Tommy Cooper

Coming up: Glass Chair Chair Glass

This Sunday on Radio 3, Russ Abbot stars in a play that imagines a day when Tommy Cooper met absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco.

Russ Abbot to play Tommy Cooper in new BBC radio drama

Russ Abbot is to play Tommy Cooper in a BBC drama that imagines what would have happened if the comedian and magician had met absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco.

Ian D Montfort is a Derren Brown-Tommy Cooper hybrid

Writer, actor and stand-up comedian Tom Binns mixes Tommy Cooper and Derren Brown in his new Edinburgh Fringe show.

Watching this series's parade of classic comedy clips, chosen by comedians of today, confirms the theory that some people just have funny bones. It wouldn't matter if Tommy Cooper were clipping his toenails or performing the elaborately shambolic glass bottle trick from 1974 that is replayed here tonight: the fez-wearing comedian induces guffaws just because of who he is. Similarly, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore go wildly off-script in their "Pete and Dud" sketch in the art gallery and start giggling, but they're naturally funny together, as Phill Jupitus and Rhod Gilbert attest here. Funny comes in many packages, and while the American stand-up Joan Rivers, chosen by Graham Norton and Jo Brand as a favourite, is well-known for her shock tactics, her outrageous quips about growing old on The Graham Norton Show appeared to take even Norton aback at the time. Other treats featured are the University Challenge scene from The Young Ones in 1984, co-starring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, and the bit in the Monty Python film Life of Brian in which Graham Chapman's Brian Cohen exhorts his followers to think for themselves. It may be a clip show and most of the clips are more than familiar, but it surely contains more laughs per minute than any of the newer comedies on television tonight.

Who could forget Mandy, the peroxide blonde bombshell with the catchphrase "Ooh, you are awful but I like you"? During the sixties and seventies, it must have been quoted at parties, pageants and playgrounds up and down the land as often as Vicky Pollard's "Yeah but, no but" or Victor Meldrew's "I don't believe it" decades later.

Yet Mandy's creator, Dick Emery, seems to have been largely erased from the nation's comedy memory bank. Unlike Tommy Cooper, Morecambe and Wise and the Two Ronnies, whose work is deservedly kept alive by repeats on Gold as well as the terrestrial channels, the brilliant Emery has been curiously absent from our screens since his death 30 years ago.

None of the contributors to Dick Emery - A Comedy of Errors could account for this glaring oversight, including presenter David Walliams, clearly a big fan in his youth. The best they could come up with was that Emery's success predated the marketing boom of the eighties when artists like Cooper and Morecambe and Wise were immortalised on T-shirts, mugs, greetings cards and the like.

While the documentary was a fitting tribute to an outstanding comedy talent, it also revealed the troubled man behind the many funny faces. Nervous, insecure and incapable of fidelity, Emery's early childhood had been spent on tour with his parents, a variety double act, not the most stable of upbringings.

His love life - five failed marriages, umpteen love affairs - reflected a restlessness and terror of being alone. One of his children, Eliza, now a singer-songwriter, said he sought constant reassurance that she loved him, even though it was probably his kids who needed assuring the most.

Walliams concluded in characteristic Emery style, "What we need is more Dick on our screens," followed rather predictably by a rousing "Ooh, you are awful but I like you".

First shown on BBC Four, the second half of Michael Grade's history of the variety era examines what happened to the entertainers once the theatres closed and TV cameras beckoned. He talks to stars who managed to make the transition from stage to screen, among them Bruce Forsyth, Des O'Connor and Ken Dodd. Grade also looks at Sunday Night at the London Palladium, plus the impact of Tommy Cooper and Morecambe & Wise.

In part two of the terrifically enjoyable The Story of Variety, presenter Michael Grade investigated television's culpability in killing off variety, and highlighted the attempts of various performers to make the tricky transition from stage to screen.

Tommy Cooper adapted instinctively, Morecambe And Wise succeeded on their second attempt, while Ken Dodd never quite succeeded in shrinking his genius to television's proportions. Ventriloquist Peter Brough and his doll Archie enjoyed tremendous, if inexplicable, popularity on the radio, but a clip from the archive showed why they never enjoyed small-screen success - Brough had failed to grasp a fundamental element of ventriloquism and made little or no effort to disguise his moving lips.

This second exploration of showbiz is a tale of those who could play to the camera, instead of the audience. Ken Dodd shows how he's torn between the two. Others did not face the same dilemma - witness Morecambe and Wise's mastery of the medium. For the other modern great, Tommy Cooper, we learn performances were meticulously planned. But in 1984, with alternative comedy booming, both Tommy and Eric died. But variety didn't die with them. We have Britain's Got Talent. And now ITV has bought the rights to the Royal Variety Performance. That wouldn't have happened had Grade been back at the BBC.

Is this the funniest woman in Britain?

She's as comedic as Tommy Cooper and as hilarious as Hattie Jacques. Now Miranda Hart has won the affections of Allison Pearson.