Clive James

The Comic Strip gang, creators of previous full-length satirical fantasies deploying prodigies of mimetic skill to recreate erstwhile Britain through parody of its movies and television, set out to do so again with "The Hunt for Tony Blair" (Channel 4). Stand by for a sardonic take-down.

Some of The Comic Strip's catalogue is very good. They did a version of the Arthur Scargill story as it would have looked if Hollywood had taken it over and cast Al Pacino in the lead. I remember laughing at that. They did a version of The Professionals in which the pair of style-free heroes ran around the entire time with their lips pursed. It was called "The Bullshitters". I remember laughing very hard at that.

But I can already remember not laughing at "The Hunt for Tony Blair" even once. It made all the standard references to Blair the war criminal as if that was enough. Meanwhile it recreated The 39 Steps and a whole era of British film in which Britain's short list of stars struggled to be glamorous. Tony Blair, in fact, looked a bit like John Gregson, remembered by dozens of people even today.

But even as you admired the fidelity of the stylistics, the show refused to fizz. Somewhere in the middle there was a little giggle about Blair being Mrs Thatcher's lover, which gave Jennifer Saunders the chance to enact scenes from Sunset Boulevard: scarcely a British movie, one would have thought. Around that shaky fulcrum, deserts of unfunniness stretched far away.

You can't, however, blame Jennifer Saunders for grabbing any chance going to climb into period threads. Women's frocks were just so interesting, in the days when they were the top layer of a whole support system.

Clive James on The Jonathan Ross Show

As the BBC is about to learn, Jonathan Ross was born to host one of their talk shows.

That Sunday Show, review

With the right guests, That Sunday Night Show could mimic the similar successes enjoyed by Clive James in the 1980s - or perhaps the show is damned to failure as it seeks to copy an outdated formula - but needs to bring in a whole panel of comedians or inventive thinkers.

It's hardly a new idea, we've seen this sort of clips show before, most notably presented by Clive James and Chris Tarrant in the 1980s. Here the format is resurrected, fronted by comedian Jimmy Carr. He does a reasonable job, too, although the audience seem overly (and suspiciously) buoyed up for the laughs on offer.

New Statesman Review

Russell Brand's Ponderland is the latest attempt by Channel 4 to find a vehicle for the station's outrageous star. However fast Brand talks, however many rude words he uses, it's still a teased pompadour of perfection, every line worked to within an inch of its life by its writers. This is not to say that it's not funny, because it is. But with its use of a studio audience whose titters sound weirdly like a laugh track (were they so timid that Channel 4 had to overdub them afterwards?) and its Clive James-style use of archive film, it has a manufactured quality that is somewhat at odds with Brand's increasingly worked-up Frankie-Howerd-meets-Ozzy-Osbourne persona.