Richard Littlejohn

Richard Littlejohn: Comedy classes on the NHS? You're having a laugh...

Just as well the NHS hasn't got much on at the moment. Patients are to be prescribed free comedy lessons to help them overcome trauma.

Dave Allen was a genuinely funny man, not because his jokes were great - some missed and some hit - but because he had a combination of charm, timing and delivery that made you want to laugh anyway. God's Own Comedian was a respectful appreciation of the writer and performer who courted controversy in the 1970s with his mockery of religion, particularly of the Catholic variety.

It's hard to imagine a comedian being allowed to make fun of religious piety on the BBC now, partly because we've become more "respectful" (aka fearful) of religious sensibilities and partly because the BBC is institutionally terrified of giving offence. The other notable thing about that period in British television, going by the various contributors who knew Allen, is that it produced a generation untouched by dental vanity. I haven't seen such fabulously bad teeth on view since I interviewed Shane MacGowan.

Before he sat on a bar stool, signature fag in one hand and a glass of whisky (apparently ginger ale) in the other, Dave Allen hosted a chat show. Not long ago anyone who had any kind of success on or off TV - Jeremy Clarkson, Davina McCall, Richard Littlejohn - was rewarded with their own chatshow, with mostly disastrous results.

Ben Elton's new sitcom's political correctness gone mad

Ben Elton's exhaustingly unfunny new sitcom, The Wright Way, feels like the work of a socialist Richard Littlejohn, says Michael Deacon.

"Don't get me started," said Gerald, Baselricky town council's health and safety officer, on a couple of occasions during the first episode of Ben Elton's new sitcom The Wright Way (BBC1). If only Elton had listened to Gerald, everyone would have been a great deal happier. Lame doesn't begin to describe this car-crash of a comedy that involved actors standing around awkwardly doing their best at damage limitation. There was no point in them even trying to make the script convincing.

Several well-telegraphed knob gags; a slapstick routine involving taps that wasn't funny the first time, never mind the second; "comedy" lesbians; a litany of familiar Middle England rants about women taking too long in the bathroom, loading the dishwasher properly and how the modern world has generally gone mad; and a lead character who plans to shut down the whole of the town to reduce a speed bump by 6mm. I've had more laughs reading a Richard Littlejohn column. The Wright Way is a sitcom that would have looked and felt badly dated in the 1970s.

What's happened to Elton? If he intended to write a latter-day Reggie Perrin, someone should have told him he had missed the mark badly. I know there are a lot of people who have never liked him or found him funny - he did too often mistake shouting for humour - but his heart was in the right place and he took aim at worthwhile targets. Back in the 80s, when a great many entertainers were riding the Thatcher - sorry to bring her up again, but it's unavoidable - bandwagon of self-interest, he was in the vanguard of those with a vocal, leftist opposition.

If nothing else, Elton made you think; in The Wright Way, he does precisely the opposite. More unforgivably, he's not even funny with it. Has he mellowed, sold out or just given up? Maybe he feels that Thatcher won so there's no point in fighting old battles. Either way, he has written a sitcom that only someone like the late baroness would probably have enjoyed. And if that doesn't give him sleepless nights, it ought to. My name is John Crace, good night.

Thanks for the laughter, John. See ya, Dave

Write about what you know, they say. And John Sullivan certainly did that.

The North-South divide opened up again in The Omid Djalili Show, in which Djalili, a large comedian of Iranian extraction, a background he mines about as relentlessly as British Coal once explored the seams of South Yorkshire, enjoyed himself with the notion that Geordie girls out on the razz don't wear much in the way of clothing. In the current edition of Radio Times, Djalili explains his comedy thus: "I play on stereotypes. I do lots of silly ethnic voices. People with Middle England sensibilities might think, 'Are you crazy? How can you find this funny?'" Well, I don't think it was my Middle England sensibilities that got in the way of my enjoyment of The Omid Djalili Show, I think it was the crassness and tired unoriginality of most of the material. I laughed at the opening sketch, in which a recycling centre had bins earmarked not just for bottles but also fluff, fairy lights, fridge magnets, Jordan biographies, odd ski boots and articles by Richard Littlejohn, but things went vertiginously downhill from there.