Russell Kane

If you get aroused at sketch and character mirth, Russell Kane tells us, you're in the right place (actually he puts it in a more sexual way) because this show is a platform for fresh comedy talent. We're at the puerile end of the humour scale here, with some skits so surreal as to be almost pointless. But there are flashes of wit and the occasional gem.

YouTuber Chris Kendall's Film Fizz celebrity interview is very clever, while Kane's attempt to take the Bard to Essex in The Only Way Is Shakespeare (Sharonetti and Daveutio speak in Shakespearean blank verse) is ingenious.

Russell Kane is rushing about BBC schedules with the same camp mania as he does his standup stage. Not only did he do Britain Unzipped and How To Win Eurovision, he's now the self-styled "fluffer" for a series of new-school sketch comics on Live At The Electric. There's "France's premier misanthropist and lover" Marcel Lucont, sharing his sex advice (drinking wine in a turtleneck, natch), slightly stale faux review show Film Fizz, and Joe Wilkinson and Diane Morgan doing their shambolic savant thing as Two Episodes Of Mash.

The BBC must've been delighted with the first series of Russell Kane's Live at the Apollo-for-yoofs - a third season is already in production, before the second batch has even aired. The format remains largely unchanged for Live at the Electric 2.0: Kane introduces a mix of character comics and sketch acts with a younger, trendier edge than McIntyre's relatively geriatric affairs.

But, wisely, most of the pre-edited VTs that lead the first series have gone, replaced by greater focus on the 'live' part of the title. Welcome new additions to the line-up include suave French misanthrope Marcel Lucont (the character creation of Alexis Dubus), who dishes out some inventive sex advice, and weirdo Northern Irishman Paul Currie, who silently, and absurdly, recreates the iconic Russian roulette scene from The Deer Hunter with the help of a monkey puppet and some theatrical gestures.

Not all the skits hit the mark, though. YouTube star Chris Kendall (know as 'Crabstickz' on the interwebs) spoofs Robert Pattinson's Twilight turn about five years too late, and Kane's own The Only Way is Shakespeare sketch has one joke: saying rude words in a thespian tongue. But the rotating cast make this well worth sticking with, and there are some cracking acts to come later in the series.

Russell Kane: I had a year of partying. It was souless

Russell Kane talks about Twitter sex, falling in love with a fan and a funnyman's best friend: Colin the pug.

'The thought of Les Dawson coming back as a hologram fries my tiny mind,' was probably the weirdest sentence I heard on TV all weekend. It arrived courtesy of Russell Kane, standing in as a rented talking head on Les Dawson - An Audience With That Never Was (ITV).

I had to check that this wasn't one of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror futuristic dramas because there, on the screen, was the hologrammed Dawson cracking gags as if he was still alive - he died 20 years ago at the age of 62 - while the camera kept cutting, in time-honoured Audience style, to chortling minor celebs in the present day. Debbie McGee, Lorraine Chase, you get the drift.

It was deeply odd. Dawson had been two weeks away from filming his Audience show when he died and this was a well-intentioned way of paying tribute to an old-school comedy great.

But the long-shot hologram sequences of Dawson in action felt uneasily like you were watching him cracking jokes at his own funeral. The Q&A was a belter, mind.

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