Alistair McGowan

Alistair McGowan to replace Rupert Everett in Pygmalion

Alistair McGowan, who was nominated for an Olivier Award for his peformance in Little Shop of Horrors, is to replace Rupert Everett as Professor Henry Higgins in the West End production of Pygmalion.

How Alistair McGowan reinvented himself as an actor

The Millennium dawned particularly brightly for Alistair McGowan. His seven-year love affair with Ronni Ancona had gone into meltdown, but they were just about to become the hottest names in TV comedy.

Tonight, David Baddiel's swotty teenage self locks horns with Guinness Book of Records editor Norris McWhirter (an uncannily authentic Alistair McGowan). Next, we meet an equally uncool 14-year-old Julia Davis. Fortified with Dutch courage filched from her parents' house, young Julia isn't going to let flat chest, braces and frizzy perm get in the way of her first kiss. Or is she?

Video: McGowan takes on the role of Noel Coward

Alistair McGowan talks to BBC Breakfast about his new theatre production that concentrates on the life of Noel Coward.

The play is told through Coward's poetry .

The Impressions Show Review: Fame Shamed

Jon Culshaw has always lived in the shadow of more popular impressionists such as Alistair McGowan and the superb Rory Bremner, but greater recognition could await him yet. Even though Bremner may be a better impressionist and shows a greater ability to contextualise his sketches, the quality of Culshaw's jokes has improved.

Keen to enjoy some legit giggling, I tuned into Craig Brown's Lost Diaries. Brown's Private Eye diaries make me laugh more than anything else in print. But they seem not to work on radio, in spite of the brilliant impressionists (Alistair McGowan, Jan Ravens) who perform them. Perhaps it's that topicality has been lost; Edwina Currie and John Major appeared and, for a moment, I struggled to remember that they once had - oh my God! - an affair.

Then again, any programme that does not take Harold Pinter's egregious "poetry" (or his widow Antonia Fraser's extreme reverence for it) seriously is performing an important service.

The best resurrection of the undead came in Craig Brown's Lost Diaries, which assembled a formidable clutch of impressionist talent, including Rory Bremner, Alistair McGowan and Jan Ravens, to deliver gobbets of satire on figures who may have vanished from public life, but burn brightly in collective memory. There was Edwina Currie's diary on her trysts with John Major: "'Essentially,' he coos, 'these proposals for renewing the essential health of our domestic economy are the same as those I previously mentioned.' 'Go on!' I beg him." There is John Prescott, whose malapropisms and bulimia are a gift, and Antonia Fraser on Harold Pinter's poem about Humpty Dumpty as a denunciation of the Bush regime. "Serves you bloody right for being an egg, chum!" Antonia records that, "Both mummy and daddy had their eyes closed in immense concentration." Bliss.

Celebrating Radio 4's continuity announcers

Their work normally goes unremarked - but Alistair McGowan's new radio comedy, Continuity, focuses on the voices who hold R4 together.

Reading aloud for a few seconds every half-hour might seem like a cushy job - but this new sitcom by Hugh Rycroft imagines a world of pain behind the sturdy vowels of a Radio 4 continuity announcer. Alistair McGowan plays the announcer who leads a lonely professional life in the booth, away from his wife and kids, mulling things over between stints at the mic.

Pete and Dud: The Lost Sketches review

Alistair McGowan, always an uncanny impersonator, was the standout performer. But even he had to concede that they were attempting the impossible. "Yes, you can perform the material," he said wistfully in the Green Room afterwards, "but it was about their relationship, their warmth, their fun, their genius. And that you can never recreate."