Jeremy Paxman

Graham Norton 'taking second pay cut'

A BBC report has said the broadcasting giant will be reducing pay for some of its top earners, including Jeremy Paxman and Graham Norton - the latter's second pay cut in three years.

When it comes to spoof documentaries nothing will ever top Rob Reiner's This Is Spinal Tap. But the brother-and-sister writing-and-acting team of Rebecca and Jeremy Front have come pretty close with this superb observational comedy series.

Each stand-alone drama has Jeremy spending 24 hours with a woman of note, who also happens to be a total nightmare. Rebecca, of course, plays them all and they range from a TV psychic to a working-class opera diva, via a drunken war photographer, an evil-genius geneticist and a brash, TV-friendly hack and author.

Jeremy is joined in each "documentary" by real experts who attempt to throw light upon the ghastly woman in question. Robert Winston, Janet Street-Porter, psychologist Richard Wiseman and 60s photographer David Steen all turn in quality performances, but the stand-out new drama talent for me for is Jeremy Paxman.

He attempts to get a quip-free straight answer out of the abhorrent journalist Lucy Winterton but gives up when she wears him down with her, "I put the pun into pundit" responses. This is not just good, it's excellent and shows that quality writing can transform radio comedy into something that's laugh-out-loud funny.

Ed Reardon - celebrated creator of an episode of Tenko, ghostwriter for z-list celebrities and, sometimes, their pets - is back, and this time he's happy. So happy, in fact, that his facial muscles have difficulty in adjusting to this new emotional experience.

Reardon fans, who include RT's very own Alison Graham and Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman, need not fear that his inner rage at the injustices of modern life or, more specifically, his life has been dampened. He begins by railing against the happy young women they place on the front of broadsheet newspapers who have just passed their GCSEs with flying colours. Why can't they show abject failures, he wants to know? And why does even the sport section of said papers have to contain a wry look at the world by David Mitchell? Why not just give him his own damn section and have done with it?

Life has certainly improved for Ed since he took up with 1960s model Fiona (played by Jenny Agutter) - she's going to fly him on an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris - but can this spate of happiness last? No, of course not. An attempt to get his passport renewed ends in the squalid disaster we have come to expect from genius writers Andrew Nickolds and Christopher Middleton. Who'd have thought a company called Merkury Kouriers could invoke such disdain?

Video: Coogan and Mensch clash over press regulation

Comedian Steve Coogan and Louise Mensch MP, a member of the culture select committee, joined Jeremy Paxman to discuss whether Daily Mail Paul Dacre was right on his views on over-regulating the press, whether press self-regulation works and whether the tabloids are a necessary evil.

Video: Davidson returns with play but past haunts him

Jim Davidson, the man who went from shelf-stacker, window-cleaner and pub drummer to television host and fund-raiser for the Tory party, fell out of favour years ago.

It wasn't so much his face that didn't fit as his idea of what was funny.

Now he's written and co-stars in a play about a washed-up, racist comic who sees the light.

Mr Davidson spoke to the BBC's Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight.

Jeremy Paxman meets Russell Brand

Jeremy Paxman asks comedian Russell Brand about the scandal which followed the prank calls he made to actor Andrew Sachs in 2008.

Watch Jeremy Paxman's full interview with Russell Brand on Friday 1 October 2010 at 10.30pm on BBC Two and then afterwards on the Newsnight website.

Dave Podmore on the Stump (Radio 4, Wednesday) was a glorious post-election tonic. Not all cricket fans love Podmore, sublime comic creation of Christopher Douglas and Andrew Nickolds with assistance here from Nick Newman. He is, for some, too louche, too coarse. Only as louche and coarse, of course, as some former county players who turn up in reality shows and commentary boxes. This was the story of how, by Podmore-ish accident, he became an MP, observed and assisted as always by the faithful Andy, reporter for fictional but recognisable Radio One County. Pod had to stand down, of course, but not before enough jokes to make the script fizz and me fall off the chair laughing. On this show (produced by independents Hat Trick) even (the real) Jeremy Paxman sounded as if he were, at last, enjoying himself.

Don't get too excited about the reappearance of Outnumbered. This repeat of the first episode of series two is just plugging an awkward gap in the TV schedules and the rest of the series won't be following. The family are at the wedding of Sue's cousin Julie - and young Karen (Ramona Marquez), the undisputed star of the show, is chief bridesmaid, quizzing the bride relentlessly on her dubious taste in boyfriends. While we wait for a third series to materialise, there are plenty of other TV shows where Karen's unique world view and unwavering style of interrogation could - and should - be employed. Hosting Have I Got News For You, standing in for Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, interviewing suspects on The Bill... She's far too good to waste on just sitcoms.

Charlie Brooker's Newswipe, and Brooker's sudden, dramatic appearance in a neck brace last week, explained the end-of-series chaos, with a 'best of' running last week, and the last 'new' episode finally running this week - presumably around outpatient appointments and physiotherapy.

Newswipe has, after an oddly muted start, been like a shotgun in a field of crows - more adept at countering the 21st-century media slide into goonery, retardation and witchcraft than almost anything available, including Jeremy Paxman's sneer.

Newswipe's great gift has been to dispel the idea that current affairs is so huge, complex and about Israel that we can never hope to get a handle on it - something that even Brooker himself seemed to believe, despairingly, at the start of the series. Instead, it gently illuminated the fact that simply thinking about what you've watched, and then asking yourself what your true opinion of it is, is more than half the battle.

The other half is, of course, laughing at Newswipe, and then writing down all of Brooker's elegant, angry perspicuity in a jotter marked "Good points well made". The News, Brooker pointed out, used to be a factual programme, to which we would then have an emotional response. But, since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, this has become reversed: the news has taken to first asking us for our emotional opinion, then covering it as a "factual" event - as with Baby P "public outrage", Jade Goody "public sorrow", etc.

And that's if there are any "facts" at all: in the following show, Brooker furiously flicked between footage of bleeding Thai protesters, and then viewers' pictures of snowmen from the recent Big Snow, while shouting "News! Not news! News! Not news!", like Matthew Broderick shouting "Learn! Learn!" at the rampaging supercomputer WOPR in War Games.

Brooker is the nearest this country has to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the US programme that has single-handedly dragged the collective American IQ up ten points since the start of the recession. It's neither here nor there if Brooker's in a neck-brace and unable to put on his own trousers without help from a nurse. We just need him to crack on with another series.

You spot the gag pretty quickly in Strangers On Trains (Radio 4), a new spoof in which presenter Nat Segnit shares the apparent results of a year spent recording conversations with men on trains. It's all entirely made up, but for the first few seconds, it feels real enough.

We have a middle-class, self-regarding presenter in Segnit, and he does dishevelled posh well, sounding like Jeremy Paxman crossed with Boris Johnson. Arh, he barked, I'm travelling around on trains all over the country, talking to strangers essentially. That 'essentially' was marvellously done.

In the next sentence, the spoof was revealed. From then, this became a patchy comedy, with some glistening moments - such as a Welsh postman who gets rather carried away with his community role - and some dull interludes, even in its brief 15-minute format.

Best of all was Segnit's narration, saying nothing much in pompous, ridiculous soundbites. There's something in particular about men on trains, he opined. Perhaps it's that sensation we get, staring out of the window. There is a wicked, funny spoof of radio features to be made. This wasn't it, but bits of this were horribly, brilliantly familiar to anyone who listens to a lot of Radio 4.