Reece Shearsmith

Peter Kay is a natural heir to Ronnie Barker

Ahead of BBC1 tribute series, Peter Kay's Comedy Shuffle, friends and collaborators Sian Gibson, Danny Baker, Reece Shearsmith and Jason Manford tell TV Times what makes Peter Kay a comedy great.

DVD review: Alan Partridge Mid Morning Matters series 2

Alan remains a great comedy creation, often sympathetic (unexpectedly bringing out the softer side of a loathsome opinion former played by Reece Shearsmith) but just as often sickeningly egotistical, politically incorrect and tyrannical, this format (which never sees Alan leaving the radio studio) works well.

TV preview: Stag, BBC2, episode 3

It is so hard to write about this excellent comedy thriller without giving something away. Needless to say the final episode in which the loose ends have to be tied up - probably around one of the cast's necks - is the toughest to discuss. One slip and the game may be given away.

Created and written by Jim Field-Smith, the creator of the wonderful The Wrong Mans, alongside George Kay, Stag follows the exploits of a boisterous gang of men on a stag party. Stumbling along as a late arrival to the hunting weekend is Ian (Jim Howick), a mild-mannered geography teacher who is totally different to the other stags celebrating the last weekend of freedom of Johnners (Stephen Campbell Moore). Ian's weekend gets off to a bad start from the get-go as he's left at the side of the road by the rest of the party before being landed with a bar bill from the local pub's stern waitress (Sharon Rooney). Events soon take a dark twist when the men are abandoned by the local gamekeeper (James Cosmo) and forced to fend for themselves in the wild. Quickly some of the party are picked off and are thought to be killed whilst the rest start to turn on each other with suspicion quickly falling on outsider Ian. I have to admit it took me a while to adjust to Stag which has none of the charm or quirky British humour which made The Wrong Mans such a joy to watch. The majority of the characters in Stag, with the exception of Ian, are initially unlikeable toffs who are described by the mild-mannered Aitken (Tim Key) as the worst kind of people. But as Kay and Field-Smith's story continues they start to reveal complexities in the characters all of whom seem to be hiding secrets of some kind. The writing duo also seem to have done their research into the sort of genre they want Stag to fit into with the general tone being that of horror thriller. There are definitely elements of both The Wicker Man and Deliverance both in the presentation of the local community and the way in which the party start to be picked off. The humour is also subtly presented with a lot of smutty, laddy banter mixed in with some genuinely funny one-liners. The ensemble cast bounced off each other perfectly with Howick brilliantly portraying the awkward outsider and the rest of the gang having excellent chemistry. I especially liked Reece Shearsmith's brief appearance as the party member who wants to escape his family as well as Borgen's Pilou Asbaek as the Danish oddball. Although I've already got an idea of how Stag is going to end I'm intrigued enough to carry on watching what must be one of the most unique TV shows of the year so far.

Stag preview

The hunters become the hunted as each one is horribly eliminated, one gobby moron at a time.

TV preview: Stag, BBC2

I don't really need to tell you much about comedy chiller Stag. The cast should be enough of a selling point. Jim Howick, Reece Shearsmith, Rufus Jones and Tim Key as well as Stephen Campbell Moore, James Cosmo and Pilou Asbaek. If you don't know some of the names you'll certainly know the faces.

Stag: episode 1 review

From the producer and director of BBC Two comedy thriller The Wrong Mans comes another series that combines dark humour with a deadly chill.

This opens like every crime drama you've ever seen, with a dark dreary landscape and heavy clouds gathering on the horizon. Bleak piano music plays as a car slowly winds its way through the sinister hills. I'd probably have switched off at this point if it wasn't for the fact that this is a comedy series, and no ordinary comedy but one starring the dark genius of Reece Shearsmith.

It's a three-part comedy thriller set in the Highlands and begins like a parody of An American Werewolf in London: Ian, a small and polite little Englishman in a dinner jacket, finds himself in a wild Highland village and he ventures into the local pub to be met with silence and sneers. "You shouldn't be here," he's told but the silence is soon broken by a bunch of idiots who come dancing through the pub in a conga line.

Ian is in the Highlands for a stag weekend but he's seems a bit too genteel for the antics which are planned. The rest of the party are arrogant, wealthy bankers from London who've come to Scotland to indulge in "sleeping rough, hanging tough and stalking your prime rib deer across the Highlands."

But when they leave the pub and enter the wilderness, this bunch of bankers are reduced to frightened schoolboys, being stripped naked and threatened with drowning and perhaps rape by stags and it becomes a comic version of Deliverance set in the Highlands.

The second series of this superb and unique comedy from Reece Shearsmith was always going to make the list. The first series was one of the biggest highlights of 2014 meaning this second series of the standalone comedy stories had a lot live up too. Whilst some episodes failed to reach the high standards set by the first series, special mention must go to Sheridan Smith's episode and a deeply engrossing episode set in a call centre.