Johnny Vegas

Hugh Bonneville on playing messy tramp Mr Stink

The Downton Abbey actor joins Sheridan Smith, Johnny Vegas and Pudsey the dog in BBC's festive adaptation of David Walliams' children's story.

Johnny Vegas has turned down every I'm A Celeb series

Johnny Vegas has turned down the chance to appear in every series of I'm A Celebrity - because he'd rather pop to the shops for food.

Sheridan Smith & Johnny Vegas join Mr Stink cast

Sheridan Smith and Johnny Vegas are to join Hugh Bonneville in Mr Stink, BBC One's forthcoming 60-minute adaptation of David Walliams' popular children's novel.

Chris O'Dowd's comic re-imagining of his childhood in Ireland sees Martin (David Rawle) ditch his imaginary friend Sean (O'Dowd) when Uncle Danny (Steve Wall) pays a visit to the family home. Danny is the cool one in the family - he is a musician who has busked around Europe and once worked with U2 - and it's he Martin turns to for advice on dealing with the opposite sex. The ostracised Sean, meanwhile, consoles himself by hanging out with some of Martin's other forgotten imaginary friends, including Crunchy Danger Haystacks (Johnny Vegas).

Gently does it, as Chris O'Dowd's imaginary friend helps cute little Martin Moone through more childhood challenges in this cockle-warming tale. This week, there's a trouser incident after wide-eyed Martin watches one too many TV shows involving "grunty Argentinian tennis ladies". Sean (O'Dowd) is too busy enjoying a night at the pub with fellow fantasy figures including the legendary wrestler Crunchy Haystacks (Johnny Vegas) to offer Martin much-needed advice. Luckily, Uncle Danny the busker arrives home with wise words and tales of hanging out with U2. Subtle laughs all round.

There's a great cautionary tale for people wishing to sell their home in this witheringly funny attack on the cult of interior design from Johnny Vegas, Stewart Lee and Rob Thirtle. Never, ever show prospective buyers the post-castration scene from arthouse film Farinelli il Castrato. It will put them off.

Vegas stars as Jeffrey Parkin, an overbearing design obsessive, showing buyers around his home, a turn-of-last-century semi with original features and sympathetic updates. While the play's comic starting point is built upon as Jeffrey bumptiously details his "improvements" and design for living - including a bespoke pan rack based on sketches of the Humber Bridge - the tone shifts to reveal the emotional cracks hidden beneath his tasteful exterior. The message is, it's not home interiors that matter, it's human interiors.

This Afternoon Play had Johnny Vegas stamped all over it, the way he goes full throttle, his voice coming in stops and starts as if being squeezed from a near empty toothpaste tube, and then there is the dip as he comes to the darkness and futility that is often his pay-off line.

Interiors was a satirical and unexpectedly touching drama about property-owning during a financial slump and how homes can reflect broken lives.

Vegas, along with Stewart Lee and Rob Thirtle, is credited with having written the original play on which this production, directed by Dirk Maggs, was based, implying alterations to the original. As Vegas clearly enjoys and understands radio drama acting, with a track record stretching from The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists to Shedtown (whose first series is now being repeated), these tweaks to the script will have been more sensitive than those carried out by his character, Jeffrey Parkin, to the home he wants to sell.

Parkin does the en-masse viewing himself, full of empty bombast, playing to the gallery, which, if he had one, would be half-finished like everything else in the house. He issues a spluttering critique of TV property shows, a wheezy indictment of his erstwhile wife's taste in flat-packed furniture. Then, the vanity of the home-owner, once mired in the certainties of his own taste, crumples. Standing in his botched house of smashed dreams, he admits that he has wasted his energy on things that don't matter.

While this was mostly a one man tour-de-force, a cast of six actors played the viewers, a whispering, embarrassed Greek chorus, who were given few lines but whose presence is palpable.

Once again we come across another example of a great comedy programme that is only on in Scotland (thank goodness for the iPlayer). Late 'n' Live Guide to Comedy is a six-part documentary series about the Late 'n' Live comedy show at the Gilded Balloon venue during the Edinburgh Fringe.

For those who don't know, this is a series of late night stand-up shows featuring several comedians performing on stage in front of an audience who are usually loud, drunk and willing to heckle at any given opportunity. To quote Jenny Eclair, the greatest error made when you're try to avoid heckling at Late 'n' Live is when "you make the mistake of breathing," and thus leave a short enough pause for someone to shout: "Fuck off!"

Other than learning about the history of the late-night show, the best thing about this documentary is watching some early stand-up performances by famous names. These include Johnny Vegas encouraging his audience to throw coins at him while he sang and Russell Brand in 2001, who at the time had only performed between 20-30 gigs. His stand-up involved deliberately angering and provoking the audience - what a surprise. But this lead to a storm of abuse and Brand getting an encore.

During the encore someone tried to throw a glass bottle at him. It missed Brand, but a shard landed in the leg of the next act, Fiona O'Loughlin, meaning she was bleeding when she went on stage...

Comedian Tommy Cooper was regularly credited with the ability to be funny without actually having to do anything. At 6'4!, with messy hair and a red fez on his head, he certainly looked the part. Using previously unseen footage, plus details from the diaries of Cooper's manager Miff Ferrie, this documentary provides a portrait of the troubled comedy giant, who died in 1984. Contributions come from Johnny Vegas and Damien Hirst.