Laura Shavin

Now Show Preview - Jeremy Hunt and the Cult of Hunting

On tonight's Now Show, Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis take a topical trip around tuition fees and Today tongue-twisters. Musical Mitch Benn sees the world through Lennon's eyes; German stand-up Henning Wehn probes our World Cup hypocrisy; John Finnemore wonders at the sexual magnetism of a certain Lib Dem MP and Laura Shavin reveals what every woman wants for Christmas.

The Now Show Preview - A Blessed Tribute

Guests on tonight's Now Show include Marcus Brigstocke, Andi Osho, Laura Shavin and Mitch Benn. In fact, here's a preview of Mitch right now with his affectionate tribute to Brian Blessed, who's been in the news this week.

Hurray! I've really gone off The News Quiz (too blue for me and too self-satisfied for its own good) so welcome back Steve Punt, Hugh Dennis, Mitch Benn, Jon Holmes and Laura Shavin with their much wittier reflection of the week. There have been Friday nights in past series where I could have hugged them for being so astute and so funny about government goings on. Even with Cameron and Clegg and their coalition comrades being much harder to mimic than Brown and Blair, Darling, Prescott et al, I'm still confident my thoughts will be echoed in the team's jokes.

Welcome back, my friends, to the sequence of news-based satire programmes that seemingly never ends. After six weeks of The News Quiz, we now have six of The Now Show, which will doubtless give way to Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive and thence to The News Quiz again in the spring. Perhaps Radio 4 thinks that life is hard enough at the moment without shocking us with the new at the end of a hard week. And, to be fair, the last series of The Now Show was something of a comeback to form, with the credit crunch, the re-emergence of Peter Mandelson and the sheer otherworldliness of Sarah Palin providing plenty of grist to the mill for Steve Punt, Hugh Dennis, Marcus Brigstocke, Jon Holmes, Laura Shavin and Mitch Benn.