Dave Allen (II)

Dave Allen was a genuinely funny man, not because his jokes were great - some missed and some hit - but because he had a combination of charm, timing and delivery that made you want to laugh anyway. God's Own Comedian was a respectful appreciation of the writer and performer who courted controversy in the 1970s with his mockery of religion, particularly of the Catholic variety.

It's hard to imagine a comedian being allowed to make fun of religious piety on the BBC now, partly because we've become more "respectful" (aka fearful) of religious sensibilities and partly because the BBC is institutionally terrified of giving offence. The other notable thing about that period in British television, going by the various contributors who knew Allen, is that it produced a generation untouched by dental vanity. I haven't seen such fabulously bad teeth on view since I interviewed Shane MacGowan.

Before he sat on a bar stool, signature fag in one hand and a glass of whisky (apparently ginger ale) in the other, Dave Allen hosted a chat show. Not long ago anyone who had any kind of success on or off TV - Jeremy Clarkson, Davina McCall, Richard Littlejohn - was rewarded with their own chatshow, with mostly disastrous results.

A genius of observational humour was celebrated in Dave Allen: God's Own Comedian, reminding us he was so much more than a stand-up comic. Allen, who had his own jokes-and-sketches show, Dave Allen At Large, on BBC2 in the Seventies and Eighties, was a one-man crusade against the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland (he labelled the nuns who taught him at school 'Gestapo in drag') and caused such offence that he used to get death threats.

It's incredible the BBC ever had the nerve to screen his papal striptease, with the Holy Father high-kicking on the steps of St Peter's. And it's a downright travesty that, because Allen didn't want to see his shows constantly repeated, they are never replayed at all.

Whatever some 40-year-old contract says, it has to be torn up. Dave Allen is too funny to be forgotten.

Dave Allen - God's Own Comedian, BBC2, review

The wonderful wit and creativity of comedian Dave Allen is remembered in a fine tribute programme.

"Here lies Dave Allen, a comedy fool/Who drank and told gags as he sat on his stool ..." Allen's own epitaph for himself neatly encapsulates his received image as one of the great bar-room raconteurs, but the Vatican-baiting humorist (who received death threats from the IRA) also pushed more boundaries in his time than the so-called alternative comics who followed. Admirers and friends such as Mark Thomas and Dame Maggie Smith bear witness to his peculiar genius in this fond and very personal tribute.

Radio Times review

If you've ever wondered why the great Dave Allen's 1970s shows are rarely repeated, there may be an answer in this profile: he insisted on a clause in his contract allowing only one repeat. So it's good to be reminded of the suave comedian seated with cigarette in hand and whisky glass at his elbow, spinning a bar-room yarn or introducing a sketch that always seemed to involve at least one priest. One famously featured the Pope doing a striptease, though his wife tells us he was never anti-religion - hence his sign-off "Goodnight and may your god go with you."

The tributes and clips are wonderful and there's a nice coda on the one big mystery: how he lost that finger.

Remembering laughter legend Dave Allen

Dave Allen is trapped in limbo. The Irish comedian has been floating in the afterlife ever since his death in 2005. Well, at least he is in a new one-man play about to be premiered in Manchester.

On the face of it, Comic's Choice looked as if it was going to be negligibly mediocre. It had the kind of jaunty animated title sequence we've seen a hundred times before, and the pre-broadcast description indicated that it was yet another clip-show, one of those comedians-talking-to-comedians affairs that can occasionally make contemporary broadcasting look like a vast job-creation scheme for underemployed stand-ups. The saving grace here is that one of the comedians (the presenter one) is Bill Bailey. Not only can he play his own signature tune but he's got a manner that somehow makes the format work, which is handy for Channel 4, since it's on every night this week, as a curtain-raiser to the British Comedy Awards this coming weekend.

That's the premise. The British Comedy Awards do flavour of the month, while this short series explores more durable supremacy, with each guest nominating and selecting their best of the best in various categories. Last night, Alan Davies was in the selector's chair, and quickly demonstrated one problem with the structure of the programme, which is that there's no proof in comedy. Davies had nominated Dave Allen as Best Male Comic, on the strength of a live West End performance he once saw. But, of course, there was no clip of that, and even if there had been it may not have made his case for him. It doesn't hugely matter, though, because Bailey is affable and funny enough to fill the gaps - on great form last night pretending to sulk about one of Davies's other nominations, the "sexy little jazz weasel" Noel Fielding, who once bumped him off a captain's slot on Never Mind the Buzzcocks.

A dreadful debut comedy vehicle for the seasoned stand-up comic. Although there is nothing wrong with its traditional format of a few studio-bound routines intercut with sketches - it's worked for everyone from Dave Allen to Stewart Lee - here it feels painfully strained and old-fashioned.

Amos is likeable enough, but his material is woefully pedestrian I curdled with embarrassment when he dragged up as his mother, a presumably recurring character that should never have been allowed.

Comedy doesn't always have to be cutting-edge or biting, but it should never resemble a forgotten mainstream comedy flop from 1983.

Dave Allen broke into British TV on Val Doonican's BBC TV show in the mid-1960s, soon graduating to a series of his own where a relaxed raconteur style, cigarette in one hand, glass of whisky in the other, distracted from his daring in choice of topics. Sex, death and religion were well within his witty compass and all, from time to time, got him into trouble with the press. He's been followed by observational comics such as Jack Dee, Dara O'Briain and tonight's presenter Ed Byrne, but he was funnier than any of them.