Lorraine Chase

'The thought of Les Dawson coming back as a hologram fries my tiny mind,' was probably the weirdest sentence I heard on TV all weekend. It arrived courtesy of Russell Kane, standing in as a rented talking head on Les Dawson - An Audience With That Never Was (ITV).

I had to check that this wasn't one of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror futuristic dramas because there, on the screen, was the hologrammed Dawson cracking gags as if he was still alive - he died 20 years ago at the age of 62 - while the camera kept cutting, in time-honoured Audience style, to chortling minor celebs in the present day. Debbie McGee, Lorraine Chase, you get the drift.

It was deeply odd. Dawson had been two weeks away from filming his Audience show when he died and this was a well-intentioned way of paying tribute to an old-school comedy great.

But the long-shot hologram sequences of Dawson in action felt uneasily like you were watching him cracking jokes at his own funeral. The Q&A was a belter, mind.

Keith Watson, Metro, 3rd June 2013

Video: Comedy, music and chat from Edinburgh Tonight (Link expired)

Co-hosted by Joe Simmons (Butch of Topping and Butch fame) and Lorraine Chase, Britains's best loved cockney gal, online chat show Edinburgh Tonight airs on Edinburgh-Festivals.com throughout August.

Edinburgh Festivals, 19th August 2011