Jimmy Carr

10 O'Clock Live is Channel 4's latest stab at a topical comedy show. Given the involvement of Charlie Brooker and David Mitchell, it might be less egregious than previous attempts.

Unfortunately, it also stars the facile Jimmy Carr and not-actually-a-comedian Lauren Laverne. My prediction: not half as challenging and sharp as it should be.

"A roast is where we show someone we love them by constantly ridiculing them. It's a bit like a marriage," explains host Jimmy Carr, as he lines Barbara Windsor up for the affectionate comedy drubbing. After 50 years in showbiz, she has plenty of friends willing to step up and insult her age, upbringing and career, including Bernard Cribbins, Christopher Biggins, Sean Lock and Alan Carr. Although the jokes are cruel, it's surprisingly loving, and more wholesome than it seems.

Christmas has come and gone but if you've still got an appetite for scorched old bird, don't miss the Carry On star's rip-roaring roast. Jimmy Carr comperes while celebs line up to hurl biting but mostly soft-centred abuse at their target. Barbara greets her tormenters (including Sean Lock and Christopher Biggins) with an "'ello' darling" or an "'ello sweet'art", then chuckles like a drunk kookaburra throughout their monologues. Three topics dominate: her age, her bosoms and her controversial support of the Kray twins. The latter is greeted with an almost imperceptible unease and it's curiously entertaining.

"A roast is where we show someone how much we love them by constantly ridiculing them. It's a bit like a marriage," says host Jimmy Carr in one of the funnier lines from tonight's "tribute" to Barbara Windsor.

For reasons known only to herself, the 73-year-old Carry On actress agreed to sit through this hour of public humiliation at the hands of comedians such as Alan Carr, Patrick Kielty and Rich Hall.

Although some of the observations are affectionate, they're mostly cruel jokes about her age and sexual history. Windsor gets her own back with a scathing riposte at the end, but otherwise it's pretty uncomfortable viewing.

"A roast is where we show someone how much we love them by constantly ridiculing them. It's a bit like a marriage," says host Jimmy Carr in one of the funnier lines from tonight's "tribute" to Barbara Windsor. For reasons known only to herself, the 73-year-old Carry On actress agreed to sit through this hour of public humiliation at the hands of comedians such as Alan Carr, Patrick Kielty and Rich Hall. Although some of the observations are affectionate, they're mostly cruel jokes about her age and sexual history. Windsor gets her own back with a scathing riposte at the end, but otherwise it's pretty uncomfortable viewing.

Remember what 50-year-old Mary Bale threw into a wheelie bin, briefly bagging her the title of most hated woman in Britain? And ten points and a moulding turkey leg to anyone who can name the lady Gordon Brown dubbed "ignorant" during his doomed election campaign? Jimmy Carr knows, but do the celebrities whose agents have signed them up to be interrogated on his daft end of year quiz? These include Jonathan Ross, Ruth Jones, Alan Carr and Michael McIntyre. But Channel 4 haven't yet let slip who the A-list question-setters are - previous guest coups included Bono, Ricky Gervais and Quentin Tarantino. Let's hope the celebs have been devouring the tabloids all year on the off chance that they're called upon to regurgitate it with an amusing trim, for a generous fee, naturally.

David Mitchell, Jimmy Carr, Charlie Brooker and Lauren Laverne team up to produce a live, topical "comedy and current affairs" show. Think Newsnight with a steady laugh-track. Adrian Chiles is doing something similar for ITV in That Sunday Night Show but this is probably the one to watch.

This irreverent panel show makes merry tonight with a seasonal special in which host Jimmy Carr asks contestants to guess the results of holiday-themed surveys. If you like your Christmas cheer with a large helping of sarcasm and a dollop of misanthropy, you'll like this. Reliably funny team captains Sean Lock and Jason Manford are joined by guest panellists Jack Dee, Christopher Biggins and Lorraine Kelly.

Funny or easy-to-mock guests booked to provide tonight's festive repartee and laughs include dour comedian Jack Dee, Lorraine Kelly and camp sweetheart Christopher Biggins. Irritatingly, at the time RT went to press, the episode hadn't been filmed, so we can only speculate - wildly - as to its contents. It's Christmas-themed, so expect host Jimmy Carr and contestants to have dressed for the occasion: sparkly antlers; nylon beards; necklaces made of mince pies - that kind of thing. And if Biggins isn't wearing a pantomime dame outfit and lashings of rouge then I'm going home.

It seems we have Weekend Watchdog to thank for Believe: the Eddie Izzard Story.

Sarah Townsend's intriguing film about the comedian began with a snippy and ill-informed report on the consumer programme, which accused him of recycling material from an old tour. Virtually every minute of the film that followed might have been designed to prove that taking easy shortcuts is the very last thing that Izzard would do. Hurt by the suggestion that he was short-changing his fans, he took a break from stand-up to concentrate on acting; this film both recorded his preparation for his comeback tour and explained how he went from comic no-hoper to the kind of star who can sell out Wembley Arena.

What really wounded Izzard about the charge of recycling was that he'd never made any secret of his working process, which involves ever-wilder excursions from the previous shows. It's a process of evolution, which means that by the end of a tour the material he's using will be completely different to the show he started with. This time round though, sensitive about any suggestion that he was building on old foundations, he effectively began with a pre-tour, popping up in tiny venues in places like Frome to slowly lick the new show into shape. And in between doing that he reminisced about his past, and revisited places that had been important to him.

"Living here was the best part of my life," he said, looking around the Northern Ireland house he'd lived in as a small child. "After that it all went crap." The reason for that was the death of his mother from cancer, after which he and his brother were consigned to a school in Eastbourne, where Izzard rapidly absorbed the most crucial lesson the English boarding system delivers: that it's probably safer to repress the emotions. "I thought, 'Crying equals losing in arguments'. So I didn't cry from then on." Instead, in a classic displacement for the unhappy and vulnerable, he showed off a lot. And when Izzard saw Monty Python he decided to make it big in comedy.

That isn't the sort of thing you're supposed to be able to decide for yourself, but the fascination of Townsend's film lay in its evidence that Izzard - apparently the most insouciantly natural of comedians - had conjured himself into existence by sheer force of will. His phrase for it was "personal nepotism". If no one else would give him a break, he would do it for himself. So, though he could be described as an overnight success, after a single charity gig that really made his name, years of obscurity had led up to that night - on the cobbles of Covent Garden, where he learned to work a crowd round to his way of thinking, and in the rash of comedy clubs that sprang up in London in the Eighties. Izzard would come back to his flat from compering open-mike spots and plot his progress on a map of London, colour-coding what material worked where.

He'd also learned something crucial earlier, after an escapology act went humiliatingly wrong in Covent Garden piazza. "If you think you cannot get out you will not be able to get out," a colleague told him. "You have to believe you can get out." He now seems almost addicted to performance risk; when he felt in control of stand-up he went off to Paris to do his act in a language he could barely speak. It was a disaster, so he plugged away at that, too, and now he can even make Frenchmen laugh. "Why do you want to be a so-so actor when you're a brilliant comedian?" someone asked, just after he'd added that to his to-do list. "Well, once I was a so-so comedian," he replied.

It might all strike you as ruthless - if it wasn't for the man behind it. After one gig in America, a weeping woman dressed as a bee came to the stage door to thank Izzard for bringing her through a recent medical ordeal; she'd been reciting one of his routines as she was wheeled out of the operating room. He reached out and gave her a big hug - which isn't something you can imagine Jimmy Carr or Frankie Boyle doing. And there's a humanising need behind his drive, too. Towards the end of the film, Townsend filmed him shortly after he'd read some old letters his mother had written, expressing her concern for the boys she knew she was about to leave behind: "Everything I do in life is about trying to get her back," Izzard said with tears in his eyes. Personally, I didn't think we needed "Mama Can You See Me Now" on the soundtrack as Izzard opened at Wembley to press the point home. We got it already. But that misjudgement aside, this was a film that began as a fan's DVD extra and steadily deepened into something far more substantial and moving.