Michael Grade

Old Roman joke: "That slave you've sold me has just died." "My God, he never did that when he belonged to me!" Ah well...perhaps you had to be there...and by "there", I mean a tavern somewhere in the Suburra around 40BC, because the gag didn't exactly bring the house down in Michael Grade and the World's Oldest Joke.

In fact, it died, along with a startling number of other historical jokes and quite a few contemporary ones, the producer of this otherwise intriguing exploration of the history of the rib-tickler having taken the perverse decision to give the job of telling the gags almost exclusively to people who weren't very good at it. What Michael Grade was interested in was the embedded human need to crack wise. What the director seemed to be interested in was getting in the way as often as possible, quite often with members of the public mangling perfectly blameless jokes.

To be fair, it was hard to imagine anyone being able to revive some of these vintage gags. Take this, from a Tudor compilation of humorous quips - Q: What is the cleanliest leaf? A: The holly leaf, because no one will wipe their arse with it. Or the jokes that depended on the reliable hilarity involved in beating your wife. And once the programme had calmed down a bit - and got away from the philosophising about the nature of comedy that also bogged down the opening - it proved interesting. It was good to learn about Poggio Bracciolini, a papal employee who compiled the Liber Facetiarum, an early joke book full of stuff that only a cardinal could read without blushing. And I liked the revelation that the Greek passion for lettuce gags was dependent on the belief that it was an aphrodisiac. Substitute Viagra for the little gem and most of them would (half) work now. The oldest joke in the world, incidentally, was a fart gag, which seemed somehow comforting. A warm, gently rising fug of carnality.

A jape, a jest, a gag, even a jewel or trinket in Old English. There are many ways to describe a joke, but pinning down why a joke works is about as easy as nailing jelly to the wall.

Here the jovial Michael Grade does a pretty good job of getting that jelly on the wall - with the help of esteemed gagmeisters Ken Dodd, Barry Cryer and Tim Vine.

His scholastic peregrinations in search of the world's oldest known joke prove we've always laughed at the same things - except we're not so fond of lettuce and herniated eunuch gags nowadays - while the scholarly analysis is tempered by a barrage of one-liners.

A shame that what could have been an entertaining foray into the history of joke-telling should be so lacking in humour. There's nothing inherently wrong with the premise of the documentary in which Michael Grade asks whether there is such a thing as a new joke or whether we are laughing at the same things our ancestors did - it's just that it's all a little boring. Ken Dodd, Barry Cryer and Tim Vine are among those pointing the way as Grade discovers what Romans and Tudors found funny, why lettuce was once thought amusing, why a 14th century papal secretary was responsible for one of the first joke books and why the BBC once censored some jokes - chambermaids and lodgers were among the banned topics.

Stanley Baxter was a gifted mimic whose lavish shows were legends of opulence. During the 1970s and 80s Christmas wasn't complete without Baxter dressed as a woman to play anyone from Zsa Zsa Gabor to Mrs Bridges from Upstairs, Downstairs, or an entire Busby Berkeley dance troupe.

In this fond tribute Baxter himself (looking very good for 86) talks us through his career, from early days on stage in Glasgow to his heyday at LWT, where his indulgent boss Michael Grade wrote the cheques. Baxter was brilliant but his shows, apart from becoming too expensive for TV, had an in-built obsolescence and dated immediately.

A profile of the Glaswegian entertainer and talented mimic who performed most of his sketches in the guise of celebrities of the day. Famously, Baxter would use clever editing to portray all the characters in a scene and was the first person to play the current Queen on TV. We hear how he started his career in Scottish variety theatre and the Army entertainment corps, before going on to draw huge audiences during the Seventies and Eighties for his TV specials - until the cost of his epic productions priced him off our screens. Fans and friends including Michael Grade, Barry Cryer, Bill Oddie and Gregor Fisher pay tribute.

Michael Grade has recently become BBC Four's go-to-guy on all matters concerning variety theatre.

Having already given in-depth guides to the history of variety and the music hall, this Christmas he's covering panto, looking into the origins of the pantomime dame character. He traces its routes from Italian theatre, to its rise in popularity lead by the great clown Joseph Grimaldi.

However, what will be of interest to most people reading this, by which I mean comedy fans in the north, is that the biggest panto dame is from the region. Berwick Kaler is a Geordie, and has written and starred in every panto at York's Theatre Royal for 33 years. He keeps the scripts fresh and topical, but always starts with the same four words: "Me babbies, me bairns!" Watching his performances and devotion to the genre, you can't help but want to see him perform live, although demand for tickets would be so high the chances of doing so would probably be negligible.

This show was diverting, entertaining, and somewhat education. It certainly gave me a new application for an artform that I'm not that keen on personally. However it's good to see some peculiar British forms of entertainment still flourish.

You only wish Michael Grade had been given more of a chance to be a dame, so passionate was he about that most peculiar of British institutions.

He appeared in full mask and costume at the top and bottom of a festive confection that revealed as much about the life peer and media mogul as it did his specialist subject, but stuck to his trousers in between in his History of the Pantomime Dame.

The former BBC chairman has panto in his blood, it turns out. As the son of a theatre impresario, he remembered as a young boy watching his Aunt Cathy perform in panto from the wings. His still childish delight in discovering more about the artform made me wish it was a requirement of any documentary presenter to be so devoted to his subject. You got the sense he already knew a lot of what we learned, but his joy throughout was infectious.

In York, Grade met Berwick Kaler, a giant of the modern scene who has directed and written himself as the dame into pantomimes at the city's Theatre Royal for more than 30 years. Kaler defined panto as the "only quintessentially British artform", in which "a girl dressed as a boy, the son of a man dressed as a woman falls in love with a girl who's a girl, helped by two people dressed as an animal."

A mad evolution began, we learned, in the piazzas of 16th-century Italy and the commedia dell'arte, which inspired an appetite among audiences across Europe for simple stories of unrequited love driven by humour. By the 18th century, London was at war as the impresarios John Rich and David Garrick competed in the West End with ever more lavish productions.

Joseph Grimaldi later helped bring clowning centre stage and the British dame followed. Gyles Brandreth, as ever, provided the best value among the documentary's supporting acts. Himself a panto obsessive, he defined the vital qualities of the dame thus: "Eyes that say everything and knees that make you laugh. If you haven't got funny knees, forget it."

As Grade followed panto out of the West End and to provincial theatres, where it still thrives, he sat through a production of Cinderella in Stratford in east London. It appeared to the dispassionate viewer to be a pale imitation of what had come before (a clunky plug in the script for the local shopping centre that had sponsored the show was excruciating) but, to his credit, Grade reserved judgment and sat beaming, as entranced as he must have been as a kid in the wings.

Up-and-coming TV presenter Michael Grade explains the evolution of a peculiar British cultural institution, in a lightly festive hour that begins with our host in full make-up, wig and tent-like dress. We learn how 18th-century impresario John Rich discovered harlequin shows were ten times more lucrative than Shakespeare; then how the specifics of a man delivering double entendres as a deliberately unconvincing woman gradually fell into place.

Grade chats with Gyles Brandreth, Richard Briers and Matthew Kelly about the demands of damehood. But the star of the show is Berwick Kaler, writer, director and dame of York's famous panto. The future of the art form looks safe with him.

Oh yes it is! It's a rave review of the pantomime dame, presented, somewhat bizarrely, by former BBC1 controller Michael Grade. Going back to the 18th century for the birth of this very British tradition, this compendium of men donning frocks features insights from veterans such as Richard Briers and Matthew Kelly.

Panto, it has been rather unkindly said, is the only artform invented by the British. Well, Michael Grade gets so involved in this profile of a theatrical phenomenon that he looks like he'd be the first to shout 'oh, no it isn't!'. He looks tickled pink, in fact, to be rubbing shoulders with some of the great pantomime dames (Berwick Kahler has been filling stockings at York's Theatre Royal for 30 years) while his investigations reclaim panto from the nitpickers and the knockers (oo-er) and reinstall it as an artform with a storied past. One thing is clear: pulling off the sort of concentrated chaos and misrule that sustains the best pantomimes has long been a feat of considerable technical innovation and creative artistry. Equally and perhaps unexpectedly, panto has sustained its relevance into the twenty-first century with a broadening cultural palette. The pantomime's best days may not be,er, behind it...