Lionel Blair

Comedy losses 2021

Remembering the people in the comedy world who died in 2021, including Sean Lock, Jethro and Paul Ritter.

Ricky Gervais jokes about Lionel Blair Extras prophecy

Ricky Gervais has joked about the fortune-telling of his show Extras after Lionel Blair entered the Celebrity Big Brother house on Friday (January 3).

Les Dawson: An Audience with That Never Was (ITV) was a not-terribly-snappily titled tribute, timed to mark the 20th anniversary of the much-loved comic's death. It told the story of the TV special Dawson was a fortnight away from recording when he died and attempted to recreate it using a 3D projection. The hologram was billed as "staggeringly realistic" and perhaps it was if you were in the same room. On TV, it merely looked like a cut-out image of Dawson wearing an unnaturally bright blue jacket and a low hairline, standing strangely still and occasionally moving jerkily.

Instead this was a glorified clip show. Venerable figures like Bruce Forsyth, Cilla Black and Ken Dodd sat in beige hotel suites, going misty-eyed over their memories. The celebrity audience watching the hologram's performance were noticeably one notch below - more the level of Debbie McGee and Lionel Blair. And those were two of the more familiar faces. Despite the presence of Dawson's widow and daughter, who were visibly moved, this still felt like a macabre cash-in. A tribute to Dawson would have been fine without a shoddy attempt to "bring him back to life".

The show was rescued by Dawson himself, whose wit rang down the decades. He rattled out mother-in-law gags and gurned with that rubbery bulldog face. We heard how he was an accomplished musician and frustrated poet, hence his artfully off-key piano-playing and relish for florid language. Best of all, there were copious clips of his "Cissie Braithwaite and Ada Shufflebotham" routines with Roy Barraclough, the cross-dressed pair gossiping like fishwives and silently mouthing more "delicate" words, before hitching up their ample bosoms. Cissie and Ada really were three-dimensional.

When something is rumoured as possibly the worst British film ever, there's a car crash-type need to see it. And when you spy Cliff Richard and Rolf Harris cameoing as buskers during the opening credits you know you're in for a humdinger. This remake of Ray Cooney's 'whoops, where's me trousers?' farce casts Danny Dyer - who else? - as a black cabbie whose bigamist lifestyle is threatened with exposure after a dog food-eating tramp (Judi Dench - what was she thinking?) clocks him one with a handbag. Neil Morrissey sits on a chocolate cake, Richard Briers falls into a hedge, Christopher Biggins pushes Lionel Blair bum-first through a bathroom floor - no one emerges unscathed among the cameo-packed cast that reads largely like a roll-call for Brit TV legends you'd previously suspected deceased.

In this farce, Danny Dyer plays a man with more than one wife. Does that mean he's a Mormon? No, this is a Dyer movie so there is one too many Ms in that description.

When I was a kid, my parents took me to see the stage version of Run For Your Wife. I don't remember much about it but the audience definitely laughed.

This adaptation must surely be very different, then, because there are no funny jokes.

The closest it got to making me guffaw was when Lionel Blair's bottom fell through a bathroom ceiling.

Playing spot "so-and-so off the telly" will help pass the time as there are plenty of actors of Lionel's level in the cast, such as Neil Morrissey, Denise Van Outen and Christopher Biggins.

They are all more convincing than Danny attempting to play a loveable London bigamist covering his tracks.

I appreciate Run For Your Wife is supposed to be dumb, but rarely has a film aimed so low and missed its target so woefully.

ISIHAC to drop Lionel Blair running joke

It is the end of an era: I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue is to lay off the jokes about Lionel Blair.