British Comedy

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/16482414

Sir Ken Dodd's joke books, tickling sticks and other artefacts are to be preserved in a new £15m centre dedicated to the late comedy legend in his home city of Liverpool.

The Sir Ken Dodd Happiness Centre will provide a permanent home for his archive, as well as hosting comedy performances and events.

The four-storey centre will be attached to the city's Royal Court theatre, where Sir Ken regularly performed during his career. He died in 2018.

The plans were submitted in November and were approved by Liverpool City Council last week.

His widow Lady Dodd told BBC News he would be "honoured" and "amazed".

The quip by Canterbury funnyman Mark Simmons took the acclaim at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe - which finishes on Bank Holiday Monday.

The performer, who appeared as a panellist on the long-running BBC satire show Mock The Week, saw two of his jokes named in the top 15 of the U&Dave’s Funniest Joke of the Fringe Festival competition

His winning gag was a simple one-liner: “I was going to sail around the globe in the world’s smallest ship but I bottled it.”

Back on in the UK from 3rd September, BBC2.

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 comedy on TV, radio and streaming

The week's best live comedy

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/15007031

It’s time for the Police Federation of England and Wales to apply lavender oil to all available pulse points, because the new ITV comedy Piglets is here. When the title of the sitcom about six recruits to the fictional Norbourne training college was announced, the Federation’s condemnation was swift and lengthy. One can only assume that every investigation had been closed and the last criminal in the country locked up that morning and our boys in blue have been looking for a new project ever since. It was, the federation said, “A disgusting choice of language to use for the title of a TV programme,” and “highly offensive to police officers risking their lives to protect the public every day, providing an emergency service”. And “inflammatory against a landscape of rising threats and violence against officers”. And “incredibly dangerous to incite more negativity and misinformation against a public sector service that’s already under so much pressure”.

Now that they have had a chance to view the programme, perhaps the federation can put the toys back in the pram and note that, by some whim of the comedy gods, there is virtually nothing – given the wealth of material offered almost daily in recent years of endemic police corruption, failures and general inadequacies – in it to distress its members. Beyond that wounding title, of course.

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Piglets was created in large part by the team behind Smack the Pony and Green Wing, and you can see the idiosyncratic ghosts of both shows in the attempts at surreality and absolute silliness. But here they don’t quite come off, and instead just make you feel embarrassed and sad.

Two of the original stars of the hit film Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory will appear at the Edinburgh Fringe as part of a musical parody based on a Glasgow event that left parents fuming and children in tears.

Julie Dawn Cole and Paris Themmen, who played Veruca Salt and Mike Teevee in the 1971 movie starring Gene Wilder, will co-narrate the stage reading of Willy's Candy Spectacular: A Musical Parody.

The show is based on the doomed Willy's Chocolate Experience, which sparked headlines across the globe after being advertised as a "chocolate fantasy" where "dreams become reality" - but instead turned out to be a sparsely decorated warehouse where children were limited to a couple of sweets and a quarter of a can of limeade.

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The cast of the parody was unveiled on Monday afternoon, with a bill that also includes Shelley Regner (Pitch Perfect series), Eric Petersen (Shrek The Musical), Nicole Greenwood (In Plain Sight), Wilkie Ferguson (Motown: The Musical), Cassandra Parker (Cabaret) and musicians Monica Evans and Chris Villain.

The show, created by US producer Richard Kraft and directed by Andy Fickman, will run at the Pleasance King Dome from 9-26 August.

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

When much-loved children’s author Julian Hartswood (Ben Miller) inadvertently causes a social media storm, his career and that of his illustrator wife Ingrid (Sally Phillips) appears to be over. That is until Austin (Michael Theo), the neurodivergent son that Julian never knew existed, turns up out of the blue. Could embracing this modern nuclear family be Julian’s route back from cancellation? Will Ingrid ever forgive him? One thing is for certain: if Julian thinks Austin is going to be a pushover, he’s in for a rude awakening.

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De-clickbaited the headline.

This time around, the star-studded guest cast includes Steve Pemberton (Inside No 9), Sharon Rooney (Barbie), Ben Willbond (Ghosts), Conleth Hill (Game of Thrones), Chaneil Kular (Sex Education), Derek Griffiths (Unforgotten), Gemma Whelan (Killing Eve) and Paula Wilcox (Coronation Street).

"I am so delighted to be back wading around in blood. We have made sure that Wicky has some bizarre characters to deal with this series," Greg said.

From a “renegade, rundown pub” to a stately home: was rags to riches ever so clearly exemplified? When Darrell Martin founded Just the Tonic, he was “an unemployable young man, just out of university in a recession,” setting up a comedy club in Nottingham because he didn’t know how else to become a standup. Thirty years later, he is celebrating the anniversary of a now-thriving chain of clubs with a long weekend of gigs at Melbourne Hall in Derbyshire. Once home to Victorian PM William Lamb, it makes room this week for a roster of top-tier comics that includes an act closely associated with Just the Tonic and its maverick way of doing things: the potter turned standup turned glamping impresario Johnny Vegas.

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“I don’t let Johnny out of the box much any more,” his creator Michael Pennington tells me, on the phone from his native St Helens. “But if Darrell gets me on the phone, I know I’m going to agree to it.” It’s a relationship that stretches back the full span of Just the Tonic’s three decades, to a time when Vegas was just breaking out of Lancashire to make a national name for himself. “I was struggling to get anywhere outside of the north-west,” says Pennington now. “It was like a no-go zone. But Darrell booked me. He got what I was about.”

What Vegas was about, as anyone who saw him gig in the 1990s will recall, was havoc and disruption. In Just the Tonic, then a startup in Nottingham’s unglamorous Old Vic pub, he found a spiritual home. “They let you off the leash,” he remembers now. “There was very little, ‘Here’s what we want you to do.’ It was much more, ‘We want to see what you’re going to do.’ You were given carte blanche. It didn’t feel like a business, it felt like a night of fun.”

Martin says: “I was an encourager of a free-form approach to standup. A lot of clubs look at the clock. But I just used to say, ‘Do what you want. If it’s fun, keep on going.’ I didn’t really know what the rules were. And my nights would be utter chaos because of that.”

You want examples? Johnny has examples. The night he arrived after closing time so staged the gig in the car park. The Christmas Eve when Martin shepherded him on stage, crying in a Santa outfit, after his tour van burst into flames. “It was always that thing of, ‘How can we make tonight unique?’” he recalls. “I’ve done gigs with the Tonic where I’ve sat in a wheelie bin and they’ve passed it around the room. And I’m like, ‘When I stop singing, the table I’m next to wins a round of drinks.’

“One time, me and Ross Noble got into an argument over who’d make the best barber – and punters got up on stage and let us cut their hair. Another night, we had a band playing downstairs, they were so loud. So I went down, brought the singer back upstairs, and we had an arm-wrestling match on stage: if we lost, we had to stop the gig and listen to them playing; if we won, they had to come upstairs and watch our gig. And I beat him! And all their audience came upstairs. It just wouldn’t happen anywhere else.”

The week's best live comedy

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

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

Norhtern News and the rest of the week's best live comedy

As Douglas Is Cancelled prepares to air, Moffat talks about career implosions, Bonneville relives past nude scenes – and Kingston recalls the ‘wandering hands’ warnings she used to be given

Dave Gorman is making a return to TV.

Details of his new show are under wraps, but he will be doing some work-in-progress gigs next month to shape the programmes.

In an email to fans, he explained: ‘Well, this is exciting. Unfortunately it's so exciting that a man in a suit won't let me tell you all of it - so, with apologies for being a click-tease, here's the bit I can tell you:

‘I'm in the process of making some more telly shows. I can't tell you what they're called or who they're for... but I can tell you that I'm getting the band back together. And when I say 'band', I mean, my laptops, screen and clickers. Because it's me doing stand up. Simple.

‘As with previous projects, being at a desk, making powerpoint only gets me so far... to shape it, I need to get on stage with it. And so we've put a few warm up dates together.’

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

The week's best live comedy

Paula Taylor, who has run The Cheeseman at Norwich Market for 24 years, said Coogan visited "about eight or nine years ago, but it was lovely to see him come back to smell my cheeses - he's such a nice man."

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/13120670

While Charlie Brooker might be best known by a wider audience for his science fiction anthology series Black Mirror, the English writer and satirist has a back catalogue that spreads far and wide. Amongst his writing credits on the likes of Brass Eye and Nathan Barley is a hidden gem, a satirical take on the detective genre, A Touch of Cloth.

Arriving a year after Black Mirror first aired on Channel 4, A Touch of Cloth was written by Brooker and Daniel Maier, who had previously worked on Harry Hill’s TV Burp. With the two comic writing masters behind the show, A Touch of Cloth sees John Hannah play police detective Jack Cloth, and Suranne Jones play his colleague Anne Oldman.

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“It’s a gag-packed spoof of dark British detective serials in the sort of Messiah, Wire in the Blood mould,” Brooker had once told The Guardian around the time A Touch of Cloth was being released on Sky One back in 2012. “The idea was to do something that was just outrageously stupid as opposed to dark or satirical.”