Frankie Howerd

A three-hour compilation called Greatest Stand Up Comedians proved this to exhaustion, by butchering the stage routines of 50 famous comics.

Without the build-up, the timing and the audience rapport, most of the gags weren't even recognisable as jokes. It was like listening to five-second snatches of songs - pointless and frustrating. One of the rare moments worth a laugh came from Lily Savage: 'I've got a brother, our Archie. I hate him. The only reason I speak to him is you never know when you'll need a kidney.'

Shows like this are mostly padding, waffle from talking heads with just a taste of the real thing. That's usually because short clips can be broadcast under 'fair usage' agreements, with no fee; longer clips cost money.

So most of the three hours boiled down to different ways of saying something was funny: 'He's just an incredibly brilliant comedian'; 'Hilarious, I mean hilarious'; 'He is one of the comedy greats, no doubt.'

In case we hadn't noticed how incredibly brilliantly hilarious this all was, narrator Meera Syal kept saying, 'There's more merriment, wit and hilarity on its way,' or, 'We've giggled, tittered and guffawed our way to the end.'

But the real reason for the one-star rating is that Michael McIntyre was rated the seventh most uproarious comic ever . . . 37 places above Frankie Howerd. That's not even funny.

A studio-bound, single-set, multi-camera sitcom, Vicious is a gratifyingly old-school farce in which thespian deities Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Derek Jacobi have a char-grilled whale of a time as an incessantly bickering homosexual couple. Sealed within their sepulchral Covent Garden abode - they shriek like vampires when the curtains are accidentally opened - pompous actor Freddie (McKellen) and retired bar manager Stuart (Jacobi) tussle waspishly over decades of perceived slights, while never missing an opportunity to mock each other's supposed decrepitude.

Now, these are hardly original comic creations - the vituperative, hammy old queen has long been a staple of popular culture - and there is nothing especially notable about the premise. But that simply doesn't matter when the execution is as strong as this.

Resembling a startled, wounded guinea pig, Jacobi squeals and frets amidst a knowing flurry of camp mannerisms, while McKellen booms fresh insults in that oak-lined voice of his. He also pulls some of the funniest "Why, I've never been so insulted in my life!" expressions this side of imperial phase Frankie Howerd. It's an impeccable dual assault of seasoned comic timing.

Enjoyment is magnified by the addition of Frances de la Tour as their dotty, man-hungry pal. Famously, she starred in Rising Damp, one of ITV's few great sitcoms, and it's tempting to view her presence here as a deliberate nod to the past. Not that her involvement is merely symbolic - she's a peerless comic actress - but you could argue that she's essentially playing lonely Miss Jones 30 years on. Even the dingy brown set recalls her most celebrated role.

Broad and boisterous in the best possible sense (ie it's nothing like that avalanche of horror, Mrs Brown's Boys), Vicious is jam-packed with gags, hitting the ground running with an impressive opening episode which establishes set-up, character and backstory with consummate ease.

A co-write between acclaimed playwright Mark Ravenhill and Gary Janetti, a former executive producer on Family Guy and Will & Grace, it revels in its camp bluster with such benign relish, I doubt it'll get into too much trouble for reinforcing stereotypes. It's obvious that Freddie and Stuart are blissfully happy in their enmity, and it's that undercurrent of warmth - the spoonful of sugar beneath the barrel-load of bile - that make these characters so engaging.

I'm no soothsayer - I've never said "sooth" in my life - but I predict that Vicious will be huge. A hit sitcom! On ITV! Nurse, the smelling salts...

'Look at the bloody size of it!' marvels Peter Kay as he runs on stage at the O2. It feels a little disingenuous, because Kay is arguably at the front of a pack of comedians who have been aiming this high from the start. The second part of this fascinating three-part series examines the process behind these startling new comic trajectories. Via a dig around in the BBC's written archive (Frankie Howerd was on 80 guineas a series) and Frank Skinner's brush with pay-related tabloid infamy, we reach the present day.

Comedy historians will probably dub our era The McIntyre Ascendancy. But has edge and artistry been lost as careerism wins the day? Or is it naive to think that stand-up was ever about anything other than a drive towards commercial success? Reassuringly, Mark Thomas is on hand to suggest than comedy has 'fallen for the capitalist concept of endless growth'. But the hyper-competitive Comedy Store bearpit we visit at the end suggests that many young comics still think there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Comedian Frankie Howerd's Somerset home, Wavering Down, remained largely untouched after his death in 1992. Frankie Howerd: the Lost Tapes uncovers a huge archive of his letters, files and recordings for this fond recollection of a curious career.

Howerd, with his terrible wig, his nudge-nudge act and catchphrases based on the infinite comic possibilities of the word "tittering!, was a well-loved figure, though his career suffered deep troughs and he could be tough to work with.

But he was a doughty fighter who wouldn't give up, his huge success as leering Lurcio in the BBC sitcom Up Pompeii came after a long period in the doldrums. This is a fascinating portrait of a curious man, peppered with clips from real oddities, including an atrocious film with, of all people, the Bee Gees.

Anyone casually inferring that the title of this 90-minute documentary might shed light on the inner workings of knowing music-hall surrealist Frankie Howerd is likely to be mildly disappointed. The Lost Tapes is far more interested in his stage-and-screen career than his occasionally tumultuous private life. That said, the plethora of footage unearthed here is an absolute treat for any fan of British comedy. Bruce Forsyth, Tim Vine, Ross Noble, Roy Hudd, Galton & Simpson and the eternally youthful Barry Cryer guide us through clips ranging from Frankie's stint at Peter Cook's Establishment Club to his scenes - sadly left on the cutting-room floor - with Wendy Richard and Paul McCartney in The Beatles' Help! to footage of another musical misfire in his role opposite The Bee Gees in the regrettable promotional movie that accompanied their Cucumber Castle LP. Other nuggets include clips from 1973 Up Pompeii! rehash Whoops Baghdad and a 1976 sitcom made for Canadian TV.

As seen on The Late Great Eric Sykes, three days before he died in the summer, aged 86, Eric Sykes told his agent Norma Farnes that what he'd like more than anything would be the chance to pop into Orme Court one last time.

This was his office in London's Bayswater, and having been fortunate enough to share an hour in his company there, I knew what the place meant to him. In the 1960s it had been a fun factory, with top gagsmiths firing jokes at each other across the hallway. Comedy was a serious business for these guys with Sykes and Spike Milligan failing to agree where to position a "the" for maximum laughs and the latter settling the matter with a lobbed paperweight.

When I visited Orme Court, I noticed that Milligan, who had been dead three years, still had a pigeon-hole and what's more he had mail. I hope Sykes' ­pigeon-hole remains active although he's pretty much the last of his generation. Almost all his associates featured in The Late Great Eric Sykes, including Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howerd, Peter Sellers and regular co-stars Hattie Jacques and Derek Guyler, are gone. Guyler played Corky, the bumbling bobby, and typically Corky would say "Hello, hello, what's all this then?" and Eric would say "Don't come dashing in here like Starsky and Hutch!" He was being ironic, of course. No one did any dashing in Sykes' comedy.

Farnes took us on a tour of the office, which seems to have been left untouched. Sykes fired his gags from a big Sherman tank of a desk. There was the cupboard where he kept his cigars, latterly just for sniffing. And there was the photograph of his mother. She died giving birth to him, at least this was what he was told, and he bore much guilt for that. But she was his inspiration. In a clip from an old interview he said: "When I'm in trouble or a bit down I've only got to think of her." The photo's position in direct eyeline from the Sherman was deliberate. "Eric was absolutely certain that she guarded and guided him," said Farnes.

Sykes didn't have a catchphrase and his style wasn't loud or look-at-me. His heroes were Laurel and Hardy who no one mentions anymore, which seems to be the fate of practitioners of gentle comedy (notwithstanding that with Stan and Ollie or Eric around, there was a high probability of being hit on the head with a plank). Denis Norden, one of the few old chums not yet potted heid, described him as diffident, and not surprisingly it was the gentle comedians of today who queued up to sing his praises (no sign of Frankie Boyle). ­Eddie Izzard rhapsodised about him getting a big toe stuck in a bath-tap; Michael Palin said: "He just did the things you'd see your dad do, or someone in a ­garage." And right at the end Farnes recalled Eric's reaction to the dramatic revelation that his mother had actually hung on for a week after he was born: "So she did hold me!"

Crowd funding "Forgotten Heroes of Comedy"

Robert Ross has written books on the Carry On films, Fawlty Towers, Marty Feldman, The Goodies, Benny Hill, Frankie Howerd, Sid James, Monty Python - the list goes on and on and on. But his latest book Forgotten Heroes of Comedy is not being handled by a 'traditional' publisher. It is being 'crowd-funded' by Unbound.

New ITV2 comedy, Plebs, brings reminders of Up Pompeii

In setting only, as Plebs reads more like an Animal House style Toga party, the series reminds me of the classic BBC comedy, Up Pompeii, starring the late, great Frankie Howerd.

David Nobbs, wonderfully comic writer whether on radio, TV or in print, begins a three-part series talking to an audience about his work and some people he's worked with over the years. As he's written for Frankie Howerd, David Frost and The Two Ronnies, invented such TV comedies as A Bit of a Do, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and (for Radio 4) The Maltby Collection, it's a rich field. Mia Soteriou and Martin Trenaman are the readers, Andrew McGibbon produces for independents Curtains for Radio.

Comedy gold: Frankie Howerd on Campus

As an exemplar of how to rule an audience with laughter, Howerd remains as good as comedians have ever got.