Michael McIntyre

Review: Michael McIntyre, The O2, London

It's classic McIntyre - instantly relatable, neatly done, just original enough. He's certainly not the first person to find tiny hotel kettles irritating, but he's the only one in The 02 to have made millions, and millions laugh, out of sharing his irritation - and it would be churlish indeed to hate him for that.

Michael McIntyre - review

To finish, there's an anecdote about a horrific trip to the dentist, whose anaesthetised hero is hauled across London bloodied, dismayed and slobbering his name inarticulately at bemused medics. It's a minor masterpiece of comic storytelling, against which the first half's cliches look tawdrier than ever.

Michael McIntyre: Showtime! review

Big-hearted Michael McIntyre is very welcome back. The boyo done good so far.

James Everett adds his voice to the Fringe ticket price

'What if Michael McIntyre was charging £50? Is it then OK to pay £25 for Stewart Lee?'

In a different setting, it's easy to imagine Rob Brydon being persuasive, teasing the most difficult and troubling of secrets away from celeb bosoms.

A lively half-hour chat show is not the place for that, however. So as it returns for a third series, Rob contents himself with comedy talk from Michael McIntyre and festival talk with Alex James, who's about to run a food and music event with Jamie Oliver on his Oxfordshire estate. Lovers of chat-show bingo should fill their game cards with the words "Blur", "farm" and "cheese".

Music comes from the racing car-loving Scottish singer Amy Macdonald.

Rob Brydon's chat show - an engaging mixture of the comfy and the surreal - returns for a third series. Whether Brydon has been persuaded to part with the bright brown shoes he inexplicably wears with his smart blue suit remains to be seen. His guests include comedian Michael McIntyre, and cheese-making Telegraph columnist and Blur bassist, Alex James, with Scottish singer Amy MacDonald performing her new single.

Britain's Oldest Stand-Up is an irresistibly charming documentary chronicling 90 year-old Jack Woodward's return to the stage after an absence of nearly half a century. The venue he has his heart set on is the Hammersmith Apollo in London, where he has admired the young upstart Michael McIntyre perform on the BBC's Live at the Apollo show.

And guess what? He lands a five-minute gig there as the warm-up for Ed Byrne. Armed with some new material supplied by comedy writer Les Keen, Jack heads for his date with destiny.

Nervous? Not a bit of it. Jack is excited at the prospect of playing to a 3,000-strong London audience, who hold no terrors for a comic who has played working men's clubs in Gateshead where hecklers threw coal.

"I heard you clapping and got here as quick as I could," is Woodward's opening line, and the laughs just keep coming. Turns out he's a pretty good comic.

My advice to anyone thinking of booking him is - don't delay.

One of the longest running comedies on Radio 2 has made its return for the Olympics, as David Quantick presented a guide to the games for people who may not know that much about it...

The Blagger's Guide to the Games is full of information and rapid fire gags, cut in with sound effects and music left, right and centre. This is a four-part series, so it's longer and more informative that The Sinha Games, and covers certain aspects of the games further in depth. For example, there's an entire section about the austerity games in 1948 (when London last held the event), as well as a gymnastics guide.

The main aspect of this programme, for those who haven't listened to previous editions of The Blagger's Guide, is that it's so full of gags and material that often you miss some bits and have to listen to it again. My highlight of the show was a sequence about the austerity games, which featured impressions of Ben Elton, Kenneth Williams and Michael McIntyre all rolling into one. Excellent.

However, in the same section I was less keen on the rationing routine which featured a Dad's Army skit between Lance Corporal Jones and Mrs. Fox after the end of the war. It wasn't so much the lack of humour that was the problem, but my own pedantry. I'm a huge Dad's Army fan, and I know that in the final episode Mrs. Fox becomes Mrs. Jones. But that's just me...

There's much to enjoy from The Blagger's Guide..., though it's one of those shows that needs your full attention.

For the non-sportive, David Quantick returned to Radio 2 to give us his Blagger's Guide to the Games. Finger poised above the effects button and daftness turned up to 11, Quantick initially seemed to be holding back his quick-fire mind to allow slower listeners to keep up. But five minutes in and we were back to his usual rat-a-tat gag-and-fact-packed action. Every aside was a gem ("Even though the war had ended three years ago - that's longer than the Saturdays' chart career - Britain was still full of austerity"). The show even bears another listen, so you can catch great jokes just tossed in, such as when a standup comic flips from Ben Elton to Kenneth Williams to Michael McIntyre mid-rant, with no explanation. Warning: all Blagger's Guides are a little like listening to a over-caffeinated, over-researched man-boy in the grip of quip mania but, as a lot of my conversations are like that, I approve.

Michael McIntyre hurts leg during Euro 2012 routine

Michael McIntyre had his Irish fans in stitches this week - but ended up on crutches after an energetic skit.