John Bishop (I)

A rare boon for Rossy, who so often seems to be beaten to the A-listers by Graham Norton: this week he's managed to reunite the Spice Girls! Well, four of them - Victoria Beckham is missing from the sofa as well as the arena tour the group have just announced. Perhaps they could convince Kylie Minogue, performing here alongside Jack Savoretti, to join in her stead? Playing very much second fiddle to Baby, Scary, Ginger and Sporty is John Bishop, who will be discussing his latest standup DVD and recent UKTV series.

XS Malarkey club turns 21

The Manchester comedy club that hosted early performances from Peter Kay, Alan Carr and Jason Manford turns 21 years old.

John Bishop on big egos

The funny man and serious interviewer, 51, on getting famous later in life, family and comedians wanting to be the centre of attention...

Funny Cow review

Maxine Peake is wonderful as a female comedian.

Funny Cow review

If Adrian Shergold's film tells us anything about life in 1970s England, the overriding message is that being a female standup comedian was clearly no laughing matter.

Movies about comedy are rarely funny but Funny Cow takes the sad clown cliché to such a grim extreme it becomes almost laughable. Starring the excellent Maxine Peake as an aspiring British stand-up in the sexist, racist, homophobic environs of the Northern working men's clubs of the 1970s and early 1980s, the film around her is such a wilfully incoherent mess it renders her performance all but dead on arrival.

She plays the eponymous Funny Cow (no other character name is given), a battered wife who has apparently found success by transforming the trauma of her life into a stage act that mixes the sort of politically incorrect gags of the era with uncomfortable confessionals about her childhood, her marriage and her surroundings. Using what seems like a television special or a monologue-based theatre show as a framing device, the film deploys random flashbacks (with occasional magical realist flourishes) to various incidents in her life in order to track her evolution from defiant child who stood up to her violent father (Stephen Graham) to self-determining woman able to conquer the male-dominated club circuit with racist and fat-shaming jokes of her own.

Along the way she's mentored by a terminally depressed veteran comic (Alun Armstrong) and meets a cartoonishly conceived bookseller (a woefully miscast Paddy Considine), whose Pygmalion fantasies she's more than happy to exploit as she escapes her brutal marriage to the knuckle-dragging Bob (played by the film's writer Tony Pitts). Blink-and-you'll-miss-them cameos from the likes of Vic Reeves and John Bishop capture some of the sad, broken spirit of the variety circuit, but the film's determination to avoid the rise-fall-redemption character arc of the biopic (even a fictional biopic) backfires. By plotting a more elliptical and impressionistic course - one perhaps inspired by Nicholas Winding Refn's Bronson or the Andy Serkis-starring Ian Dury biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll - Funny Cow might give some sense of the chaos of its protagonist's life, but that's not the same thing as making it compelling on screen. In the end it feels like a hollow and rather pointless exercise.

Review: Funny Cow

Maxine Peake captivates in a film that takes a serious look at being funny.

John Corden to recreate Smithy Comic Relief sketch

The new sketch is one of the treats planned for BBC1's Sport Relief on March 23 along with a Strictly Come Dancing special

John Bishop's Winging It at the London Palladium review

This was a brilliant show of the highest quality and it was a real pleasure to watch John Bishop in his element on stage.