Olivia Lee

Watch an exclusive clip from the new series

Comedy Central's resident prankster Olivia Lee is back for a brand new series of Dirty Sexy Funny.

Call me unsisterly, but I can't help thinking that Olivia Lee's success as a wind-up merchant is more to do with her beguiling smile and short skirt than innate comic genius. Still, she duped gullible celebrities in C4's Balls of Steel and proves equally adept at flummoxing the British public in her first hidden-camera show. The results range from mildly amusing to excruciating, with her turn as an obsessibely clean flatmate by far the funniest.

Comediennes are not the most conventionally alluring creatures on television - Dawn French, Victoria Wood and Jo Brand, to name a few, have often exploited their comfortable shape to hilarious ends.

So it will come as no surprise that striking funny-girl Olivia Lee, whose one-woman sketch show - Dirty, Sexy, Funny - starts on Comedy Central next week, has struggled to marry her glamorous appearance with her comic buffoonery.

"It has been hard sometimes getting people to take me seriously as a comedienne because people look at me and think: 'She's not going to be funny', says Olivia, 29. But that's a good thing because I am changing the cliched perception and bringing a bit of glam to it. You don't have to look funny to be funny - and there are always prosthetics which I can use in some of the sketches, although that is more for disguise in the hidden-camera bits."

Interview with Olivia Lee

The London Paper asks Olivia some questions.

Olivia Lee is the pretty blonde practical joker from Balls of Steel who would try to interview minor celebrities holding a dildo as if it were a microphone. This new solo hidden-camera show gives her more room to expand, so to speak, and is themed around Sex and the City, with Olivia wandering around London in a frou-frou like some deranged, better-looking Sarah Jessica Parker putting members of the public in loony scenarios in showrooms, parks and a rap bar. There are some nice ideas, but as ever the supposed victims are too savvy and good-humoured and the gags tend to deflate.