Hugh Dennis

Notes from The Now Show: Tackling the Irish Bailout

Following last week's sudden bout of voicelessness, here's a reassuring message from Hugh Dennis: "Back on the show this week and able to speak, with part of me wishing I couldn't as we battle to extract the comedy value from the Irish debt crisis."

The Now Show Returns - Preview

A few hours before the recording we took a call from Hugh Dennis who was just about able to croak out the alarming message that he'd lost his voice and BBC doctors had signed him off work!

Hurray! I've really gone off The News Quiz (too blue for me and too self-satisfied for its own good) so welcome back Steve Punt, Hugh Dennis, Mitch Benn, Jon Holmes and Laura Shavin with their much wittier reflection of the week. There have been Friday nights in past series where I could have hugged them for being so astute and so funny about government goings on. Even with Cameron and Clegg and their coalition comrades being much harder to mimic than Brown and Blair, Darling, Prescott et al, I'm still confident my thoughts will be echoed in the team's jokes.

This Week on The Now Show: The Now Show turns 32

The Now Show is back back back! After Sandi and her News Quiz team go and lie down in a darkened room until they are next required. We're on to series 32 of The Now Show, amazingly, and Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis still look as fresh and gamine as years at the comedy coal face will allow.

Perfectly timed to ward off those back-to-school blues, the ever-popular topical panel show returns after a summer holiday. Tonight's guests are Thick of It star Chris Addison, Andi Osho - both fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe - and Milton Jones, who does a fine line in ludicrous puns. Unlikely to let them get a gag in edgeways are regulars Hugh Dennis, Russell Howard and Andy Parsons, while host Dara O'Briain dishes out points. Expect an impudent digest of the week's news, arbitrary scores and puerile one-liners aplenty.

Fibbing to their host, fellow panellists and the general public this week are pouty newsreader Kate Silverton, comedian Hugh Dennis, presenter Ben Fogle and Strictly Come Dancing judge Craig Revel Horwood. Dennis kicks off the truth and lies session by announcing that he has to touch his nose every time he says "France". Later, Silverton wants the other team to trust that she once presented the news with her foot in an ice bucket. And Fogle claims authorities on a small island interrogated him because they thought he was a spy. Worse still, he was accused - or so he says - of smuggling breadfruit plants. Laughs abound. There's even a tense moment: Revel Horwood over-investigates Silverton's foot story, perhaps failing to grasp that he's in a comedy panel show rather than an audition for a low-rent detective drama.

Jonathan Ross rounds off his BBC career this week with his final chat show on Friday, and this love-letter to comedy duo Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Ross, a devotee of the pair's sardonic, surreal sketches, tells us that Pete and Dud were his first TV comedy love. Their series Not Only... but Also ran on BBC2 between 1965 and 1970. It will surprise no one to learn that the BBC subsequently wiped the tapes of many of its 23 episodes, some of which survive only in script form. Which is where we reach the chancy bit of Pete and Dud: the Lost Sketches. Ross's guests - including Alistair McGowan, Angus Deayton and Hugh Dennis - gather to re-create some of these vanished comedy gems. I hope it works.

Right up until the late Seventies, it was common policy for the BBC to wipe reels containing previously broadcast programmes in order to make space in the archives and save money by reusing the tape. One of the most significant casualties was Dudley Moore and Peter Cook's seminal comedy sketch show Not Only... But Also, of which fewer than half of the 22 episodes survive - despite apparent efforts by Peter Cook to purchase the masters from the BBC before they were wiped. While some of Pete & Dud's famous routines have been recovered from other filmed performances, others now exist in script form only.

Hence this project, spearheaded by Jonathan Ross, to resurrect Moore and Cook's lost sketches by reperforming them with a group of contemporary comic actors, including Adrian Edmondson, Alistair McGowan (who is rather good as Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling) and Outnumbered's Hugh Dennis. The scripts still sparkle despite the passing of time, but the performances, perhaps inevitably, make you miss the real Pete and Dud all the more. However, the film has undoubtedly been made with the best of intentions, and includes rare archive footage of the original duo in action too.

"Hey, do you remember that teddy bear you had as a kid? You really loved that thing, huh? Bet you'd love to have it back, wouldn't you? Well here it is! We've cut off its head and vomited on it for you too!" Some of Cook and Moore's deleted Not Only But Also sketches are ruined beyond repair by a horrific line-up of Angus Deayton, Alistair McGowan, Hugh Dennis and Adrian Edmondson. Watch this if you enjoy becoming murderously angry before you go to bed on a Sunday night.