Daniel Radcliffe

Have I Got News for You returns to 4.57 million on BBC1

Have I Got News for You returned to 4.57 million viewers on BBC One. Hosted by Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe, the first episode of the 49th series earned a 21.5% audience share at 9pm. It was the evening's highest-rated show outside of soaps.

HIGNFY, review: ''Radcliffe was quietly charming"

It's still a shock seeing Daniel Radcliffe dressed as a grown-up and sporting actual facial hair, as he did hosting the returning Have I Got News For You.

Radio Times review

Those two enfants terribles and scourges of answering machines everywhere, Ross and Russell Brand, reunite. Of course, a lot of water has flowed under many bridges since the Andrew Sachs/Radio 2 debacle.

Also coming in for a chat on the couch is another celebrity used to unflattering column inches, Lindsay Lohan, winning respectable reviews for her London stage role in Speed-the-Plow, and that nice Daniel Radcliffe. Music is provided by the Script.

I did personally feel that this first show had an incredibly impressive line-up what with Daniel Radcliffe, Chevy Chase and Olivia Coleman. All three seemed pretty game for being part of The Kumars experience and were all up for hawking the products that Ashwin was trying to get rid of from the store downstairs. Coleman especially came across as a fantastic sport and really tried her best to make the show as funny as possible.

My main issue with the format itself is the way the talk show segments are structured. Whilst the sitcom element of the show is enjoyable, especially the meetings in the discount store, I don't feel that writers know exactly what they want from the interview portions. The questions often seem a bit muddled and the guests are often asked to recall moments from any part of their careers.

In addition, the programme just feels a little baggy, due to the fact that Sky have given it full hour. I felt that The Kumars was a perfect thirty minute comedy show but the fifteen minute extension makes it feel incredibly slow at times. Though I still enjoy Bhaskar and Syal's interplay with the guests, I'm not so sure about Harvey Virdi's addition to the cast, especially seeing as most of her jokes have something to do with her hilarious name.

I do feel that there is still a place for shows such as The Kumars but this latest incarnation of the comedy chat show needs to be better written and have at least ten minutes cut off its running time.

The Kumars are no longer at number 42. Indeed, they are not even at the BBC anymore. After an eight-year absence, their chat show has been revived by Sky1, relocated to a room behind a minimart and provided with Daniel Radcliffe, Chevy Chase and Olivia Colman as inaugural guests.

The trouble is, I still don't get it. Obviously, it's subverting television conventions. True, nobody else seems to have a problem with the absurdity of the set-up. But to me and my far-too-literal mind, it doesn't make any sense. How come the Kumars have a chat show in their home?

Despite being incomprehensible to me, I find the show entertaining enough, especially if the guests play along with their hosts and don't try to compete with them. Chase looked lost, Colman couldn't contain her amusement and Radcliffe was charm personified, and effortlessly witty with it.

After eight years away from our screens, the British Indian family returns to treat the famous faces of today to some amiable nose-tweaking. Despite the action leaving the cosy confines of No. 42 (and the BBC) in favour of the box-strewn surroundings of the flat behind Ashwin's shop in glitzy Hounslow (and Sky1), the appeal of smushing on to the couch with Sanjeev, Ashwin and Ummi et al hasn't dimmed, with tonight's opener playing host to Daniel Radcliffe, Chevy Chase and Bafta-bagging Olivia Colman.

Radio Times review

Remember the Kumars? You should, because their BBC show The Kumars at No 42 (which ran from 2001 to 2006) was one of a kind, steering a path between Asian sitcom and cheeky chat show that occasionally teetered on the edge of shambles, but mostly paid rich dividends as celebrities squirmed in Sanjeev Bhaskar's hot seat and the ad libs zinged.

Since we last saw them, our fictional family have fallen on hard times, with Sanjeev, Dad (Vincent Ebrahim) and Ummi (Meera Syal) now living above Dad's gift shop in Hounslow. That hasn't affected the quality of their celebrity visitors, however, as Daniel Radcliffe, Olivia Colman and Chevy Chase pay a call.

Daniel Radcliffe and Jon Hamm for Strictly? Tonight's visit to the Russian surgery where it always snows features the star duo showing off some fancy footwork in a waltz. It's just one diverting moment in a witty yet bleak delight that also features Radcliffe sporting a clown's costume, breaking into song and caught on the hop by a dark emotional twist. And rarely has the line 'we were looking for wood' dripped quite so heavily with double entendre. A comic treat.

Jon Hamm plucking a balalaika, Daniel Radcliffe drug-addled and lovestruck, sly jokes about accidental discharge... it was reassuring to find A Young Doctor's Notebook (Sky Arts 1) hitting its scurrilous stride once more. Actors looking like they're having a ball playing their parts can come off as plain self-indulgent but here that joy shines off the screen.

Though it's set in post-Revolutionary Russia, A Young Doctor's Notebook feels strangely contemporary, with Radcliffe and Hamm note perfect as the younger and older versions of Bulgakov's country physician. Witty wordplay slices and dices through the crude surgery but beneath it all lurks a gimlet-eyed study of the human condition.

Pulling back from the brink of self destruction, Radcliffe's naive young medic found that a nasty dose of unrequited love was the wake-up call he needed. 'There's more to us than morphine,' was the moral of the story as he took baby steps towards depending on himself.

The first series of Sky's A Young Doctor's Notebook - a stagey comedy drama set in a rural Russian hospital in 1917 and starring Daniel Radcliffe and Mad Men's Jon Hamm - plunged from cheerful if gory slapstick (cue wheezy accordions and balalaikas) to the sort of black despair familiar from even the sunniest Russian literature of the era (the plays are adapted from the stories by Mikhail Bulgakov). One moment Radcliffe (straight out of medical school) was happily yanking a tooth or sawing a peasant's leg off, the next he was a morphine addict peeing the bed, accompanied by an increasingly raddled-looking Hamm - Radcliffe's future self as a grownup medic flitting between reading his old diaries in the Stalinist 1930s and returning to his former haunts with a dazed expression and a needle in his arm. It's not Call the Midwife.

Amazingly, Hamm was off the drugs in this opening to series two (thanks to a bracing spell in a municipal straitjacket), though Radcliffe wasn't, and was soon watering down the morphine for the benefit of a suspicious government inspector arriving imminently to do a stock count. Luckily the man arrived with three bullets in him, courtesy of the revolution raging outside, and if he ended up dying as a result... well, would it be the end of the world? For him it was of course. And so agonising. What was wrong with that morphine!

Sometimes, not knowing whether to laugh or cry, you end up doing neither. Even so, there is something compelling about this barmy pursuit of redemption - the figure of experience revisiting his innocent descent into hell, blaming his younger self for succumbing to temptation but also offering forgiveness.