Plissken

I just know I'm going to regret this... from my fourth ever gig in January 2002. So its bloody old, especially for topical stuff. Its about the war in Afghanistan. Ropey as fuck. Clicky And slagging Kay out of professional jealousy? Oh, please. Thats like saying noone can call Westlife shit because they've themselves have not had a No 1 record. See one of my gigs (I'm doing a charity gig at Glass, Fallowfield, Manchester 8pm tomorrow) and then judge. Otherwise, let me know where you are and I'll hunt you down^W^W^W let you know when I'm in the area, as it were.

OK, so I phrased that very badly, sorry. I could name a couple of excellent improvisers that it is unlikely you'll have heard of (Mick Ferry? Martin Bigpig?) but as a gigging comic I know them well but they're too unknown out in the big, wide world. You'll never find me defending the "quality" of his material. I thought Max and Paddy was a great example of how "good" a writer he was, because it was Phoenix Nights without Spikey and Fitzmaurice and suffered badly as a consequence. As for chasing the almighty pound note, like Jack Dee before him, Kay is happy to advertise beer, without touching a drop himself.

Released at different times, but filmed on the same tour, weren't they? And thats why I didn't listen to Sexie before I went to see Izzard at the MEN. Of the acts you lot will have heard of, only Ross Noble genuinely improvises the majority of his material.

Peter Kays standup has never been good. What he is good at, is connecting wiht a live audience and making sure they all have a good time. That doesn't translate to a standup video, not that standup translates well to video - live a good concert, it has to be fucking immense to get the atmosphere across through the screen. Comedian does same material on same tour shocker - blimey, I'm doing gags I first wrote four years ago. Happens all the time. Anyway, save money on the video and generate your own Peter Kay routine

Took a while to get going, but hilarious by the end.

Mate had an Intellivision, which was cool. And I got a Vic-20 and kept playing Gridrunner and Andes Attack (a certain J.Minter version of Defender). The first game I got properly addicted to was a football management sim on the C64 called The Boss.

No. From Chortle

Good. Considering out of three sentences, two were abusive, so it doesn't help to get the third one wrong.

Sketch show? BN is not a sketch show. Parodying the evening news? Nope. Parodying all TV news. You are obviously unaware of the real lineage of "Broken News". It is a TV version of the rather excellent "The Sunday Format" which was a radio show, which primarily spoofed newspaper magazine supplements.

As opposed to through some headphones, whereever you want...

Lucy Porter.

Help! By a long way.

Bo Selecta. Balls of Steel. Meet the Magoons. Green Wing. (If it is this year.) Nathan Barley. Celebrity Wrestling. Broken News has got but two weeks to survive. Its not been a classic year, has it?

Usually three months, minimum. That was because the music industry people behind Pop Idol wanted Gates to win. Another disposable tenny-bop icon, stick his face on lunchboxes and posters, make a fortune. I guarantee you that if Gates had won, Young would have been held to the three month clause. But because Young won, he had to share with Gates, to the extent that there was the fucking duet together. Same with that "shock" result where Javine lost out in a place in Girls Aloud to Sarah Harding. Lets see, which is more marketable - an obviously talented solo R&B artist shoehorned into a five piece and making the rest look utterly useless, or yet another blond with an endearing habit of getting her kit off. (And wasn't it an amazing coincidence that there was a whole bunch of underdressed photos of Harding in the papers within a week?) Man! People have to wise up to the way X-Factor and all that work. McManus wins Pop Idol, they change the format so that public get the illusion of choice (i.e between all the same type, good for the voting revenue) and there is absolutely no chance of the plucky underdog surviving on audience goodwill.

If you think a pie fight is satire, then I;m going to give up even trying.

To the humour.

No.

I sat through Dawn of the Dead and thought it was a nicely observed allegory. Cleverly written metaphor. It is, however, first and foremost, a horror movie but it had an intelligent point to make about humanity and it made it. Calling it a satire is like saying "Escape From New York" is a satire. "Independence Day" has that lovely sequence in Area 51, which pokes fun at military spending, does that make it a screwball comedy? "The ... Dead movies are satires" is one of those great afterthought sacred cows of the film world, right up there with "Even in 1977 Lucas always intended to make 9 films".

Can anyone, and I mean anyone who has described the Dead films as satire please fuck off and look up the meaning of the word. Clever allegory, decent metaphor, allusion, yes, yes and yes but a fucking satire?

He wasn't even the funniest man on that show. Will Self was.

IIRC, bits of the last Alan Partridge series got slated for having an overenthusiastic laughter track, when it was recorded in front of an audience of fans.

Actually, it always reminds me of Elite.

There should have been only one.

"..we ripped off Wife Swap but just changed it enough to avoid being sued."

No. I thought it was made pretty obvious during his conversation with Mal. And reinforced by the ending. Book was always looking for redemption and understood that you can't make the world better by force, but by fixing people one by one. It would have been interesting - I figured that had Firefly continued, Book would have been revealed as one of the major forces behind what happened in Serenity Valley.