John Fleming (I)

Why I am interested in comedians

In this blog, I try to tell short stories with a rounded ending about interesting people doing interesting (mostly creative) things. Very often they are comedians. Very rarely do I write about myself although regular readers might be able to make up a patchwork impressionistic picture of my life.

Chris Dangerfield: serious heroin problem & a new drug

It is no secret that comedian Chris Dangerfield has a heroin problem. He has talked about it on stage. When I met him yesterday, he was sweating a lot and he had just broken up with his girlfriend.

Steve Best hopes to get laughs out of the Kosovo War

"You are a hyphenate," I told comedian Steve Best in the Soho Theatre Bar.

Last night, ITV tried and failed to revive legendary, classic and once classy variety show Sunday Night at The London Palladium under the inexplicably shortened title Sunday Night at The Palladium.

If Simon Cowell had produced it, the show could have retained some class. Instead, ITV transformed class into crass and the result was somewhere between a reality show produced by Endemol on an off night and Saturday Night at Butlins for Essex Man.

Stephen Mulhern presented it like an edition of Big Brother's Bit On The Side and it came complete with what looked very much like an audience plant towards the start of the show.

To compound the felony of failing to revive an old classic rather than thinking up a new idea - and rather than have highly original variety acts - they went for Cirque du Soleil performers Les Beaux Freres who nicked the idea of the Greatest Show On Legs' classic 1982 Naked Balloon Dance and replaced the balloons with towels.

They performed perfectly serviceably and at least, unlike many acts, they changed the music and the objects. But original it most certainly was not.

Sunday Night at The London Palladium used to go out live. It did not last night. It went out dead.

Comic gets sacked after his Fringe show

London-based Italian comedian Giacinto Palmieri used to work in IT for a well-known property company. Then he went to this year's Edinburgh Fringe with his show about Wagner.

"The big boss of my company," he told me in Soho Theatre at the weekend, "came to see my show at the Edinburgh Fringe and, the first day after I came back, I was sacked."

Machete Hettie: she gangs, Bulgarians & big black wave

When I was at the Edinburgh Fringe last month, I occasionally posted blogs about what had happened at the increasingly prestigious Grouchy Club which I co-hosted with comedy critic Kate Copstick. But the shows were an hour long and what I mentioned in the blogs were only 5 or 10 minute excerpts. One character who never turned up in the blogs was someone I did blog about last year - newbie comic Machete Hettie.

Let me tell you an Ashley Storrie...

Ashley Storrie has a sitcom pilot Conundrums My Dad Says transmitted on BBC Radio Scotland at lunchtime tomorrow.

Davidson, Godley & Canadian cottage misunderstanding

The final show I saw at the Edinburgh Fringe last night was Jim Davidson's No Further Action which I really do have to say was an utterly brilliant, flawless hour of comedy. Genuinely, utterly brilliant. It knocked most other Fringe comedy shows into the amateur starters section.

Chocolate genitalia and odd sex tips

This is the final day of the Edinburgh Fringe and, as is traditional, it is a Bank Holiday in England, but not in Scotland. This means that, in Scotland, all the shops are open and it is a normal working day... except that the banks are closed. You may want to read that paragraph again.

Getting drunk at the Fringe & singing over a dead body

My left shoulder is in middling agony if I move it. It is comedian Arthur Smith's fault. More about that later.