Stuart Jeffries

Liam Williams: optimism v pessimism in 2017

Liam Williams quit standup fearing his pessimism about the state of the planet was making audiences worryingly apathetic. But is a sunny outlook really any healthier? We sat him down for a session with psychotherapist Philippa Perry.

Paul Merton on Just a Minute

As Paul Merton surpasses Kenneth Williams as a Just a Minute legend, he talks about the fast-talking panel show's best and worst guests - and why everyone was scared the day he arrived.

In Lenny Henry's Danny and the Human Zoo (BBC One), his thinly veiled autobiographical drama of rising as a black comedy star in the 1970s, the last 20 minutes dealt with the self-disgust our hero felt after performing on the same bill as white men in blackface.

Earlier, we saw Danny and his family watching telly in their Dudley home. Like the rest of the TV nation, they giggled at Brucie on The Generation Game and Michael Crawford's Frank Spencer. And then the Black and White Minstrels came on. Smiles switched to open-mouthed disbelief. Just as, you'd suspect, happened in Henry's family living room.

Much of the appeal of Danny and the Human Zoo was the light it cast on its writer, that outlier for black British entertainers, and the compromises he made as a naive teenager in this racist realm. That wasn't how the Queen put it when she knighted Henry in June, but, you'd like to think, it's one of the reasons he was honoured.

In the drama, Danny blew up his showbiz career by coming on the Blackpool stage naked apart from tribal makeup - and telling his audience a few home truths. As security goons chased Danny, looking like a naked Fela Kuti, around the stage, Benny Hill chase music started up. Nice period touch. I wish they'd let that scene run longer.

There was wish fulfilment in this and the denouement in which, having rebelled, Danny returned, tail between his legs, to Dudley. There, Danny (a pitch perfect performance of innocence from Kascion Franklin, if not quite as disarmingly cheeky as the young Lenny was) got the girl (the sweet stand-up black one, not the fair-weather white one) and reunited with his fond but invertebrate white mates, and with his family. "Jamaicans don't have parents," Danny told his mates. "They have drill sergeants lamping them around the house." Really? In the drama, the love that Danny's endearingly firecracker mom (Cecilia Noble played her superbly as hard as nails and brittle as pressed flowers) had for her son looked unconditional.

And then there was Danny's sad British Leyland drone of a Jamaican stepdad, played with masterful restraint by Henry himself. Nice to see him inhabiting previous generations' ground-down shoes so empathetically. For 90 minutes Henry had a face like a wet weekend in Lower Gornal until, very near his and the drama's end, he gave us an unexpected laugh, sounding as lubricious as Lenny Henry's comic character Theophilus P Wildebeest. It was good to hear.

The truth about Henry is probably more painful than Danny and the Human Zoo suggested. Those photos of the young Lenny from the 70s, giggling amiably while flanked by two Black and White Minstrels with whom he was contractually obliged to appear, make difficult viewing in 2015. But white people like me don't get to call Henry on what he did then, nor, quite possibly, should anyone else.

In An Evening with Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse (BBC Two), the two comedians had been celebrating 25 years of working together with a clip show of their funniest moments in front of an audience of celebrity admirers, all superbly performed by the two impersonators. It was all going very well until they asked for a question from Lenny Henry. In the audience was Enfield's impersonation of Henry. He awoke in pyjamas under purple bedclothes like the ones from that hotel chain he endorses in the TV ad. Only one problem: Enfield was impersonating Henry in blackface.

"All roight Harry and Paul," said Enfield's Henry in car-crash approximation of a Dudley accent. "Would yow ever consider blacking up?" "That's something we draw the line at," replied Whitehouse with the misdirection that was the show's hallmark, "but we have supported a number of black causes down the years with our biting satirical skits."

They then cut to a sketch in which Enfield and Whitehouse appeared in thick blackface as two putatively Caribbean contestants on Dragons' Den seeking funding for their Me Kyan Believe It Nat Custard. Just possibly, Levi Roots, who got £50,000 from the dragons in 2007 for his Reggae Reggae sauce business (now worth £30m) was in the satirical crosshairs. But the main target was white political correctness - the dragons only invested in the custard so as not to appear racist. Given the history of blacking up and the pain it caused black Britons, dramatised so clearly in Danny and the Human Zoo, that satirical target was attacked with bumbaclot witlessness. White satirists in blackface draw attention overwhelmingly to their insensitivity rather than whatever they were hoping to satirise.

Still, at least the show ended with Enfield and Whitehouse getting pelted with fruit for being racists, homophobes and misogynists.

Again, there was a twist. The people pelting Enfield and Whitehouse were the two men dressed up as their celebrity peers - a fine piece of metacritical self-loathing. As cod-self-flagellatory schtick, it was welcome antidote to this format's usual ceremony of self-luvviedom.

And Lenny Henry? Was he in the angry mob, pelting these two disgusting racists? I didn't see him. He had probably dozed off again. Those hotel beds he gets paid to endorse look really comfortable.

Review: Danny and the Human Zoo, Harry & Paul

Yes, they were being satirical, but Enfield and Whitehouse's blackface was a mistake - as Lenny Henry's complex autobiographical drama makes clear.

Dr Martin Ellingham is brilliant, grumpy, imperious and socially inept as an obstetrician turned GP. These facts make Doc Martin a must-see for those prospective doctors who want to fit in to the medical establishment which, as you know, is filled with imperious, socially inept, grumpy doctors who may, if you're lucky, be brilliant. If you can't bear to watch Martin Clunes being curmudgeonly in Cornwall, you could watch James Robertson Justice as Sir Lancelott Spratt in the Doctor in the House franchise or De Forrest Kelly as Bones in Star Trek to get much the same picture.

Ian Lavender: Dad's Army cost me a career in the movies

Ian Lavender was 22 when he was cast as mummy's boy Private Pike in Dad's Army. It was a role that would come to haunt his career, stopping him from getting meatier parts. His one-man Edinburgh show explains all.

My favourite TV show: Dad's Army

Dad's Army's ironising approach to national identity made me fall for Britain in a way that only Danny Boyle's Olympics opening ceremony has done since.

Say what you like about Rob Brydon - and I certainly plan to - but he hosts a brain-ruining celebrity quiz show with aplomb. Those hours spent remaining cheerful while dining opposite Steve Coogan's wet-weekend-in-Ancoats face on The Trip to Italy are certainly paying dividends.

How bad is The Guess List (BBC1)? It's as likely as Michael McIntyre's chatshow to make it to a second series. It makes Would I Lie to You?, Brydon's other quiz show, seem like a work of shattering genius.

That said, I couldn't look away. "How lovely to be this close to a fox and not worry it's going to sniff round your bins," said Brydon introducing his first celebrity guest, Emilia Fox. "I speak for everybody when I say I loved The Vicar of Dibley," he said, introducing Jennifer Saunders. He went on with similar amiable insults to the other usual suspects (Simon Callow, Louis Smith, James Corden), while they kept their smiles mirthlessly frozen. If there isn't yet a Bafta for best rictus in quiz show adversity, it is only a matter of time.

The idea is, five celebrities come up with a plausible answer to a question, and then two contestants have to decide which, if any of those suggestions, is most plausible. For example: "According to a poll, what should old people do three times a week to help them live longer?" "Tango," said Callow, insanely. "Orgasm," said Corden, sensibly. "Exercise," said Smith, boringly. The answer? Oh come on! It's have sex.

Only one of the contestants seemed to have trouble with The Guess List's concept. Naturally, she won. But then she also told us she'd moved from Birmingham to Australia after watching Wanted Down Under, which is the very definition of madness.

Celebrity input seemed so superfluous that the show could readily have been renamed Pointless Celebrities. Here's my question: "Which of the following collective nouns is the odd one out: A) murder of crows; B) whoop of gorillas; C) busyness of ferrets; D) pointlessness of celebrities?" Answer: D) I want to hear more from the other three.

Dara O'Briain: School of Hard Sums (Dave) fails to understand the contract between viewer and TV: I will watch you, says viewer to telly, only if you undertake not to make me feel guilty about wasting my life and under no circumstances try to improve me.

O'Briain and his mini-me henchman, Oxford maths prof Marcus du Sautoy, know a lot about Pythagoras's theorems, multi-dimensional space and quadratic equations, but they don't realise they're destroying the very essence of TV in general and the business model of Dave, the channel devoted to further stupefying half-cut blokes who can't find anything else on. But as the credits rolled, a voice said: "Place eight queens on a chessboard in such a way that they cannot capture each other." There's no easy way to say this, but I've got the pieces on the board right now. Damn you, O'Briain!