Sacha Baron Cohen

Sacha Baron Cohen to play Freddie Mercury in biopic

Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen is set to wear a moustache again as he plays Queen singer Freddie Mercury in a new film from the writer of The Queen.

New baby for Sacha Baron Cohen and Isla Fisher

Isla Fisher and Sacha Baron Cohen have reportedly become parents for the second time.

...I can't see much evidence that Pete and Dud have influenced the creator of Lee Nelson's Well Good Show, though it's abundantly clear that Ali G should be paying some form of child support, since Lee's persona, a breezily amoral Sarf London scally, owes quite a lot to Sacha Baron Cohen's invention. When he's working the studio audience, Taylor can be funny and fast on his feet, offering examples of his chat-up style to a pretty girl on the front row ("You're the best-looking girl I've ever seen... in your category") and protesting at his social worker's suggestion that he's implicated in his six-year- old son's behaviour problems ("How could it be my fault for fuck's sake... I'm hardly ever there!"). The sketch material is a bit more uneven though. He has an entertainingly dim Premier League footballer called Jason Bent ("Yeah... footballers do get paid more than the average wage... But without footballers the average wage would be a lot lower, so we're actually doing people a favour"), but the foreign doctor gag is Chuckle Brothers stuff. He needs a Dud to help him carry the weight.

Have you been watching ... La La Land?

Could Mark Wootton could be the new Sacha Baron Cohen? His BBC3 show certainly suggests so.

It doesn't matter that Sacha Baron Cohen has done all this before when Marc Wootton does it so well - that said, tonight's set-ups have fewer laughs and a lot more oh-my-God-no cringes. Grasping psychic Shirley Ghostman auditions for a TV show, competing against rival clairvoyants. Despite being a comedy character, he's as convincing as they are. Spooky. Meanwhile, bad actor Gary Garner shoots a sexy showreel, using his own autobiographical script. The funniest scenes come from unethical documentarist Brendan Allen, who's tackling ecology. Future generations will refer to this episode as "the one with the condor in a bag".

I'm not sure what to make of La La Land. I am a big fan of its star, Marc Wootton, but I find the whole prank TV genre tedious in the extreme.

Wootton plays three characters, an aspiring actor, a showbiz psychic and a documentary film-maker, who come to Los Angeles hoping to realise their dreams of fame and fortune and, in the psychic's case, to escape a charge of the attempted murder of a child.

Once Stateside, they provoke the locals with their rude, ignorant, intolerant and boorish behaviour. You know, like Sacha Baron Cohen was doing with Borat several years ago.

Because the targets are Americans it presumably makes them fair game, but far from humiliating his unsuspecting co-stars Wootton merely serves to highlight their patience, tolerance and forbearance.

Some, like former movie star Ruta Lee, give back as good as they get. "You don't know shit," she helpfully informs oafish cab driver Gary, who has been encouraged to pursue a showbusiness career by his mates down the pub.

La La Land is fitfully amusing, and the three characters are beautifully observed, but I can't help thinking Wootton's talents can be put to better use.

You might think that Sacha Baron Cohen had queered the pitch for ambush television in the States, making people so wary of foreign television crews that it would be impossible to successfully pull off a spoof documentary. If you go where deranged self-regard and narcissism is the norm, however, you still stand a fighting chance. In La La Land, Marc Wootton has done just that. He plays three expatriate Brits hoping to make their mark in Hollywood, and films his encounters with various unwitting stooges who make a living by servicing the egos of the ambitious. We've seen one of the characters before - Shirley Ghostman, a camp television medium who has arrived in Los Angeles fleeing police charges in England. The logic of his back story didn't entire make sense, but it was still funny to see the brisk professionalism of the publicity agent he was consulting, as she fished helplessly through the wreckage of his recent CV trying to find an upside. Also hoping to build a career are Gary, an Essex geezer who thinks he's the next Jason Statham because everyone looks at him in the pub back home and Brendan Allen, a bearded documentary-maker. The stooges, incidentally, mostly come off with their dignity intact, quickly recognising that Wootton's characters are absolute idiots and in most cases telling them so, but with a degree of exasperation that suggests they haven't twigged that it's wind-up. The funniest moment was the long sequence in which Brendan doggedly tried to pitch an "innovative" shark documentary using underwater cameras, reacting to the tactful explanation that this had been done many times before as a failure to grasp the novelty of his suggestion: "No, no... I don't think you understand what I'm saying," he explained patiently, "we'd be underneath... you know, below where the boats are." There was strong competition for that top spot though, largely because of the detail and nimbleness of Wootton's characterisations. It's genuinely funny.

Hollywood, mecca for the delusional and terminally superficial, is a gift for the satirist. But halfway through Marc Wootton's adventures in La La Land I started to wonder who exactly was the butt of the joke.

Wootton, drawing his characterisations with the broadest of brushes, plays a trio of British wannabes who arrive in LA with stars in their eyes. Meet oafish aspiring actor Gary Garner, halfwit documentary maker Brendan Allen and male (I think) disgraced psychic Shirley Ghostman, a disparate group, you might think, but united by a shared arrogance and misplaced faith in their own talents. The joke is that while Wootton is putting on an act, all of the characters he interacts with are real people. Quite how the ragbag of no-one-you've-everheard-of actors, photographers and publicists were fooled into appearing isn't quite clear but they were, to a man and woman, unfailingly polite when confronted by Wootton's buffoonish rudeness. Each scene inevitably ended with a confounded Hollywood-ite concluding, not unreasonably, that 'the guy's a f***ing idiot'.

So whereas Borat, Bruno and Ali G contrived to expose the fallibility of their targets, all Wootton succeeds in doing is make you feel vaguely ashamed to be British. In short, he's no Sacha Baron Cohen: in setting out to expose the daftness of star-chasing LA, Wootton just exposes his own shortcomings. He deserves credit for the hours he spent in make-up coming up with three very different looks but, aside from one tasteless but funny joke about Shirley Ghostman hiring a hitman to stop him being exposed as a fraud, the material was so puerile it was a wasted effort. The real laugh is that La La Land is made by Fooling Nobody Productions, which at least provided a giggle over the closing credits.

A low-rent Sacha Baron Cohen, Mark Wooton takes his spoof psychic character Shirley Ghostman - wait! Come back! It's not that bad, honest - to LA along with three others. He plays pranks. And you know how we feel about that. However, the old actress is SUPERB. Worth watching just for her.

Mildly amusing new comedy in which a hapless documentary-maker, a psychic medium and a taxi driver turned wannabe-action star - all played by British character comic Marc Wootton - try to make it big in LA. Featuring the characters' real-life encounters with unwitting members of the public, Sacha Baron Cohen-style, it already counts Ben Stiller and Larry David as fans after its airing in the US.