Paul Sinha

The News Quiz: Are men the problem in football?

This week's News Quiz lineup features Jeremy Hardy, Sue Perkins, Paul Sinha and Carrie Quinlan alongside presenter Sandi Toksvig. Tonight, the panel tackles Sky Sports' own goal, and asks, 'Are men the problem in football?'

We do love a bit of camp, we Brits. Frankie Howerd, Larry Grayson, Dick Emery, Mr Humphries aka John Inman all perpetuated the non-threatening camp stereotype in the sixties and seventies - unlimited innuendo but no sex please, we're British.

That all changed in the eighties with the coming of alternative comedy and the black leather-clad Julian Clary. Camp's hidden agenda was well and truly outed, paving the way for Rhona Cameron, Graham Norton, Simon Fanshawe and others to do full-frontal gay comedy, warts and all.

In The Archive Hour, Simon Fanshawe traced the history of gay comedy over the past 30 years, from the double standards of Howerd and Grayson, always fearful of alienating the audience by appearing openly homosexual, through the overtly gay material of Clary and Cameron to today's more androgynous approach, where the quality of the material counts for more than any concerns about sexuality.

You got the impression Julian Clary quite missed the shock and awe days of the eighties - "I enjoyed the sharp intake of breath when I crossed the line" - though Fanshawe was in no doubt that today's open-minded audiences were much to be preferred.

Graham Norton said he soon got bored with doing gay jokes, having traded on his gayness at first, and consciously started to introduce other subjects. "I was lucky in that I could do Irish jokes as well as gay jokes," he said.

I'd never heard of the Australian Brendan Burns, a straight stand-up who does a funny line in anti-homophobic material, nor the Anglo-Bengali gay stand-up Paul Sinha, but their contributions sent me scurrying off to YouTube to see further exposure.

A minute of your time: Paul Sinha (Link expired)

An interview with Paul Sinha.

Edinburgh Fringe grilling: Paul Sinha

Next to be subjected to Sport.co.uk's gruelling grilling is the "reassuringly intelligent and very funny" (The Guardian) Paul Sinha - "the world's only gay Bengali GP turned stand-up comedian" (The Times) - who returns to the festival with his new show 'Extreme Anti-White Vitriol...'

Speaking of cricket, much was made during the Ashes series of 2005 of the footballification of the game, whereby people who didn't know one end of a bat from the other were caught up in the excitement of a great series. For a time, the summer game became as much of a topic of conversation as the year-round game. It was, to a cricket fan, a frankly unedifying sight and sound, epitomised for me when Adrian Chiles, who had always come across as an amiable if slightly dull broadcaster, went on the radio before the last Test and said that he hoped the match would be rained off so that England could win the Ashes. Only a football fan puts the result ahead of the game. Luckily the next series, in Australia, was a whitewash and the likes of Chiles went back to having sleepless nights about the fortunes of West Bromwich Albion, leaving cricket to cricket lovers, not lovers of events.

But now the Australians are back, the first Test starts on Wednesday (ball by ball coverage on Test Match Special, 5 Live Sports Extra and Radio 4 longwave) and once again the broadcasters will be hoping that Ashes fever will grip the sort of people who think that Andrew Flintoff's first name is Fred. On Saturday there was the first of six "comedy" chat shows under the title Yes It's the Ashes (Radio 5 Live, 11am), in which Andy Zaltsmann and other people paid to be funny will be reacting to events during the series in a thigh-slappingly jocular way. Now, it is possible to funny about cricket - the Australians Roy and HG have been doing it for years. But they aim at the correct audience: the knowledgeable cricket fan. Zaltsmann - who does know and love the game, and has blogs on specialist cricket sites to prove it - has aimed his, it seems, at Adrian Chiles.

So Zaltsmann's programme was filled with "hilarious" made-up facts about the greats of the game, as well as reports from Zaltsmann's friends in Australia and America about how the inhabitants were gearing up for the series. Both countries were in the grip of Ashes fever, apparently - but one of the correspondents was lying. Oh, one's aching sides.

There were a couple of star guests - the comedians Phil Cornwell and Paul Sinha - supposedly there to offer humorous insights, but mainly there to laugh at Zaltsmann's tortuous metaphors (although Cornwell did establish his bona fides as a cricket expert by asking what the significance was of the numbers underneath the crest on the players' shirts. If he didn't know that already, what was he doing on a cricket show? Oh, right - being a Tottenham fan).

This Saturday, of course, we'll be three days into the Test, and Zaltsmann will have real cricket to discuss with Frank Skinner. He likes his sport, as we all know. Football, mainly. Big supporter of West Brom. If Skinner comes, can Chiles be far behind?