Nina Conti

Line-up for Magners Greenwich Comedy Festival revealed

American comedian Rich Hall, ventriloquist Nina Conti and satirist Mark Thomas are among the acts who will perform at this year's event, which will take place at the National Maritime Museum on September 24-28.

10 Questions for Ventriloquist Nina Conti

Can you go on holiday without Monkey and not miss him? Yes, I could but now my three-year-old son won't let me.

Nina Conti at Leeds City Varieties for DVD recording

Conti's rise up the comedy ladder looks set to continue in 2014, with a DVD recording of her Dolly Mixtures show scheduled for Tuesday 15 April at Leeds City Varieties.

Nina Conti interview

With a new live show, theatre piece, sitcom and documentary all in the making, Nina Conti is on a pretty tight schedule.

Nina Conti on the perils of audience participation

The ventriloquist braves watching one of her performances to show how she picks who to bring on stage. First, make sure their head is the right size...

Nina Conti - lately of Family Tree and the only reason you will ever need to use the words "amusing ventriloquist" - comperes this final episode of the standup comedy series. Conti specialises in a kind of elaborate, mechanical audience participation, and here she introduces acts of a similarly high polish. Jimeoin (latecomers: you say "Jim Owen") will reprise his gentle and not enormously surprising range of observational material, while Rob Beckett offers an amiable take on class.

Ventriloquist Nina Conti brings the current crop of comedy sets to a close tonight as she pulls her faithful Monkey out of a straw bag to help her host the show.

Also taking their turns in the spotlight are class-obsessed Londoner Rob Beckett and English-born Northern Irish joker Jimeoin.

The audience also gets a chance to take a starring role, as cheeky puppet master Conti yanks on their strings for a spot of puppet-based participatory entertainment.

Radio Times review

Picking someone out of the audience to help with your act can be hit and miss. But Nina Conti gets really lucky when she asks a person in the front row to be her new puppet. The woman she chooses is an absolute natural, although to give Conti her due, it's a very, very clever idea.

She's followed by Jimeoin, who does such a spot-on impersonation of a catwalk model he could do it for a living if the comedy didn't work out. Then sarf-Londoner Rob Beckett takes to the stage with some nice observations on his childhood. But it's Conti and her new assistant who steal the show.

Radio Times review

Series nine of what must be Radio 4's longest-currently-running sitcom begins with Clare (the superb Sally Phillips) arriving late for a meeting with her fellow social workers at Sparrowhawk Family Centre. Which is rather odd, as she's supposed to be on honeymoon at the time.

She's remaining tight-lipped as to why she left her long-suffering partner Brian (Alex Lowe) at the airport while he enjoyed a nibbling-fish foot spa. But as he decided to continue on the holiday - it is full board and non-refundable, so it's a shame to waste it - we get to hear his side of the story when numbs the minds of his fellow holiday-makers and locals with the details.

It provides a complementary storyline to the travails of the social workers back home, and includes a hilarious turn from Nina Conti as a shrill holiday rep intent only on relaying information about a series of increasingly bizarre day trips.

Meanwhile, Clare is having to contend with an elderly Mrs Magoo character on the Sparrowhawk Estate, who is convinced that she will die that day - as her visual sight has diminished so her second sight has improved, apparently. Hannah Gordon is virtually unrecognisable as the batty old dear.

If you haven't listened before - and if not, where have you been for the past ten years? - Clare in the Community walks a fine line between silly, scatological humour and nuanced satire of government do-gooders who know all the current jargon but nothing of people's everyday concerns.

John Bishop's Christmas Show tops ratings with 4.7m

The BBC One show, featuring the likes of Nina Conti and Tim Vine, entertained 4.75 million (19.9%) at 9pm.