Stephen K Amos

My Hols: Stephen K Amos

The comedian loves New York, but had a bad experience with some fruit in Thailand. Even worse was to come in Japan...

Remember the dodgy MP who claimed thousands for a gold sarcophagus and a terracotta army? Or the Duckmanitarian crisis, which saw ducks around the country losing their homes?

Miranda Hart sums up 2009 with spoofs made up in someone's head. The show uses real footage, heavily messed with, and specially-recorded material that looks at events that almost happened but didn't - such as an 80-year-old Arlene Phillips being replaced on Strictly by a child.

Talking heads include Stephen K Amos, Sally Phillips and Duncan Bannatyne.

The year's defining moments in culture, politics and television are cut up into a thousand pieces, then reassembled for our amusement, in a spoof of the traditional list show. Miranda Hart guides us through re-imagined versions of party leaders' conference speeches, George Bush issues a semi-musical apology for his time in office, and even Jeremy Paxman gets a light ribbing. Guests include Stephen K Amos, Duncan Bannatyne, and Adam Buxton with a uniquely suburban take on Ed Wardle's Alone in the Wild documentary adventure.

Stephen K Amos: Murder, he wrote

He once joked that British TV couldn't cope with more than one black comedian at a time - now Stephen K Amos is getting his own BBC series. And he hasn't even had to kill Lenny Henry, he explains.

The urbane Lee continues to do his bit to redress the shortage of stand-up comedy on TV. We're overrun with panel shows in which comics slice and dice their stand-up ideas into witty chunks but we get fewer full-length routines.

What Lee shows over the course of a half-hour programme is how a longer time frame lets him toy with an idea, stretch it to breaking point, and play on preconceptions so that by the end you almost feel part of an unusually witty sociology seminar.

Having said all that, tonight's edition isn't as thick with laugh-out-loud moments as it might be. Some of the better jokes are in the sketches: look out for the spoof Hitler speeches ("And you can't even hit your kids any more!" he rants in German) and Stephen K Amos lifting an otherwise daft joke about Kofi Annan.

A new panel game, Act Your Age, ostensibly pitting comics from different generations against each other, sounded like a poor man's Mock the Week, with the six contestants, including Lucy Porter, Stephen K Amos and Barry Cryer, vying to come up with the funniest jokes or anecdotes. It wouldn't have mattered that chairman Simon Mayo's scoring was fashionably arbitrary if he'd made a wittier contribution, or helped the contestants out when they were floundering. Any panel game that is reduced to knock-knock jokes in its first outing is going to struggle to find an audience.

They act their age, but they're not funny

I can remember laughing only once, and even that was spitefully. Stephen K Amos, Lucy Porter, Barry Cryer and, bizarrely, Roy Walker had pitched up to pick up a cheque by not trying very hard.

The Fringe continues to upstage high culture in festive Edinburgh. Saturday's Sean Lock and Friends patchily celebrates Auld Reekie's comedy obsession. Worst: the host himself and Lucy Porter's perfunctory turn. Best: Stephen K. Amos, sardonically articulate.

Newspaper Review

Idiot MC, pretend pub, feeble band and no jokes. Radio 4 comedy is having a laugh!