Steen Raskopoulos

Best of live comedy 2016

From classy confessional comedy to superlative solo sketch work, the year was filled with a plethora of live treats.

Interview: Steen Raskopoulos - You Know The Drill

Steen Raskopoulos interview.

Ten Australian comics at the Fringe

Ten antipodean shows that'll be sweet as...

10 of our favourite posters from this year's Fringe

HTF has chosen our favourite posters from this year's Fringe, and we have asked each performer how they came up with their idea.

Ten Fringe stars with very different TV roles

Anyway, here are ten acts at the Fringe who you may know from other TV shows, stand-up appearances not counted.

Steen Raskopoulos Q&A - Edinburgh Fringe 2016

Interview with Steen Raskopoulos.

20 sketch & Fringe character comedy recommendations

One of the great joys of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the chance to see an assortment of mad weirdos push comedy to new levels with inventive new characters and brilliant new sketch narratives that offer something different to the great stand-up also on offer. But who to see that is an example of the previous paragraph? Well, you're in luck because here are our picks of the best sketch and character comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe 2016.

Pleasant surprise of the week came in the form of BBC Three comedy Top Coppers which I thought would be another awful offering to match the woeful Crims. Instead this loving pastiche of 1970s and 1980s cop shows offered some big belly laughs and some wonderful observational gags on top. Writers Andy Kinnear and Cein McGillicuddy have employed a high gag ratio but at the same time haven't forsaken the plot of the episode over getting cheap laughs. Meanwhile the cast seemingly realise that the best way to pull off a successful spoof is to play it dead straight and that's what most of them have done. Top Coppers is centred round the Justice City Police Department and more specifically Detectives John Mahogany and Mitch Rust (Steen Raskopoulos and John Kearns). Mahogany and Rust have a strong bond which looks to be tested when the former wants to go out with the new girl in the office rather than enjoy movie night with his colleague. This decision leads Rust to go to some extreme lengths to compensate for his loss which includes trying to recreate certain scenes from the movie Speed. The best recurring gag in the first episode for me involved the fact that gangster Harry McCrane (Paul Ritter) had recently purchased an ice cream factory meaning that the employees now had to produce both ice cream and drugs. Although at times Top Coppers may have been a little silly, I felt that it was one of the more tightly-plotted TV comedies that I've recently seen. More than anything Top Coppers was just very funny and that's more than I can say for most of the British sitcoms I've watched during 2015. I'm just hoping that the enjoyment that I garnered from the opening instalment wasn't a one-off and that Top Coppers will go down as one of my favourite comedies of the year.