BCG Daily Wednesday 15th January 2014

House of Fools - TV review

It's good to be back in Vic and Bob's glorious snow globe of subversive lunacy.

The Kumars return to celebrity-obsessed Britain

The Kumars' Sanjeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal on the return of the family that welcomes celebrity into its living room.

House Of Fools, BBC Two, review

Not every gag hit the mark but if one didn't, another soon came along.

Ricky Gervais offers signed DVDs to NTA voters

Ricky Gervais has been busy drumming up support for Derek at the National TV Awards and is even offering fans signed DVDs if they vote for the show.

House of Fools, BBC2 - TV review

It's The Young Ones with M&S V-necks as odd couple's surreal laughs hit home.

House of Fools, BBC Two

Much of it is puerile, but no less funny for that, while other gags are just lame.

Details of Glasgow comedy festival revealed

Top female comedians Miranda Hart and Sarah Millican are two of the biggest stars lined-up for the Glasgow Comedy Festival, which begins in March.

Harry Hill: On physical comedy and Slapstick Festival

Looking at his more than colourful body of work over the years, Harry Hill appears to be one of modern comedy's most effortless physical comics.

Radio Times review

Picking someone out of the audience to help with your act can be hit and miss. But Nina Conti gets really lucky when she asks a person in the front row to be her new puppet. The woman she chooses is an absolute natural, although to give Conti her due, it's a very, very clever idea.

She's followed by Jimeoin, who does such a spot-on impersonation of a catwalk model he could do it for a living if the comedy didn't work out. Then sarf-Londoner Rob Beckett takes to the stage with some nice observations on his childhood. But it's Conti and her new assistant who steal the show.

Radio Times review

Remember the Kumars? You should, because their BBC show The Kumars at No 42 (which ran from 2001 to 2006) was one of a kind, steering a path between Asian sitcom and cheeky chat show that occasionally teetered on the edge of shambles, but mostly paid rich dividends as celebrities squirmed in Sanjeev Bhaskar's hot seat and the ad libs zinged.

Since we last saw them, our fictional family have fallen on hard times, with Sanjeev, Dad (Vincent Ebrahim) and Ummi (Meera Syal) now living above Dad's gift shop in Hounslow. That hasn't affected the quality of their celebrity visitors, however, as Daniel Radcliffe, Olivia Colman and Chevy Chase pay a call.

Radio Times review

Arbiter Maven's official duties are banal - as this peach of an episode opens, he's judging a contest to find Jinsy's best bucket with a face drawn on - but at least they're not usually dangerous. So when a fortune-teller predicts he'll be assassinated during a sunset duck-impersonation ritual, he takes action.

He can't skive it, since if he doesn't appear, tradition dictates he be relieved of his duties and replaced by a duck. So he finds a doppelganger, who unfortunately turns out to be a fairground lag who behaves like a cross between Old Man Steptoe and Sid Vicious. A My Fair Lady parody ensues, with Cronenbergian overtones and a superb double performance from Justin Chubb.

In the Moosic Tavern, elderly duo Retch & Hoik make a welcome return to the stage. Their composition Deborah is the sort of song the Undertones would have written if they'd been around in the 1920s and had known a transvestite plumber.

Radio Times review

Trying to make light of Derry's troubled past is a tricky business, and this edition finds Mark Steel on not such rip-roaring form as usual. That's not to say he's unfunny, but he does seem to spend a rather lot of time recounting history.

However, he's a consummate professional and he easily gets laughs out of the absurdity of the city being officially named Derry~Londonderry for its European City of Culture tenure; the citizens' renewed enthusiasm for anything, absolutely anything, new; the piffling train service; the rivalry with Belfast; and the fact Derry culture until recently meant "marching with a whistle or singing republican songs".

If you visit he says you may notice a touch of anger in Derry citizens, but from the sound of his audience they're all jovial and happy to laugh at anything - including bombings.

QI: why do we put salt on our icy roads?

A quietly intriguing column from the brains behind QI, the BBC quiz show. This week: QI is worth its salt.

The Kumars: TV review

Although there were awkward moments (Chevy Chase seemed bemused), the format does allow Sanjeev to ask some of the better chat-show questions.

House Of Fools review

Maybe I've simply outgrown Vic & Bob's infantile antics, or their style of bonkers comedy just doesn't feel as revolutionary as it did when I was a teen.

Video: The Kumars return for new television series

A new series of The Kumars returns seven years after it was last shown on the BBC.