Mitch Benn

Now Show Preview - Jeremy Hunt and the Cult of Hunting

On tonight's Now Show, Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis take a topical trip around tuition fees and Today tongue-twisters. Musical Mitch Benn sees the world through Lennon's eyes; German stand-up Henning Wehn probes our World Cup hypocrisy; John Finnemore wonders at the sexual magnetism of a certain Lib Dem MP and Laura Shavin reveals what every woman wants for Christmas.

The Now Show Preview - A Blessed Tribute

Guests on tonight's Now Show include Marcus Brigstocke, Andi Osho, Laura Shavin and Mitch Benn. In fact, here's a preview of Mitch right now with his affectionate tribute to Brian Blessed, who's been in the news this week.

Hurray! I've really gone off The News Quiz (too blue for me and too self-satisfied for its own good) so welcome back Steve Punt, Hugh Dennis, Mitch Benn, Jon Holmes and Laura Shavin with their much wittier reflection of the week. There have been Friday nights in past series where I could have hugged them for being so astute and so funny about government goings on. Even with Cameron and Clegg and their coalition comrades being much harder to mimic than Brown and Blair, Darling, Prescott et al, I'm still confident my thoughts will be echoed in the team's jokes.

I'm Proud of the BBC, says Mitch Benn

Forget about James Murdoch, step aside, if you will, Mark Thompson, and put a sock in it, Kelvin MacKenzie. Another media heavyweight has entered the battle for the future of the BBC - the standup comic and regular of BBC Radio 4's The Now Show, Mitch Benn.

On The Now Show (Radio 4, Friday, 6.30pm), broadcast from the Latitude Festival to no obvious advantage (does applause sound any different from a tent in glorious, sodden, Suffolk? I think not), Mitch Benn once again provided the highlight. Singing a song about England's glorious draw in the first Test against Australia, he chose to focus, not on Paul Collingwood's manly six-hour defiance of the perfidious Down Underers, nor indeed on James Anderson and Monty Panesar's "they shall not pass" last-wicket stand, but on the time-wasting that so riled Ricky Ponting, to the intense joy of right-thinking people everywhere. Thus he wrote a song that did not nothing but waste time. "This is my song about the Ashes," the last verse began, as had all the others, "It did what it was supposed to do. I hope you like my song about the Ashes. And if you are Australian, sod you." Genius.

Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis may be names that TV viewers vaguely remember from The Jasper Carrot Show, but radio fans know just how good they are at dissecting the news with clinical precision. If BBC 1's Have I Got News For You is a blunt instrument, then Radio 4's The Now Show is the delicate scalpel of a heart transplant.

The format is pretty steady, with Punt and Dennis opening and closing the show, firing at a bucket load of targets and dropping in a number of running jokes for the dedicated listener (keep your ears open for a Donald Pleasance Great Escape 'I can see perfectly'). Alongside them are comedians Jon Holmes and Marcus Bridgestock, the former answering readers 'letters and emails,' while Bridgestock has a polemic that makes him the closest the UK has to Ketih Olberman. And then there's Mitch Benn, the comedy collossus with a guitar, putting the week's highlights to music.

Welcome back, my friends, to the sequence of news-based satire programmes that seemingly never ends. After six weeks of The News Quiz, we now have six of The Now Show, which will doubtless give way to Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive and thence to The News Quiz again in the spring. Perhaps Radio 4 thinks that life is hard enough at the moment without shocking us with the new at the end of a hard week. And, to be fair, the last series of The Now Show was something of a comeback to form, with the credit crunch, the re-emergence of Peter Mandelson and the sheer otherworldliness of Sarah Palin providing plenty of grist to the mill for Steve Punt, Hugh Dennis, Marcus Brigstocke, Jon Holmes, Laura Shavin and Mitch Benn.