James Acaster

Bruce Dessau's top comedy gigs for 2016

Having been spoilt for choice when it came to picking TV highlights the live highlights felt thinner on the ground this year. The Edinburgh Fringe featured a lot of very good shows but few really great ones. Maybe comedians were a little knocked sideways by the Brexit vote. but two did respond well - see below. Elsewhere there were a few excellent big gigs and small gigs and it was nice to see some West End runs rather than bank raid arena one-offs. These shows are listed in absolutely no particular order.

Some pretty good standups say some quite funny things about Christmas, in a talking-heads show that covers all the obvious topics, from shopping to sprouts. The stronger performers, such as Nish Kumar, Kerry Godliman and Tom Price, can dredge up a bit of tone or timing to make obvious observations worthy of a laugh, while in this low-impact environment, James Acaster's deadpan fancy seems positively dangerous.

James Acaster: Reset - The Lowry, Salford review

The premise of Reset centres on Acaster and a rather ingenious honey selling scam. However, things go sour and as the business grows he needs to employ more staff to help with this elaborate scam. This turns out to be a big mistake and in a bid to save his own skin he 'grasses' on his business partners in the hope of a new life.

Leicester Comedy Festival line-up announced

Next year's Leicester Comedy Festival will have as many events as ever, despite the headline sponsorship deal coming to an end.

BBC Sitcom Season: review of the pilots

Some of comedy's hottest names have been busy working on new sitcom pilots for BBC iPlayer, airing in September, with the hope of these creative projects later being picked up for a television series.

James Acaster review

Five nominations for the Edinburgh Comedy Award are surely a recommendation for James Acaster - and with his intelligent, offbeat humour and a wry delivery, he has rightly built up an impressive following at the Fringe (where I saw this show), having improved his craft year on year. Now he embarks on his biggest tour yet and is certain to add to his rapidly growing fanbase.

Do James Acaster & Liam Williams's scripts stand up?

James Acaster has penned a sitcom pilot and Liam Williams has written a play. Both bring echoes of their striking comedy routines but neither is as successful.

Undoubted non-comedy of the week was We the Jury, an alleged piece of humour that actually ran out of ideas before the end of its pilot, which is going some. Did anyone at the BBC actually watch this before it aired? I ask in a spirit of genuine inquiry rather than nastiness, because they've just given me Motherland.

Purportedly a half-hour take on jury service, it featured cliched characters and surreal madness; almost never a winning mix. Ivan Goncharov's novel Oblomov is the only successful example. Written in 1859, it's only about three thousand times funnier and more interesting, and it was in Russian. Had We the Jury popped up on Radio 4 Extra at half-four in the morning - I'm always awake about then, musing on different lives - I would have had to put on slippers, race to the loo and swallow bleach. Again: did anyone watch this before it aired?

BBC Landmark Sitcom Season: the pilots review

In my last post I looked at three of the sitcom revivals that the BBC have produced but alongside these pieces, this new season also includes five new sitcom pilots. Over the next two weeks, all five of these shows will air and in this article I will pass judgement on them all.

TV preview: We the Jury, BBC2

As one would expect from Acaster there are some gloriously well-chosen lines of dialogue.