Sandi Toksvig

Radio waves: Election fever

Sandi Toksvig will continue to present Radio 4's News Quiz despite being a former Liberal Democrat party activist.

The News Quiz has now reached series 70. At first one dragged oneself into earshot expecting the worst. Would Sandi Toksvig have decided finally to give up all pretence of being the convenor of a popular comedy panel game and do the whole thing herself?

And yet, blow me down with my prejudices, series 70 has so far been something of a cracker, the last couple of weeks in particular. First, they've injected new blood into the panellists - the rapidly rising posh type Miles Jupp a fortnight ago, the drily observant Scottish stand-up Susan Calman last week. Jupp in particular took the show over, beating Toksvig into a corner with an unstoppable stream of hilarity and never letting her out of it. Then, last week, a bottle of Buckfast Tonic Wine was brought out, knocked back, and the programme dissolved into giggling and slurring of words. Artificial stimulants - this is the way to go, one feels.

It's so rare to see two women sitting next to each other on a comedy panel show that even Sandi Toksvig seemed surprised. On QI last week Toksvig and team-mate Ronni Ancona had a witty old time sparring with Jack Dee and Alan Davies - even if the episode was called Girls and Boys and had questions all about girls and, er, boys. The show was funny, as QI usually is. Which is just the point. Women can perform brilliantly on panel shows, so why don't they appear more often? The usual one lass, three lads format is as tired patronising and boring as the older male/younger woman newsreading cliche. It's time for change.

As part of its current "G" series, QI explored the sexes in a "Girls & Boys"-themed edition, by dividing the four players into male and female duos (Alan Davies and Jack Dee vs. Ronni Ancona and Sandi Toksvig).

We learned many things, not least the scientific reason for why QI itself features so few women, how pink used to be the traditional colour for boys, and how all babies were called "girls" pre-1920's...

I still enjoy QI, but I find it less enthralling than I used to. Maybe the format's just become too predictable, or the facts are less interesting for whatever reason. I'm not sure. It's still amusing and occasionally fascinating, but I'm no longer quite so keen on it. Overexposure thanks to endless repeats on Dave, perhaps? In this episode, I thought Jack Dee was extremely disappointing (he recycled the "male drivers asking for instructions" cliche!), but Ronni Ancona was better than usual. Sandi Toksvig, a very quick-witted person (as her own BBC Radio 4 The News Quiz proves), is somehow rendered smug and irritating whenever she's on television, too.

Last Thursday's edition of QI was interesting for the guest-appearance of US comedian/actor John Hodgman, a regular on The Daily Show and "PC" in the original "Mac Vs PC" commercials. Hodgman's a big fan of the show, and was recently filmed extolling the virtues of QI during a public appearance where rallied support for a campaign to get BBC America to broadcast it (article). Clearly someone at QI noticed Hodgman's support and he was here rewarded with an appearance on the gameshow itself. I'm sure he enjoyed himself, but it made for an awkward half-hour...

Put simply, Hodgman was one of QI's worst guests - although not as bad as scruffy Scotsman Phil Kaye. It didn't help that his presence (not just as a rare guest from overseas) was highlighted by the unfair decision to stick him in the middle of teammates Sandi Toksvig and Sean Lock for the show's first ever three-person team. It felt very much like Hodgman had been crowbarred into the episode, and the show thus felt unbalanced. It also brought too much attention to Hodgman, who was suddenly given a weight of expectation - after all, why else would they upset the delicate balance of QI if he wasn't going to be comedy gold?

Of larger concern was the fact that QI's brand of comedy generally relies on wit and a certain level of surrealism. Sean Lock and Bill Bailey have that corner of the market sewn up between them. Americans in general don't seem to have the madcap comedy gene in their makeup. I'm struggling to think of any US comedians who have similar acts to Monty Python, Eddie Izzard, Vic Reeves, or Harry Hill. So, Hodgman was instantly lost during most of the rounds, while everyone else swam around talking bizarre nonsense.

Maybe Hodgman would be able to find his footing if he came back for future editions, as I'm sure it was very nerve-wracking to suddenly find yourself in the show you dearly love and have publicly championed. It's also worth mentioning that the comedy panel show subgenre is practically unknown in America, so he came in a little unskilled. At times, Hodgman just settled for answering questions in a straight-forward manner (which helped him win the show), in-between forcing out a few half-hearted attempts to be offbeat and funny. Still, at least he actually DID get involved. There are far worse examples of British comedians guesting on panel shows and saying literally four sentences. Which is even worse when you stop to remember these shows can take hours to film and they edit it down to a half-hour of highlights.

There are plenty of quiz shows on TV so it's nice to see a format where questions can cover just about anything from Die Hard to the bard.

Quip queen Sandi Toksvig hosts this cultural comedy quiz, while captains and reliable comics Chris Addison and Sue Perkins are joined by hand-picked celebrity guests to face quick fire questions from across the arts and serve up plenty of irreverent laughs along the way.

Now I'm not usually a fan of radio but that's mainly the fault of Jo Whiley and Scott Mills, but I do enjoy The News Quiz. Not only because Celebrity Lesbian Sandi Toksvig is the chair, but also because Celebrity Lesbian Sue Perkins is a regular panellist.

The News Quiz never fails to have me laughing, which is the main reason that I can't listen to it in public, I don't want to develop a reputation. It is the wittier version of Have I Got News For You, and yes there is a certain overlap of topics, but The News Quiz (usually) has five brilliant wits on, whereas HIGNFY has to make do with two, a guest chair and Ian Hislop. And very rarely does it have Celebrity Lesbians, so it just doesn't stand a chance.

Expect an arched eyebrow and plenty of sardonic quips as Sandi Toksvig reprises her role as literary quizmaster. Filmed at the Hay festival, this tongue-in-cheek series invites the likes of Rick Wakeman, Jan Ravens, John O'Farrell and Frank Skinner to test their know-how: whereupon Toksvig will separate the truly bookish from the blusterers. Also parading their Eng. Lit. credentials will be returning team captains Sue Perkins and Chris Addison.

BBC Radio 4 comedy I've Never Seen Star Wars transferred to television recently, presented by Marcus Brigstocke - a stand-up comedian who resembles a geography teacher, and who's apparently determined to find fame by appearing on every British satirical show in existence.

INSSW is a variant of Room 101, where a weekly celebrity guest must talk amusingly about a certain topic. In the aforementioned series, it was pet hates; in this show it's things they've never experienced, but wish they had. Of course, a proviso is that each guest gets to plug the gaps in their life-experience beforehand, then relate everything to Brigstocke.

It's a show that clearly relies on its guests and their choices to amuse. I don't hate Clive Anderson, but it's difficult to remember why he was a fairly big star back in the '90s, despite the fact his enduring legacy is being bumbling while hosting Whose Line Is It Anyway. His wit has long since been exposed as relying solely on daft word-play, too. His choices here were uninspiring and not particularly strong to deconstruct for comedy. What humour can you mine from the revelation someone hasn't seen Withnail & I until very recently, let's be honest.

I've heard a few episodes of the Radio 4 series in my time, and that sounded much sillier and comically distended than anything here - recently, Sandi Toksvig admitted she's never eaten a Pot Noodle, and was promptly heard cooking and eating one in comic detail as if it were an epicurean delicacy. There was nothing to equal that amusement in two episodes of the TV version, despite the assumed a visual medium should bring.

Sandi Toksvig chairs this comedy panel game in which celebrities are given the answer, and they have to come up with possible questions. It sounds like a round of Mock the Week expanded into a full half-hour, but with Chris Addison and Sue Perkins as team captains should be diverting enough.