Jack Seale

Radio Times review

I've watched Dave Allen: God's Own Comedian (Monday BBC2; iPlayer) twice now. I'll probably watch it another eight or nine times, in the hope that any of Allen's essence can somehow enter my soul. This was less a film about how to be a TV comedian, more a film about how to be.

Dave Allen had a spark, a glint. He had no fear. He knew he had his s**t straight. He trusted his mind. He was always looking for mischief. He was curious. He loved his family. He never stopped thinking. If it was funny, he'd say it.

You could see it as he bounded onto the stage to present his first big TV show, in Sydney in 1963. At 26, in his second foreign country - he'd left Ireland at 16 and left his friends The Beatles behind in England ten years later - he was brazenly flirting with the studio audience. He had it. Soon Australia had given Dave, unutterably sexy at that point with his black hair and charmed eyes, his own chat show, which from the clips in God's Own Comedian seemed to consist of him larking about aimlessly and assuredly with female co-hosts and, in one extended sequence, risking his life to demonstrate how to escape from a submerged car. Advised to stay in Australia and build on his success, Allen followed his first wife back to England and simply repeated it there.

This documentary about one of the best stand-up comedians in British TV history didn't actually contain very much of his stand-up, because what audiences were buying wasn't a series of jokes, but time with Dave Allen - a share of the drink that was normally in his hand, on and off stage. "They wanted him to like them," explained Mark Thomas, a writer for Allen's later shows. Allen's honest independence was alluring but it took him, quite naturally, to extremely controversial places.

The flint inside the laconic exterior was formed young. Allen's newspaper-editor dad, a major local celebrity, had died when his son was 12, leaving the family struggling. But before that, a Catholic education had woken Allen up. "They hit me. They pulled my hair. They punched me. They demeaned me. None of them were qualified teachers."

Allen's material about the Catholic church wasn't revenge, exactly. The Pope stripteasing, the "nuns farting next to lilies" and the rest came more from his fascination with humans at their hypocritical worst. He grinned widely when asked which of his routines about religion had offended the IRA: "Most of them!" If it was true, he'd say it. Allen was a mainstream household name but did sketches about Apartheid, because he wanted to. His popularity kept rising.

Craven celebs would have consolidated with safe options. Allen wandered off to present a series of proto-Theroux documentaries on eccentric and marginalised people, drawing on his equal fascination with humans at their best. He took a straight acting role as a man in mid-life crisis in an Alan Bennett TV play. Allen was "looking for the meaning of life", said one of his collaborators, and that didn't sound ridiculous.

About the only black note in this fantastic programme - which may have glossed over all sorts of monstrous flaws in Allen's character, although I suspect it didn't and don't much care - was his last full series for the BBC in 1990, which was dogged by green-inkers moaning about the swearing. We saw Allen eruditely explain in a Clive James interview that there are more important things in the world to worry about than "rude sounds", but the Beeb caved and Allen was wounded. It was an ironic, pathetic, trivial but illuminating example of what Allen stood against and why he mattered.

Not that he thought he mattered much, Dave Allen being one of the few things in which Dave Allen didn't take too much interest. He made the best show he could but then went home, exchanged his smart stage garb for scruffy linen, and got on with reading, painting, drawing, and hosting sprawling weekenders for his extended family and friends. The ghost stories he would petrify the kids with at the Allen house in Devon sounded like better gigs than any of the TV ones.

"He had these many many abilities but he held them quietly," observed his widow Karin. Allen knew it was just a ride and, as Cyril Connolly ambiguously said, you can't be too serious. Finally, God's Own Comedian dealt with the mystery of the missing forefinger on Allen's left hand, by refusing to answer it. He'd told everyone something different: as his associates related the tale they'd heard, they had his glint in their eye.

Radio Times review

Vicious (ITV Player) put Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellen on a standard stage/sitcom lounge set - front door on the left, swing door to the kitchen on the right, stairs in the background - and let them howl and scratch for half an hour as Freddie and Stuart, who had been lovers for more than 50 years and had now settled into their bitter, argumentative dotage on the sofa.

The challenge was to enjoy the proceedings as much as the two stars, as McKellen ripped through scores of searingly bitchy lines, peaking with a cracker about Stuart "pouring your blandness over every surface", while Jacobi freed his right arm to become one of the campest limbs ever seen on TV.

Many viewers really, really didn't enjoy Vicious, throwing all sorts of criticisms that largely bounced off. It was stagey, retro and gaudy, they said, pointing out all the things it was actively trying to be. It entrenched gay stereotypes, they said, looking to a riotous sitcom for assiduous social realism. It used canned laughter, they said, referring to the live studio audience.

The complaint that had merit was that jokes mentioning rape are basically never funny, even if Frances de la Tour as fag-hag Violet fretting about virile young neighbour Ash (Iwan Rheon) was cartoonish and abstract enough to be as near to harmless as they come, as well as being sinfully well timed. (McKellen: "For God's sake Violet, nobody wants to rape you!" De la Tour: "What an awful thing to say.")

The line still should have been taken out, and was evidence that Vicious might not have a heart, which means it'll drag as soon as the one-liners falter. But while it's steaming, Vicious is hot.

Review: Dave Allen - God's Own Comedian; Vicious

The story of one of telly's best ever stand-ups was a design for life, says Jack Seale in his weekly TV review.

A second series of mathematical problem-solving, with Dara O'Briain now up against two arithmetically challenged comedians.

Andrew Maxwell and Mark Watson use trial, error and jokes, while O'Briain relies on his maths degree, with the contest refereed by Professor Marcus du Sautoy.

You'll want pen, paper and pause button to play along, especially for the teaser about people entering and exiting a park without their paths crossing, which could keep you going for hours.

What you might not see is which mathematical principle you're using - in fact they're oddly infrequent throughout. The comics' efforts to get laughs from bare terrain are remarkably successful, though.

Vicious: the Twitter reaction

High-quality camp or retrograde rubbish? Tweeters just couldn't decide...

The biggest TV stand-up of the 1970s gets a proper appraisal in this very well put together documentary. His laconic, no-frills style is revisited and analysed but the meat of the programme is in telling the story of his life and the little stories behind his instantly recognisable, enormously popular performance tics. Great clips, many of them rarely seen, are bolstered by contributors from Allen's family and celebrities including Stephen Frears, Maggie Smith and Steven Berkoff.

Ian Hart plays John Lennon for at least the third time on film, in David Quantick's dramatisation of Ian R MacLeod's novella. This Lennon is still alive in 1991, but left the Beatles in 1962 and watched them achieve moderate success without him. Unemployed and embittered, all this Lennon has left is his hokey sense of humour: on the bus and on his disastrous first day in an office dogsbody job, he keeps up a stream of puns and Dad-jokes, whether or not anyone's listening.

If he were a global megastar, these utterances would be lapped up and analysed; as it is he's just a pillock, but a likeable one. It's a fantastic curio, with a spot-on pastiche soundtrack by Martin Carr of the Boo Radleys.

In truth there's a fair bit of filler in this week's episode. This isn't uncommon in sketch shows nearing the end of their run, and Kevin Eldon's filler has ten times more care and imagination funnelled into it than anyone else's. If you're still on board, you won't mind a bit as Eldon sings a song all about how the scraping part of "bowing and scraping" must annoy kings, or fast-forwards through his own show to preview bits that will not in fact appear.

This could be a first for sketch shows: episode four is the strongest yet. Kevin Eldon's ideas would make no sense anywhere else, but accumulated here they are overwhelmingly funny. Tonight, George Martin/Adolf Hitler recalls the band's late period ("Where did it all go wrong? I'm sure you've heard a lot of people say it was when the Japanese became involved"), Christopher Ryan is an Italian arguing with a tank of bolognese and, in a 1980s BBC drama, the unnecessarily good performance of the week is Julia Davis's drained Scouser.

The title means boys who are old enough to have an interest in adult matters, without being mature enough to mix it with grown-ups. Set on a London housing estate, Youngers follows two best friends who get their GCSE results in episode one and are in the process of growing apart, despite their shared love of music: one's a straight-A student the other a life-loving lothario. It's a familiar set-up for a teen drama, livened by crisp writing and two excellent leads: Calvin Demba and Ade Oysfeso.