Lee Mack

Jo Brand defends Lee Mack's comments on women comics

Jo Brand has defended Lee Mack, who she says was unfairly treated by the press for expressing views on Desert Island Discs recently that women weren't cut out for comedy.

Bridget Christie: The 'Are Women Funny?' debate is dead

Lee Mack told Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs that there are no women standups on panel shows because they are less likely to show off. Tell that to Julie Burchill.

Female comedians show the boys how it's done

As comedy star Lee Mack claims women can't do stand-up because they're not as competitive and boastful as their male counterparts Dominic Midgley looks at the females showing the boys how it's done...

The success of Mrs Brown's Boys has left everything up for grabs, confirming that certain TV phenomena are just inexplicable. Who cares what critics think when viewers vote with their eyeballs in such large numbers? This Jason Byrne sitcom, transferred to telly from a Radio 2 series, is wretched: clichéd, derivative, predictable and crass. But that doesn't mean no one's going to like it.

Father Figure is trad. Looking to the gentler end of domestic comedy (Not Going Out, Outnumbered) for its inspiration, it leans towards the obvious at all times. Wondering what's going to happen to that large and elaborate cake in the living room? Don't expect to be surprised. But Byrne lacks Lee Mack's sheer relentlessness and the knack of taking things one step further than they might - done well by Outnumbered.

So Byrne's bumbling dad Tom just feels like an accumulation of his predecessors, but a dead end rather than a culmination. There are some decent performers in Father Figure including Michael Smiley and Pauline McLynn. But they just haven't been given anything to work with. Poor.

A drum roll, please, for the much-anticipated, always enjoyable offcuts episode. These are the attempts by celebrities to fool other celebrities that ended up on the cutting room floor, not because they weren't funny (they are) but because they were surplus to requirements - or just a bit too guessable.

But we can still revel in Charles Dance's claim that he answers the phone in a Belfast accent or Dermot O'Leary's obsessive approach to stacking crockery. Best of all is a duel between Lee Mack and Richard Osman over whether the latter invented a superhero called Snooker Table Man as a child. We're fairly sure Osman is improvising furiously, but if he is, he's doing a great job...

Amnesty Secret Comedy Podcast episode 15

In the last of Amnesty's Secret Comedy Podcasts, recorded live at this year's Edinburgh festival, Lee Mack chats about riding Red Rum and Tim FitzHigham tells Mark Dolan about sailing across the English Channel in a bathtub. Meanwhile, there's standup from Tanyalee Davis, Paul Foot and David Morgan.

Amnesty Secret Comedy Podcast returns for 2013

Amnesty's Secret Comedy Podcast is back at this year's Edinburgh festival, and will be winging your way throughout August. To whet your appetite, here are some of the best bits from 2012 along with interviews and stand-up from some of the guests lined up for this year, including: Julian Clary, Al Murray, Lee Mack, Jenny Eclair, Ed Byrne, Jo Caulfield, Alan Davies and more.

A wonderfully enjoyable edition opens with Jimmy Carr claiming that he was given coffee in his bottle as a baby and progresses through the idea that Susanna Reid may have held the Breakfast team's speed record for drinking a pint of beer ("How big are your glugs?" enquires host Rob Brydon) and that Dave Myers of The Hairy Bikers once spent Christmas locked inside a bank.

All these prompt enjoyable cross-examination but, as so often, it's David Mitchell's mock-exasperation that really lights the comic touchpaper. "We've been doing this show for a thousand years!" he wails at one point to Lee Mack. "I know everything about you, including the fact that you did not learn to drive in a hearse."

Rob Brydon manfully steers the quiz show in which a talent for lying about your life leads to victory, especially if the opposition is vulnerable to having the wool pulled over their eyes. Tonight, Lee Mack is flanked by Getting On star Joanna Scanlan and Henning Wehn, German Comedy Ambassador to Great Britain. The opposition is led by David Mitchell, skipping alongside Olympic golden jumper Greg Rutherford and Desert Island Discs jockey Kirsty Young, who claims she has five chickens all named after her favourite newsreaders. Please let it be true.

Picture if you will, David Mitchell on a stag weekend in Cornwall, taking some time out to have a surfing lesson. Are you struggling? Yes, Lee Mack struggles with the idea, too, so he challenges Mitchell to demonstrate his technique for going from prone to standing on the board. The series is all the better for serving up these occasional gems of physical comedy among the verbal sparring.

Meanwhile, German stand-up Henning Wehn applies his bracing vowel sounds to a travelling yarn about Spanish trains, Moroccan enclaves, Interpol and a suitcase full of books. It's so bizarre, he convinces Mitchell's team it must be true. But is it?