Larry Grayson

We do love a bit of camp, we Brits. Frankie Howerd, Larry Grayson, Dick Emery, Mr Humphries aka John Inman all perpetuated the non-threatening camp stereotype in the sixties and seventies - unlimited innuendo but no sex please, we're British.

That all changed in the eighties with the coming of alternative comedy and the black leather-clad Julian Clary. Camp's hidden agenda was well and truly outed, paving the way for Rhona Cameron, Graham Norton, Simon Fanshawe and others to do full-frontal gay comedy, warts and all.

In The Archive Hour, Simon Fanshawe traced the history of gay comedy over the past 30 years, from the double standards of Howerd and Grayson, always fearful of alienating the audience by appearing openly homosexual, through the overtly gay material of Clary and Cameron to today's more androgynous approach, where the quality of the material counts for more than any concerns about sexuality.

You got the impression Julian Clary quite missed the shock and awe days of the eighties - "I enjoyed the sharp intake of breath when I crossed the line" - though Fanshawe was in no doubt that today's open-minded audiences were much to be preferred.

Graham Norton said he soon got bored with doing gay jokes, having traded on his gayness at first, and consciously started to introduce other subjects. "I was lucky in that I could do Irish jokes as well as gay jokes," he said.

I'd never heard of the Australian Brendan Burns, a straight stand-up who does a funny line in anti-homophobic material, nor the Anglo-Bengali gay stand-up Paul Sinha, but their contributions sent me scurrying off to YouTube to see further exposure.

Nick Smurthwaite, The Stage, 28th September 2010

I am not one to take against a garrulous homosexual - they constitute the greater part of my social and cultural diet - but the opening episode of Alan Carr: Chatty Man was the nearest I've ever come to shouting: "Just shut up, you rambling poof!"

While there has been amazing progress over the past ten years in making this country less homophobic (Graham Norton getting Eurovision, bisexuals on Doctor Who), the dark reality is that that many people have merely swapped homophobia for "finding gays cute".

I attended an advance fan-screening of Torchwood last week, and every piece of dialogue between Captain Jack and his boyfriend was greeted with knowing, slightly hysterical laughter from the audience - as if everything that the characters were saying was high-camp, bitchy banter. In actuality, a great deal of it wasn't, and some of it was outright sombre - yet it was all drowned out by Pavlovian giggling at the "cute queer couple having a bitch-fight".

If we really are reducing gayness to camp, in terms of social progress, it's going to be as useful as supporting sexual equality - but only so long as all the women are giggly and have big tits.

As a camp man at a crucial moment in his career, then, Carr has some mighty socio-sexual-political currents to swim against. Alas, to the disappointment of any watching recruitment officers at Stonewall, Carr's new chat show consists of little more than an hour of pointing at things - Bruce Forsyth, pictures of people from Big Brother, his own set - and squealing. It makes Mr Humphries from Are You Being Served? look like Harvey Milk.

With an hour of airtime to fill, without Justin Lee Collins, Carr appears not to generate any actual material - he just relies on mannerisms. The third line of his opening monologue is on Britney Spears: "She sings like she's talking through the intercom at a drive-thru McDonalds." Unfortunately, the line also appeared in a Mirror interview with Carr, printed on the same day - a pretty damning index of his productivity. The conversational topics for his first guest, Bruce Forsyth, were: how big Bruce's chin is, how old Bruce is, whether Forsyth knows who will be on the next series of Strictly Come Dancing? (no), and how old Forsyth is again. Forsyth seemed exasperated by the end - like an old, greying horse being harassed by a tiny Jack Russell.

Most damningly of all, the audience laughed at everything Carr said - like a previously unknown experiment involving Pavlov giving his dog a biscuit every time Larry Grayson said, "Shut that door".

Caitlin Moran, The Times, 20th June 2009