Andy Nyman

Guests announced for new season of RHLSTP

Highlights include League Of Gentlement writer Jeremy Dyson and regular Derren Brown collaborator Andy Nyman on June 26 and Ben Willbond and Laurence Rickard from Ghosts and Bridget Christie on 3 July.

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon review

Kids and fans of Shaun The Sheep will get a kick out of his latest extra-terrestrial adventures. A solid video and excellent audio presentation make up for a lacklustre set of extras.

Andy Nyman: To succeed as an actor, accept failure

Failing as an actor is not really failing, says Ghost Stories writer and Fiddler On The Roof star Andy Nyman - you have to accept it as part of the journey.

Scream with laughter: can comedy ever be scary?

Standup Nick Coyle's new show Queen of Wolves takes a Victorian governess on a terrifying journey - and proves how humour and horror work in similar ways.

Just like with last year's Ballot Monkeys, Power Monkeys by writers Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin have worked on their script up to the day of transmission to include as many topical gags as possible. Another similarity between the two shows is that we follow four camps of people with Ballot Monkeys concentrating on the four major parties going into the 2015 General Election. But as this show focuses on the EU Referendum there is only really two campaigns to focus on namely the Vote Remain and Vote Leave groups. Although I do feel that there was probably enough material to focus on just these two groups, I think to keep up the pace that made Ballot Monkeys so enjoyable Hamilton and Jenkin added two more parties just to keep things going. Those parties are the team behind Donald Trump's presidential run as well as two members of Vladimir Putin's staff. I do feel targeting Trump and Putin is quite easy but a lot of the jokes about these two men have already been made elsewhere and I don't think that the writers really had anything new to say about them. So while these segments were funny I think the running joke about Trump not allowing any female journalists to interview him was quite cliched and was done to death. The more interesting parts of the episode involved the two sides of the referendum with the vote leave campaign headed up by the returning Gerry (Andy Nyman) who was working alongside the ultra-patriotic Spencer (Kevin McNally), the focused Preeya (Archie Panjabi) and young Labour supporter Jackie (Gwyneth Keyworth). On the other side of the fence was Oliver (Jack Dee) whose offensive jokes were getting on the nerves of his colleague and fellow remain campaigner Sara (Claire Skinner). It was the interplay between McNally and Panjabi and Skinner and Dee which provided the central highlights of this first episode of Power Monkeys primarily as both sets of performers bounced off each other perfectly. I have to say though I was a little disappointed as I expect a lot more from Hamilton and Jenkin and I feel that Power Monkeys lacked the focus that Ballot Monkeys possessed. That being said I'm going to stick with the show for now as I'm a fan of the majority of the cast and have loved the writers ever since Drop the Dead Donkey. But I'm just hoping the quality of the episodes improve as I would say that the first episode of Power Monkeys was simply a little lacking in big laughs and that's not what I expected from the follow-up to one of the funniest sitcoms of last year.

Ballot Monkeys was sharp, as would befit a writing credit for Andy Hamilton, and thus trumped and trumps ITV's Newzoids so far. Again served by a great ensemble, it was hampered only by being so close not only to topicality but to truth. Stronger, Fairer, Nicer is the slogan on the Lib-Dem battle bus and a blistering Ben Miller couldn't better negate any of those adjectives. The Tory bus has Hugh Dennis as the head of something involving "delivery", although you were invited to set your watches back to 1954 as a bereft "women's spokesman" had to crane her neck against the bus-rack just to be heard past his dullard alpha shoulders. Labour? Just constantly worried about the reaction on the doorstep to happy warrior Miliband. Andy Nyman's Ukip press officer is not so much fighting Twitter storms - most of them engendered by the bus's other occupants - as engaged in a Sisyphean bout of Whack-a-Mole. If only politics could be this much fun. If only Labour hadn't sold everyone down the river. Adapted to the paradigm contiguities of a modern vibrant age. Sold everyone down the river.

Campus DVD review

Some comedy gold, here especially from comic/magician Andy Nyman, but it's ultimately a flop.

The disturbing surprise in Campus is that some talented comic acting refuses to be funny. Squatting at the centre of the action is Jonty de Wolfe (Andy Nyman), the vice-chancellor of Kirke University (in-joke: Howard Kirk is Malcolm Bradbury's anti-hero in his 1975 campus novel The History Man, a TV series 30 years ago). A monstrous man, he harasses his scholars - in particular the compulsively randy English professor Matthew Beer (Joseph Millson) - into publishing bestselling books, mimics students' foreign accents and, in this past week's episode, seeks a 25 per cent staff reduction by shouting at passing academics through a megaphone: "F**k off out of it, thank you very much, have a nice day." He locks a visiting bank manager in a cupboard to avoid his bad news, composedly takes tea beside a scholar who has just died, and threatens the university's gullible financial officer with shrinkage.

He and the other characters pursue their lives' strategies - power, sex, money, fame - as independent atoms, hurtling through a universe of others with which they collide. In their relationships, they either prey on others or are preyed on. Anyone seeking to pursue serious work or study is marginal to the main action. The one real success, a book on the concept of zero by a shy mathematics lecturer Imogen Moffat (Lisa Jackson), changes her from a cipher to the status of a tethered goat on which all other animals seek to feed. Where The History Man was, in part, a satire on sociology (Kirk's discipline) and the phoney uses to which it can be put, Campus ignores the intellectual content of a university in favour of concentrating on de Wolfe's awfulness. The more the comic business frantically multiplies, the more inert the matter is: its core, like that of the fictional university, seems absent. There is no "there" there.