Chris Morris (I)

Stewart Lee winds up the fourth series of his Comedy Vehicle. Recent weeks have taken in thorny subjects such as patriotism, wealth, Islamophobia and death with - and it's acknowledged with a heavy heart - varying degrees of success, when stood up against his previous, near-perfect series. Bringing things to a close this week in front of his audience of Guardian readers at the Mildmay Club in Stoke Newington, he delves into his own childhood for quarry, with Chris Morris berating him throughout.

Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, TV review

Lee is the only comedian who thoroughly critiques his act as he is doing it, and then critiques the critique.

What are the cast of 'The IT Crowd' doing now?

A whole decade after Jen first ventured down to the basement of Reynholm Industries, let's take a look at what the talented cast of The IT Crowd are doing now...

What happened to British political comedy?

British political comedy is an endangered species. An impending series of Black Mirror in early 2016 cannot hide the worrying dearth of social commentary in today's offerings. Armando Iannucci lies dormant, Chris Morris is hibernating and Citizen Smith has been resuscitated purely to mock Jeremy Corbyn. Stand-up, safe sitcoms and panel shows numerically engulf political comedies and dominate television schedules. In our politically turbulent era, there should be a glut of programmes savaging political idiocy with humour, yet we have almost none to namecheck. Why?

It's a good time to revisit Four Lions

To cope with the tragic international events of the last few weeks, let's all revisit Chris Morris' masterwork of dark, weirdly healing comedy.

Don't let terrorists win TV: we need to make Dad's Isis

Chris Morris's Four Lions stands alone in its bonkers brilliance. Those who care about culture should end this silent surrender and make some risky TV.

Tom Hardy is the big draw as the hooting jabberfest returns. He's hawking his split-screen, award-baiting new dual role as both Ronnie and Reggie Kray in Legend - although once you've seen his Kray twins compared on social media to Chris Morris and Peter O'Hanraha-hanrahan, you can't unsee it. Also bouncing on to the sofa is Demi Lovato, who hit the ground running on her previous appearance by swigging Dr Pepper straight from a two-litre bottle and cracking jokes about Simon Cowell's chest hair.

As a younger show with an "open door" submissions policy - meaning that anyone can send in material for consideration - the topical sketch series Newsjack (Radio 4 Extra, Thursday) ought to be edgier, weirder, less formulaic than The News Quiz; but ends up, somehow, being just as complacent. Currently fronted by the comedian Nish Kumar, with assistance from a revolving cast of comics and actors, it's one of a small group of original, non-archival series on 4 Extra.

This week's half-hour instalment was dispiriting in the way that only really unfunny comedy can be. A skit about a plane that had been forced to land at Heathrow because of a broken lavatory careered out of the radio and landed with a tin clunk on the floor. The nadir was reached during a skit about politicians doing drugs, in which Nicola Sturgeon was represented by someone doing a generic Scottish accent, David Cameron by someone who sounded vaguely like Ed Miliband, Ed Miliband by someone who sounded like a young Janet Street-Porter, and Nigel Farage by a woman making no attempt to do an accent at all.

Why does BBC radio so consistently fudge this kind of thing? Neither series is doing anything that pushes a boundary, finds an edge, or ventures anywhere outside of an ideological comfort zone. Chris Morris's On the Hour, commissioned by Radio 4 nearly 25 years ago, retains more bite in a single sketch than they managed across an hour of broadcast time. Here's hoping it doesn't take another quarter-century for the BBC to try something different.

How the Nathan Barley nightmare came true

Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris's 2005 TV series was a comedy about a ludicrous 'self-facilitating media node' in east London. But 10 years on, it looks more like a documentary about the future.

Radio Times review

Back after a three-year hiatus, the cleverest stand-up on TV had refined his tantric anti-comedy about comedy still further, flipping riffs this way and that for minutes on end like some sort of hilarity jazz trumpeter. Childish vandalism of a road sign to Shilbottle; UKIP; or Lee's own feelings of utter uselessness at being a middle-aged, vasectomised father of two drinking real ale every night: he can now work any subject up into comic nirvana by remorselessly observing not the detail of a thing, but the essence. And he made his new antagonist Chris Morris corpse. Twice.