Burt Kwouk

12 Days of Christmas Specials 6: Harry Hill's Sleigh Ride

This special is a particularly joyful episode -from the continuing fantasies about sild. 'Hmmm lovely sild...' to what surely must be the definitive version of Bing and Bowie's Little Drummer Boy, performed by Harry and Burt Kwouk themselves.

Burt Kwouk: Harry Hill remembers Pink Panther star

They joined forces on Harry Hill's Channel 4 show in the 90s. Now Harry recalls the late actor's wit, love of film, and his relationship with Peter Sellers.

If Tasmin Archer badger, Stouffer the cat and Burt Kwouk as a chicken catcher raise a misty-eyed smile, then you were probably a fan of The Harry Hill Show sketch series that ran from 1997 to 1999 before high-collared Hill - and cohort Al Murray - became megastars. In honour of C4's 30th birthday the cast offer up mockumentary-style 'reminiscences' between clips as they contemplate a reunion.

There was a time, before TV Burp made him a household name, when Harry Hill was best known for a brilliant but utterly bananas Channel 4 sketch show with a cult following.

To say that The Harry Hill Show], which ran from 1997-99, divided people is putting it kindly; even those who adored it probably wouldn't have marked Hill out as a future megastar.

Now as part of Funny Fortnight, which celebrates Channel 4's 30th birthday with a raft of new shows and old favourites, Hill fronts this reunion mockumentary looking at what made Stouffer the Cat, Bert Kwouk and Brother Alan (played by another superstar-in-waiting, Al Murray) into obscure comedy icons. If there isn't a badger parade (remember Tasmin Archer Badger and Gareth Southgate Badger?) we'll all be very cross indeed.

TV Burp might have won Harry Hill a Bafta, but it was his 1997 C4 show that first won him a place in the nation's hearts. Here, we get a retrospective on the programme's three series via the medium of a clips show but, with it being penned and directed by Hill, it's delivered via the medium of a surreal mockumentary that uses past footage to justify oddball storylines. Blurry shots of Hill clutching tins of Sild are overlaid with the claim that 'Harry was off his face on oily fish'. Skits of a pretend Welsh-language soap opera featuring Hill babbling gobbledegook prompt a storyline about miners marching on the C4 building. Clips of THHS regular Burt Kwouk yelling lines like 'Hey Harry, this show doesn't get any funner, does it?' wind up providing the peg for a story about the cast falling out so badly that Hill ends up beating the actor who played his little brother with a stick ('but it was a small stick!'). Very, very strange, but also very, very charming.

The spoof documentary Whatever Happened to Harry Hill? was part of the Funny Fortnight celebrating Channel 4's 30th birthday. This is the channel, of course, on which Hill first appeared, back in 1997. The aptly-named Harry Hill Show was a gallimaufry of inspired idiocy that introduced us to the ever-elusive badgers' parade, a blue rubber cat called Stouffer, the sight of Bert Kwouk (formerly Cato in the Inspector Clouseau films) as Harry's lacklustre chicken catcher, Mai Sung - Harry's wife and stealer of his Abbey National book and ... well, look, if you weren't there, this will all be so much nonsense and if you were, you will know that the mere printed word cannot convey more than an ounce of the madness and delight that ensued.

Whatever Happened to ... was essentially a clips job, given shape by the conceit that the major players had all suffered a falling-out but were now hoping to get back together for one last show. Kwouk was the most resistant to this plan. "For his impressions, Harry just put a wig on!" he remembered, disgusted. "He didn't even try to match the voice!" Eventually, however, even he was convinced, and a glorious reunion - now that Harry has beaten the tawdry sild addiction that finally did for the troupe - took place.

If you were in a mind to be critical, you could say that the ratio of new material to clips, and the comparative levels of invention for each, were quite low. With links to match the generous and ebullient performances from the past, the whole thing could have sung, and better than Bert Kwouk doing Hey Little Hen. But you couldn't stay cross for long in the face of the Mattie Mince pledges (though "that was the sild talking," Harry reveals bravely now), the tiny jockeys, Peter Dickinson in the badger grooming bay and other sketches of yesteryear unspooling, as insanely as ever, before you. Happiness would keep on breaking through.

After a decade spent courting the "cosy Saturday night family viewing' demographic with his enjoyable TV Burp, Harry Hill returns to the somewhat more anarchic climes of Channel 4, home of his rumbustious series back in the day. This one-off Behind The Music-style mockumentary has Harry attempting to reunite the gang - Burt Kwouk, Brother Alan (Al Murray stepping away from his tired Pub Landlord character) and, of course, the badger parade - for one last performance, but finding that he wasn't as well-liked as he assumed.

As part of its Funny Fortnight, Harry Hill returns to the network that launched him. The big-collared comedian writes and stars in this spoof documentary in which he attempts to reunite the stars of his self-titled 1997-99 Channel 4 sketch show. But it all goes wrong when he discovers how his ex-castmates Burt Kwouk and Al Murray really felt about him back then. It's a delight to see Hill, freed from the constraints of TV Burp, spread his comedy wings again.

On Radio 4, we heard from another grumpy and financially unsuccessful writer. I speak of the fictional Ed Reardon, author of episode 29 of Tenko ("I still use Burt Kwouk's risotto recipe"), a play called Educating Peter and [o]John Kettley's Big Book of Weather[/i]. Reardon, named for Edwin Reardon in Gissing's novel New Grub Street, is my hero, the only man worth listening to - I exclude even the sainted Eddie Mair in this instance - after a bad day at the keyboard.

An Audience With Ed Reardon came to us "live" from Edinburgh, where some 12-year-old BBC commissioning editor had provided our hero (played by one of his creators, Christopher Douglas) with readers for his jottings in the form of a couple of actors from a fringe production of Titus Andronicus. Poor Ed. He'd wanted Rodney Bewes, who starred in the film of Ed's awful novel, Who Would Fardels Bear? "Rodney Bewes would have nailed it!" he shouted when they fluffed a bit from Educating Peter. I laughed out loud at this, though I do see - how to put this? - that one must be of a certain age and sensibility to get this gag. Ditto the moment when he yelled: "I'll do the Trimphone!" Oh, Ed. If only you were real, I'd pop over to Berkhamsted and buy you lunch.