It was James Acaster on Radio 5 and while he was there ostensibly to plug his extended Soho Theatre run, you could almost hear the cogs in his brain whirring as he suddenly realised that with the DJ bigging him up so much he might be attracting gangs of Doreen-from-accounts-in-deely-boppers drunken Christmas office parties to his show.

Joseph Morpurgo is very much a comic on the way up. He’s part of the new wave of idiosyncratic Invisible Dot performers along with Liam Williams and Natasha Demetriou who are due for a big break. Morpurgo’s latest show is definitely a step in the right direction. Odessa is a multi-media comic noir thriller in which he plays all the characters, from cops to criminals. He even plays some TV interference, which is one of the highlights.