Simon Bird (I)

Edinburgh Fringe interview: Tom Rosenthal

Tom Rosenthal may be best known for his role opposite Simon Bird in the excellent Friday Night Dinner and more recently in the ancient Rome based sitcom Plebs. His experience filming the series in Bulgaria form part of his second Edinburgh Fringe show.

Audio: Chickens Q&A

Stars and creators Simon Bird, Jonny Sweet and Joe Thomas are joined by cast members Sarah Daykin, Emerald Fennell, and Barry Humphries at BAFTA to talk about the new WW1-set Sky1 sitcom Chickens.

Harry Hill filming with Julie Walters and Simon Bird

The film features Hill on a road-trip to Blackpool after learning his hamster has only a week to live with his Walters as his white-haired gran.

What The Inbetweeners did next...

Simon Bird, Joe Thomas, James Buckley and Blake Harrison have come a long way since they left Rudge Park Comprehensive behind.

Simon Bird interview

Simon Bird, who plays nerdy victim Will McKenzie, says Inbetweeners fans usually throw back the show's insults and catchphrases at them.

Back for a second series on Channel 4, Friday Night Dinner has retained the comic spark that it had in the first.

As with the previous helping, the series sees the Jewish Goodman family trying to have a dinner on a Friday night, which - as always - ends up with chaos. Brothers Adam and Jonny (Simon Bird and Tom Rosenthal) fight and play pranks, while mother Jackie (Tamsin Greig) tries keep everything in order while cooking the "squirrel" - and father Martin (Paul Ritter) continues with his odd behaviour, refusing to wear a shirt.

In the opening episode, Jackie finds Adam's old diary, which he reveals that he disposed of Jonny's favourite cuddly toy when he was 11. As a result, Jonny tries to capture Adam's beloved "Buggy". In the meantime, Martin is constantly sneezing while trying to fix his lawnmower...

This was a great opening episode, mixing some off-the-wall humour (mainly from Jim, who claims playing the bassoon gave him "reverse hiccups") with some good old fashioned slapstick, which helps to bring around a great ending to the episode itself.

Part of the reason why Friday Night Dinner seems to work is the fact that it's based on something real, namely the actual experiences of such 'Friday night dinners' of the writer Robert Popper. It gives the show an extra footing from which you can get more laughs from, and it does seems to work.

Dotty grandma arrives for dinner with her terrible new boyfriend, or "male companion" as she prefers. He's a mean-spirited old man who arrives by crashing his car into the Goodmans' front door before berating the household. Again, it's an episode that relies heavily on farce and eye-popping outrage, so it wears thin quite quickly. But Harry Landis, as the boyfriend, is gloriously awful, whether he's engaging in excruciating displays of affection with grandma ("I'm all randy") to claiming he's been abused by the entirely innocent Adam (Simon Bird). And there's a welcome, though all too brief, visit from febrile neighbour Jim (Mark Heap).

Simon Bird on Friday Night Dinner

Simon Bird doesn't particularly like being interviewed. If he hadn't already told me this, I'd know by his body language.