Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin: is he still funny?

As a new biography of Charlie Chaplin is published, comedian Robin Ince asks if his humour has lasted.

Who would have guessed, a generation ago, that in the year 2014 we sophisticated, endlessly demanding television viewers would be falling about laughing over a silent (or at least wordless) comedy starring somebody called Chaplin? The comedy series Inside No. 9 is the creation of The League of Gentlemen duo Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton. The second in the series was A Quiet Night In, one of the cleverest and funniest things I've seen on telly for years. It featured Oona Chaplin, the 27-year-old grand-daughter of Charlie Chaplin. She says she thinks he would have approved of the show. I'm sure he would have loved it, not just for Oona's appearance but to see Pemberton and Shearsmith's split-second timing, as perfected by the Master 100 years ago.

Charlie Chaplin novella finally published

The only known novella by film star Charlie Chaplin has been published, 66 years after it was written.

It's not just Lenny Henry; most comics turn to tragedy

According to one obituary notice, Charlie Chaplin once said that "Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot".

Slapstick Festival marks two milestones

This year's Slapstick Festival has two milestones to celebrate. For one thing, the brilliant, Bristol-based celebration of silent and classic comedy is marking its tenth birthday. This year's festival also kick-starts a global series of events marking the centenary of Charlie Chaplin's best-loved character, the Little Tramp.

If the 90 per cent empty auditorium in which I saw this film earlier this week is any guide, TV comic Harry Hill has not struck gold, but something much smellier, with his graduation to the big screen.

Maybe it's Marmite, for people either love or hate his brand of comedy. As with Marmite, if you don't have the taste for it, it's not easily acquired, and it won't be acquired here.

Like Russ Abbot and Freddie Starr, before him, Hill revels in the adjective 'madcap', and there is certainly a strong madcap element to this tale of the ever-genial Harry and his nan (an exceedingly game Julie Walters) taking their apparently terminally-ill hamster (in fact, a cuddly toy) to Blackpool.

On the way they run into Jim Broadbent, playing a three-armed female cleaner in a nuclear power station, and Sheridan Smith, who plays the princess in a nautical tribe of shell people. Meanwhile, they are pursued by two villains dispatched by Harry's evil identical twin Otto (Matt Lucas).

Hill has attracted some top-notch British talent. Whether they read the script first is open to question.

Otto is cross because he was given up for adoption to a group of Alsatians in Kettering, and from that you get a hint of the kind of humour that prevails.

It's surreal, for sure, but the kind of surrealism that makes you sink lower and lower in your seat, wondering whether to make a dash for the exit.

If you do sit it out, though, there's some enjoyment to be had in spotting the comedy references - to The Goodies, The Lavender Hill Mob, even Charlie Chaplin's City Lights.

But I'm afraid that serves mainly to remind us what good comedy is, and what this isn't.

BBC producers are a wily bunch. When Eartha Kitt was at the height of her international career it would have been impossible to persuade her to show up at an old music hall theatre in Leeds for a one-song appearance. But Barney Colehan, producer of BBC TV's The Good Old Days for all of its 30-year history, pulled off this coup by telling her that he had arranged for her to use the dressing room that Charlie Chaplin had occupied at the start of his career.

The fact that there was no way of knowing which of the many dressing rooms Chaplin might have used has programme host Paul Merton howling with laughter, one of many occasions when he cracks up over the course of his look at the history of the City Varieties Music Hall in Leeds. It's Britain's oldest music hall and has just reopened after a major refurbishment.

Merton is joined in this celebration of variety shows by Barry Cryer, Roy Hudd and Ken Dodd. The latter was the headline act at the gala reopening of the Varieties on 18 September 2011. Mr Cryer, on the other hand, recalls his first appearance at the venue in the 1950s, when music hall was out of favour and he shared the stage with ladies performing acts entitled "Fun and Dames" and "See the Nipples and Die!" There's no such roll call these days and, with the success of Britain's Got Talent, Merton hopes for a resurgence of variety shows.

The truth about Benny Hill

He was Britain;s greatest comic export. In 1990, The Benny Hill Show was on in 97 countries around the world, although not, ironically, the UK, and his famous fans included Michael Jackson, Clint Eastwood, Frank Sinatra and Charlie Chaplin. Now, almost a decade after his death, discover the surprising truth behind about the comedian including his penchant for prostitutes, addiction to amphetamines and reluctance to spend a penny of his £7.5million fortune.

This panel show began its forty-first series this week, and as usual it features a lot of things that we're all familiar with: Ian Hislop's in-depth political knowledge, Paul Merton's extraordinary improvisational abilities, a biased scoring system and rubbish but amusing pictures to keep the cost of making the show down.

Typically there were some good moments in this episode, hosted by Jack Dee, like Hislop's gag about Obama supplying light sabres to the rebels.

However, much of what was covered has already been featured in other programmes like last week's edition of Russell Howard's Good News, including the house that looked like Hitler, the Michael Jackson statue and Wayne Rooney's swearing. While the move back to Friday will no doubt please many viewers it does mean that other satirical comedies get to the stories first, so in a way it feels like the jokes are being repeated. Then again, they do cover some stories with more depth than other shows, so they get points for that.

The main problem that I have with HIGNFY - and indeed most satirical comedy shows - is that very often the jokes are just too lazy. All they have to do is find a single oddity about a person and they will keep making the same jokes about that person forever, or until they find an even better oddity.

We saw the same jokes tottered out again: Russell Brand and Silvio Berlusconi are lecherous; Sarah Palin is stupid yet sexually appealing; Eric Pickles is fat and so on. I loathe this lazy writing, especially the fat gags. For around 15 years we have had to listen to the same old jokes about John Prescott being fat and grumpy, and now that he has gone we're going to have to listen to the same gags again, but now with a different target.

Of course the thing you have to remember is that now we have a Tory government in power, so satire should be easier anyway. I have my own personal theory about satire, which is that there is always a satire boom in comedy whenever a right-wing government is in power.

In the 1940s, Charlie Chaplin made The Great Dictator, probably his greatest film. In the early 1960s you had the satire boom under Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home with shows like Beyond the Fringe and That Was The Week That Was, which soon fell after Harold Wilson came to power in the late 1960s. In the 1980s you had the alternative comedy boom and Spitting Image. In the 1990s Drop the Dead Donkey and HIGNFY began during Thatcher's final days, with Spitting Image finishing the year before Blair came to power and DDTD finishing the year after. In the 2000s, America had shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report under George W. Bush. The only problem is that no-one was expecting the Lib Dems to come into play.

Still, HIGNFY is enjoyable. It's not going to bring down the government. Mind you, with the Conservatives in power, would they want all that good material going to waste?

Where would you go if you could travel back in time?

Thanks for all the stories you have been sending in for the show. This week Russell and the team have been looking at @JAMMorgan's suggestion about a woman spotted in a 1928 Charlie Chaplin film supposedly on a mobile. It went massively viral but if you haven't seen it...