The COVID-19 pandemic has shut down the entertainment industry, which relies on people leaving their houses and paying money to be distracted from the world for a few hours. Theatres in the UK responded by putting some of their plays online for a week at a time, helping people to…
Bridget Christie’s show last year, A Bic For Her, was a double award winner and sold out at the Edinburgh Festival and the Soho Theatre (where I snagged tickets) – and this year sees her return with another show about feminism. Christie is a very funny person who makes jokes…
Chain Reaction is an interview show for Radio 4 where the interviewer chooses their subject, who then gets to choose their subject for the next show. It started off as a comedy thing, with comedians interviewing other comedians, but Stewart Lee changed that by asking to interview Alan Moore. This…
Let me say this before I start waffling: this show is funny, smart, silly and thoughtful about a serious issue that never overwhelms the fact that Bridget Christie knows she’s making jokes to make a point. It’s a very entertaining hour about feminism and the way that feminism is portrayed and…
I recently had the pleasure of two nights of comedy at the Balham Comedy Festival, and two different experiences. Jo Caulfield was performing Better The Devil You Know on Wednesday, Marcus Brigstocke was performing Je M’Accuse – I Am Marcus on Thursday, in one of the hottest weeks of the…
The Richard Herring Leicester Square Theatre podcasts are fascinating and fun, not because of the silly recurring questions (‘Have you ever tried to suck your own cock?’ and ‘What would you rather have: a ham hand or an armpit that produced sun cream?’) or Herring’s shabby interview technique, but due to…
When I was a younger man, I was a big fan of The Mary Whitehouse Experience (on television; much to my chagrin, I never knew that comedy existed on the radio in my youth, so I never heard the radio version that ran before it in 1989–1990 and which has…
In my youth, I consumed vast amounts of stand-up comedy – I was a teenager when alternative comedy started and the comedy club boom hit the UK. The only side effect that came with watching hours of (mostly) men delivering routines, either on tape or live in clubs, was the…
It was only when I was fact-checking for this post (yes, hard to believe, I know, but I do try …) that I discovered that Clare In The Community is now in its sixth year and sixth series – it’s an impressive achievement for a radio sitcom about a social…
[I interrupt my catching up on television programmes to talk about something that isn't a television programme, but at least it's about someone who has been in television programmes.] Chris Addison has a slightly bigger profile than Lucy Porter, who I saw last month – he plays Ollie in The…