Alan Davies

A slightly surprising - and very tough - vote from the judges after Monday night's show sent Dan, Pat and Tiffany through to tonight's live final at London's Hammersmith Apollo.

They've already played Blackpool's Tower Ballroom, but you can bet the nerves will be kicking in tonight as they play to the biggest audience of their careers and millions of voting viewers at home.

The winner will pocket £100,000 plus their own DVD, but all three finalists will be heading off around the country on tour in just three weeks' time.

Joining host Jason Manford are judges Alan Davies and Kate Copstick, who's warned Dan: "If you let me down I will have your Welsh rarebits on toast." I don't think she was joking.

Show disappointed as the contestants joined the army

Show Me The Funny saw Jason Manford, Alan Davies and Bob Mortimer judge the hopefuls at a military base, but the comic value of comedians participating in an army bootcamp is surprisingly low.

Alan Davies' Whites. Hulu. Now.

Should you find yourself in need of a new British comedy fix, hope over to Hulu and check out Whites, starring Alan Davies, Darren Boyd and Katherine Parkinson.

Show Me The Funny was a shambles that looked like it was being hastily cobbled ­together as they went along. Anyone work out what the hell was going on? Damned if I could.

Twitter fan and former One Show sensation Jason Manford was the host. I think.

Dying a death in Liver­pool, 10 criminally hopeless ­alleged stand-up ­comedians seemed determined to establish they couldn't make us laugh if their lives ­depended on it. Mission accomplished.

Meanwhile, Jimmy ­Tarbuck and Alan Davies spouted seasoned-pro claptrap with some old girl doing an impression of Cruella De Vil on a bad-hair day. They were the ­judges. I think.

But back to the action... and contestant Cole Parker's first "joke" of the empty night: "The amount of oestrogen in this room is as palpable as it is ­intimidating." Boom-boom!

After that it was downhill all the way. Hard to crack a smile.

There are supposed to be six more episodes of this ocean-going turkey. But is it really worth ­carrying on? I think not.

Show Me The Funny review

Another reality competition, but guest judges Alan Davies and Jimmy Tarbuck lulled me into a false sense of security by assuring me they'd never lend their names to something tawdry and half arsed. I'm not a fan of the term half arsed but it does work in certain circumstances and Show Me The Funny is the perfect one of these.

Show Me The Funny review: stand-up chronic

Alan Davies and Jimmy Tarbuck realised they were in the presence of a no-hoper but went easy on the poor bloke. However the show's answer to Simon Cowell - comedy critic Kate Copstick lays into the pair like someone trying to make a name for herself. Will this be a hit? Probably...

Though the prospect of Jason Manford hosting an X Factor-style competition for 10 amateur standups sounds more like Saturday night light entertainment, this turns out to be a meatier proposition, not least because watching people cold-sweat their way through a sudden attack of the unfunnies makes for painfully gripping television. Alan Davies and Kate Copstick are the fairly devastating judges; now that The Apprentice is over, get your fix of schadenfreude here.

For better or worse, the comedy circuit gets its own X Factor - but the contestants who will be battling it out by gigging their way round the country have already been whittled down to ten. They include experienced hands such as Patrick Monahan and people who have never had a paid gig. The winner gets £100,000, a multi-date tour and their very own Christmas DVD. Cheeky QI chappy Alan Davies is a judge, while jovial Jason Manford, presumably hoping for a big-league bounce-back after his short-lived stint on The One Show and that 'sexting' to-do, hosts.

Here's a show to cheer up anyone feeling bereft after waving farewell to Lord Sugar and his swaggering apprentices. For this series promises to be every bit as amusing and nail-bitingly compulsive, with the added bonus of a few decent jokes. Most of those are courtesy of host Jason Manford, who puts ten fledgeling stand-ups through their paces in an attempt to find the next Michael McIntyre. Each week the hopefuls will perform new material for a tricky audience, including hospital patients, secondary school pupils, tipsy Welsh rugby players and a squadron of Scots Guards. Tonight they face a roomful of Liverpudlian ladies. Cue lamentable gags about scousers and even dodgier impersonations that soon have judges Alan Davies and crimson-lipped critic Kate Copstick - who clearly intends to be the Cowell of comedy - wincing. Even tonight's guest judge, jolly Jimmy Tarbuck, can't crack a smile. Fortunately, if there's one thing more entertaining than first-rate stand-up, it's watching wannabes bomb. There's no need for Michael McIntyre to watch his back just yet.

A more cynical tv-based e-mail that likes to use glaringly topical references might say an ITV1 show about stand-up comedy that is hosted by Jason Manford and features Alan Davies as a judge is something akin to Fox News asking Rebekah Brooks to host a show about running a morally superior newspaper business, with Rupert Murdoch as judge.

But we're not that e-mail. We like Manford, though he's never really been funny-funny, and Davies redeemed himself a touch by being good in Whites... so we're going to let it slide. In this reality show, 10 wildly different stand-ups have to perform to tough rooms and then get voted out by Davies and the Mr Nasty of the affair, sidekick Kate Copstick. And it is pretty good - but not because anyone is particularly funny. It's actually interesting and unusual to watch comics dying on stage.