Paul Merton

Paul Merton: HIGNFY isn't sexist

Paul Merton has hit back at a claim by Mariella Frostrup that his TV panel game show, Have I Got News for You, is sexist.

Paul Merton: Am I allowed to call myself working-class?

The stand-up comedian and silent film aficionado talks about the relationship between class and comedy, his love of improvisation and why he still believes the old jokes are the best.

For the first time in its 21-year-history, Have I Got News for You has not one but two hosts. Taking the chair - or maybe a nice two-seater - this week are MasterChef's double act, John Torode and Gregg Wallace. Bucking the trend of booking comedians or actors for the job is an interesting decision. Whether it's a stroke of genius or a bad move remains to be seen. There are bound to be lots of food-related gags along the lines of Torode expecting perfectly seasoned answers from Paul Merton and Ian Hislop and their charges. But the big question is, will Wallace be able to restrain himself from booming, "Quizzes don't get tougher than this!"

This panel show began its forty-first series this week, and as usual it features a lot of things that we're all familiar with: Ian Hislop's in-depth political knowledge, Paul Merton's extraordinary improvisational abilities, a biased scoring system and rubbish but amusing pictures to keep the cost of making the show down.

Typically there were some good moments in this episode, hosted by Jack Dee, like Hislop's gag about Obama supplying light sabres to the rebels.

However, much of what was covered has already been featured in other programmes like last week's edition of Russell Howard's Good News, including the house that looked like Hitler, the Michael Jackson statue and Wayne Rooney's swearing. While the move back to Friday will no doubt please many viewers it does mean that other satirical comedies get to the stories first, so in a way it feels like the jokes are being repeated. Then again, they do cover some stories with more depth than other shows, so they get points for that.

The main problem that I have with HIGNFY - and indeed most satirical comedy shows - is that very often the jokes are just too lazy. All they have to do is find a single oddity about a person and they will keep making the same jokes about that person forever, or until they find an even better oddity.

We saw the same jokes tottered out again: Russell Brand and Silvio Berlusconi are lecherous; Sarah Palin is stupid yet sexually appealing; Eric Pickles is fat and so on. I loathe this lazy writing, especially the fat gags. For around 15 years we have had to listen to the same old jokes about John Prescott being fat and grumpy, and now that he has gone we're going to have to listen to the same gags again, but now with a different target.

Of course the thing you have to remember is that now we have a Tory government in power, so satire should be easier anyway. I have my own personal theory about satire, which is that there is always a satire boom in comedy whenever a right-wing government is in power.

In the 1940s, Charlie Chaplin made The Great Dictator, probably his greatest film. In the early 1960s you had the satire boom under Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home with shows like Beyond the Fringe and That Was The Week That Was, which soon fell after Harold Wilson came to power in the late 1960s. In the 1980s you had the alternative comedy boom and Spitting Image. In the 1990s Drop the Dead Donkey and HIGNFY began during Thatcher's final days, with Spitting Image finishing the year before Blair came to power and DDTD finishing the year after. In the 2000s, America had shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report under George W. Bush. The only problem is that no-one was expecting the Lib Dems to come into play.

Still, HIGNFY is enjoyable. It's not going to bring down the government. Mind you, with the Conservatives in power, would they want all that good material going to waste?

After an ill-advised shift to Thursdays, the 41st series sees HIGNFY back in its spiritual Friday night home.

Slightly worryingly though, this series will be the first to be ­broadcast in HD - giving viewers the chance to subject Ian Hislop and Paul Merton to the kind of warts-and-all scrutiny they routinely dish out to politicians.

No offence to the panel, but if there was ever a show absolutely NOT crying out to be broadcast in HD, then this is probably it. You don't need technology when you're armed with a laser-beam wit that can spin crude lumps of current affairs into comedy gold in a nanosecond.

Jack Dee chalks up his tenth spot in the host's chair tonight, while Ian and Paul are joined by comedian Jon ­Richardson and Caroline Wyatt.

And after his dedication throughout the last series of Dancing On Ice, we do hope to see daughter Chloe in the audience waving a badly ­hand-made banner saying Come On, Dad!

This is the start of a nine-week run spread across 10 weeks, because the show will be off air during the week of the royal wedding.

You can bet they'll have something to say about that! But as there are now so many topical news shows on the box, sometimes there's barely enough news to go around.

The Have I Got News For You team should be flattered at having spawned so many ­imitators.

Mock The Week, Stand Up For the Week, Frank Skinner's ­Opinionated, Russell Howard's Good News, and 10 O'Clock Live all try, but this leads the pack.

We're on to series 41, though we've never tired of this intelligent and high-spirited ribbing of the week's headlines, which has now rightly been shifted back to Friday nights. Paul Merton and Ian Hislop return, and the highly capable Jack Dee sits in the presenter's chair.

The usual reaction to a new series of HIGNFY is: oh good, it's back. But this time round there's also: oh good, it's back on Fridays, where it belongs. The bizarre idea (we said so at the time) of moving it to Thursdays was a big bag of wrong. The show is about rounding up the week's events with some cant-skewering wit and bizarre flights of fancy - the former courtesy of Ian Hislop, the latter by way of Paul Merton. It may not have quite the comic zing of old, but this is still essential viewing, the humorous full stop on the working week, the comedy safety valve, the excuse for a beer on the sofa, should you need one. Series 41 kicks off with Jack Dee trying not to corpse in the host's seat.

After two series spent looking oddly out of place on Thursday nights, the topical quiz returns to its rightful Friday-night home. Jack Dee is the guest host (for the 11th time; only Alexander Armstrong has been asked back more often). The panellists are Caroline Wyatt, the BBC News defence correspondent, and comedian Jon Richardson, joining old-timers Paul Merton and Ian Hislop.

From the 1950s to 1966, Arthur Haynes was the biggest name in British television comedy. He followed the usual path for comedians from this era, working variety shows and joining the army entertainment division before finding stardom on independent television. His comedy dealt with puncturing the pomposity of the ruling classes. Paul Merton talks to Haynes's old comedy partner, Nicholas Parsons, about him.

While some comedians are lionised after they've stopped appearing on TV, others are quietly forgotten. Nicholas Parsons spends more than Just a Minute with Paul Merton recalling his partnership with one of the latter - Arthur Haynes. Viewers of a certain age will recall the partnership that pulled huge audiences to ITV in the 1950s and 60s. It's the comedy of a simpler, slower age; Parsons remembers how depicting a vicar in a sketch was considered disrespectful. There's nostalgia and curiosity value, not least with a priceless archive interview with writer Johnny Speight. Plus, rewarding glimpses of Wendy Richard, Patricia Hayes, Michael Caine and the Rolling Stones.