John Fleming (I)

Is storytelling the new comedy?

Comedy clubs in the UK are said to be on the decline. But storytelling is teetering on the brink of the possibility of becoming the new comedy.

Why Peep Show led one American to love British comedy

I have had a Twitter account - @thejohnfleming - since March 2009 but, honestly, I have never got the hang of it. Nonetheless, people follow me - only 2,026 at the moment, but every little helps. Naomi Rohatyn started to follow me last week. Her profile says: "Wildly unsuccessful comedy writer in LA. Aspiring to become wildly unsuccessful comedy writer in London."

Comedy night in 1998 with Malcolm Hardee & Phil Nichol

I had no blog ready today. My eternally-un-named friend suggested I should post one about the origins of Shia and Sunni Islam. Instead of that, here is an old diary entry about a visit to Malcolm Hardee's Up The Creek comedy club in South East London - on Sunday 4th October 1998.

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.