Peter Kay

Charlie Brooker has a rival (um, sort of) to his You Have Been Watching - Steve Jones with his own celeb game show chewing over recent telly. The fact that his team captains are Fern Britton and Jason Manford, the cut-price Peter Kay, will give you an idea of the level this is pitched at.

Of course, were Peter Kay to do anything as good as Phoenix Nights again we'd be happy. Sadly it was almost impossible to judge Britain's Got the Pop Factor... with an open mind as the man hasn't done anything for four years except mime to other people's records and release the same DVD over and over again. The sheer scale of this one-off Channel 4 comedy spectacular was a big problem. Running for two hours may have been accurate, but it meant jokes were stretched to breaking point. Once you've seen one inappropriate musical segue, you've seen them all. Plus, surely we have now bled dry that seam of comedy that sees celebrities sending themselves up? Here it was like one prolonged back slap, and while it may make sense of the plot to record a generic song for the winner, singing it three times on the programme and then releasing it is not comedy, it's advertising.

Tribute is paid to a very different form of entertainment in Comedy Songs: The Pop Years. But what exactly, one of the first questions asks, is a comedy song?

"A song that makes you laugh," suggests Victoria Wood. She should know, having sung dozens in her breakthrough TV gig on consumer show, That's Life.

She's an original whose song, Let's Do It Again, is described as a mix of George Gershwin and Alan Bennett, as she celebrates "the absurdity of the mundane".

Who cannot warm to a song whose lyrics include the lines "Bend me over backwards on me Hostess trolley" and "Beat me on the bottom with a Woman's Weekly"? Eat your heart out, Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The history of comedy songs reflects the changing voice of comedy in general, from music hall songs, to Peter Kay's recent number one, as Geraldine with The Winner's Song.

Writer David Quantick traces the origins of the comedy song back to "some pillock in a jester's hat with a lute, singing about his genitals to the king, making it up as he went along".

One thing about comedy songs is that they may be irritating, but you can't stop singing them. The skiffle era gave birth to such memorable ditties as Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour On The Bedpost Overnight? What sort of mind comes up with a lyric like that?

The birth of the singles chart in the early 1950s meant that comedy songs could make money. The Barron Knights and The Goons had hits. There were topical songs at the start of TV's That Was The Week That Was, and Benny Hill sang about Ernie, who drove the fastest milkcart in the west.

Many songs came from TV shows like The Two Ronnies, The Goodies (doing the funky gibbon) and It Ain't Half Hot Mum duo Don Estelle and Windsor Davies duetting on Whispering Grass.

Comedy songs gave hits to people who wouldn't normally expect to make the charts. Barry Cryer recalls having a number one in Finland 50 years ago with a cover version of Purple People Eater - which, on reflection, sounds like something you might find in Crooked House.

What is the point in spoofing something that's already self-consciously funny? Still, with The X Factor officially over for the year, you may need this dummy version to help you break the habit. Ben Shepherd is hosting, a cut-price Dermot if ever there was one, and you get a lot more from the only real novelty act, Geraldine McQueen.

Geraldine: The Winner's Story

Simon Cowell is facing a further ribbing - Peter Kay's X Factor spoof star Geraldine McQueen is making a telly comeback.

It crammed in so many songs, they were never all going to be funny whilst the second hour-long results show confirmed what a seriously indulgent exercise it all was.

It's one thing getting Pete Waterman, Nikki Chapman and Neil Fox to send themselves up but having a parody of The Pop Factor without a Simon Cowell figure was a major cop out by Kay.

Having said that, Marc Pickering's performance as Leon, I mean, R Wayne, was brilliant - particularly his version of Ebony and Ivory with his ventriloquist's dummy of Stevie Wonder. The cameos by Rick Astley, the Cheeky Girls, and Macca doing the themes from Blankety Blank and Home and Away were better than most of Extras.

The one moment of comedy genius was Michelle McMammoth look-a-like cum-transsexual Geraldine's medley merging seamlessly from Born To Run to Born Free to Free Nelson Mandela and Umbrella.

Comic Kay wins 'X Factor battle'

Comic Peter Kay has beaten X Factor winner Leon Jackson in the singles chart with his spoof reality TV show song, 'The Winners Song'. Kay's single - taken from his Channel 4 comedy Britain's got the Pop Factor, in which he satirises TV talent shows - charted at number two.

You can't spoof the unspoofable. Peter Kay's show was a complete mess - a laboured, unfunny spoof that could have made the same point in a brief sketch but went on for two hours.

It did poke fun at the self-importance of these formulaic programmes and their bombastic enthusiasm for unremarkable acts who are essentially cruise-ship entertainers, but even Kay himself as Geraldine, an enormous transvestite who lives to sing, failed to land a real blow.

The problem is that The X-Factor and its ilk are infinitely more ridiculous than this send-up, but then how would you satirise Jordan or Jade Goody or Damien Hirst or Roman Abramovich? Modern culture is unsatirisable partly because no comic exaggeration is possible and partly because for satire to work at all it requires some modest capacity for shame in the world it is mocking.

Ally Ross Rants

A greedy, self-indulgent, not-all-that-funny advert for Peter Kay, who might well take the mickey out of The X Factor's rip-off phone lines but he's also clearly not above taking the p*** out of viewers, who voted with their remote controls on this one. Over half of the six million audience deserted, mid-show.

Well, what can you say - it's split the nation, pretty much like the subject matter, but Britain's Got the Pop Factor and Possibly a New Jesus Christ Soapstar Superstar Strictly on Ice was an absolute triumph for Peter Kay and Channel 4 on Sunday evening. A triumph.