David Baddiel is good here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCASLzsOG70

"burnt in his bed by a candle at St Giles Cripplegate"

If he could keep this up...

Oh I remember that now, I also think that was his best bit from that show. Shame that was all.

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"Now get those trousers off before someone dies!"

Will this be taken up here with the enthusiasm afforded to the Bristol Stool Chart? Whose shower ran cold all of a sudden, leaving them with a number 1, etc.?

Only bit from the career. But a good bit.

"Lethargy? I thought the bloke who couldn't be bothered to get out of the burning bed was pretty lethargic."

It would be nice if he could get his sixteenth and seventeenth centuries straight. Just saying...

(And if that was the best bit I'm glad I didn't see the rest)

Nothing more need be said, just get out.

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"Even when you're a super-computer with an IQ of 2000 it's brown trousers time."

Reclaiming "methinks" for the nation

Latest blog post - 2011 - a review (updated 07/10)

Sorry.

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MY COMMENTS ARE FROM THE HORSES MOUTH AND ARE ALL FACTS

The Now Show is poor. When whoever it is shouts, "The Now Showwwww" I feel my mood sink and start wondering about changing the channel. I may be wrist deep in a culinary manouvre so it sometimes stays on but I am waiting for it to end.

But not on a par with The Archers. I will climb out of a hot bath to silence that shit.

Shirley Williams, Frank Field.

Janet Street Porter, Frank Field.

Sarah Millican. She was tolerable in small doses, but now that she seems to be repeating the same, stilted schtick abso-flippin'-lutely everywhere, it's getting painful.

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"If the past really is a foreign country, I'm surprised that 'The Daily Mail' would want to live there.” - Roger Quimbly

I've avoided her new series. When I saw a clip of her with Simon Callow, and falling back on 'topical' gags about Downton Abbey and all Geordies being chavvy and unsuited to costume drama (has she not heard of Catherine Cookson?) I knew it was not for me.

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Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.

Call me cynical, but based on her work over the past year/eighteen months, I'm pretty sure the only reason she is getting so much TV attention is because she is a woman comic the public seem to like.

I'm convinced that if she were a guy from the same place, doing the same material but with the female specific stuff ommited, we wouldn't be seeing her a quater as much as we are now.

Naturaly I'm all in favour of female comedians getting work as easily as the more popular guys do, but not making special cases out of them, and it should be because they are funny - not mostly because they are female.

Overusing one female comic -good or bad- is hardly making new opportunities for the others is it?

Incidentaly, I think Roisin Connaty and Laura Solon are both much funnier and could both do with some of that attention that Sara is sucking up.

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"Now get those trousers off before someone dies!"

I said this before that I think Sarah Millican basically gets work because she plays up to the sort of Bridget Jones type character. "Look, I'm overweight, frumpy and a bit tragic, pity me and laugh!" It's a calculated thing, you just have to look at her work. When she was on Room 101 a few weeks back one of her nominations was "cats which ignore me". Now come on, that has to bea piss-take, surely.

She's about as funny as being hit by a speeding lorry in my opinion.

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"Even when you're a super-computer with an IQ of 2000 it's brown trousers time."

Reclaiming "methinks" for the nation

Latest blog post - 2011 - a review (updated 07/10)

Interesting, that. Without wishing to resurrect the male vs female comedians debate, it does appear that comparatvely more female comics adopt a persona of sorts compared to male ones. Although tht's not to say that male ones don't - Jack Dee, Omid Djalili, Henning Wehn etc all do too. What I'd call 'blank slate' comics - Lee Mack, Tim Vine etc - tend to be white men.

Roisin Carty, Laura Solon and Andi Osho don't really have a persona. Miranda Hart, Shappi Korshandi, Sarah Millican - yes they do. Jo Brand used to, now has ascended to the higher levels and doesn't.

Perhaps it is just a matter of pointing out the most obvious thing about yourself if that's what makes you stand out. Stand-up comedy is still overwhelmingly a white male (and southern at the moment) business, at least when it comes to the TV level. So it's a bit like TV drama, where the default setting is white, southern, middle class, male, and anything falling outside that bracket must in some way be about the fact that it's different.

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Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.