Vic Reeves

Radio Times review

A welcome return for the adult (and we mean adult) storybook series, but here laced with a touch of sadness.The late Rik Mayall shares the billing with Vic Reeves in this opener, with Mayall telling a wonderful story about a weatherman whose predictions actually come true and who finds himself tempted to use his power to immoral ends...

Storytelling is a form Mayall clearly loves, and he gives it everything in what must have been one of his last ever jobs. It's intense, focused and a little bit naughty and reminds us of what we're now sadly missing. Reeves's story is pretty good too - a slightly madder but no less amusing yarn about a cleaner from the future who finds herself on a mission to Mars.

The 80s comedy club where heckling became an art form

What's left of the old Mitre Arms sits on a grim, grey stretch of the A102, within gobbing distance of the Blackwall Tunnel. It looks like the sort of pub where you'd get bottled if you looked at someone in a funny way. So it's hard to believe that in the late 80s this place helped launch the careers of a generation of alternative comedians including Harry Enfield, Vic Reeves, Jenny Eclair, Jerry Sadowitz, Jeremy Hardy and Jo Brand.

Crackanory: review

Iconic TV show returns for new series featuring Vic Reeves and the late Rik Mayall at his best.

Vic Reeves & family rescue three orphaned leopard cubs

He might be one of Britain's leading funnymen. But even Vic Reeves has a serious side, as he showed by taking his family to South Africa to help rescue three orphaned leopards.

The gloriously silly world of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer draws to a close with Reece Shearsmith joining the gang as poltergeist Martin for a ghostbusting end-of-series romp. There's a chimp up for grabs in a ghost photo competition and Vic's determined to bag the primate but Bob's not keen, so Beef pitches in with his Sword of Draxos - which looks a lot like a clarinet - and Julie whips her torch out. Let's hope there's more to come of this delightful delirium.

The great skill of Outnumbered is to keep its humour just the right side of believable. Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer's House of Fools travels the wrong side, but not as far as you might think. Unbridled absurdity soon becomes tiresome - Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy being a case in point - which is why House of Fools is careful to establish some sort of norm from which it can then deviate.

The starting point is that most traditional of sitcom set-ups: the flat share. Bob is the owner of the property, Vic his infuriating tenant. A parade of comic grotesques pop in uninvited and unannounced, accompanied by some wilfully cheap animations and rubbish props, adding further mayhem to whatever spurious plotline is driving that week's episode.

This week, the flat played host to a pop-up restaurant intended to impress a probation officer, who was subsequently served a coconut-topped pizza made of grout.

I watched it in a state of bemused delight, punctuated by the occasional guffaw, but then I've always been a Vic and Bob fan. Non-fans, I suspect, won't get past the bemused stage.

Horses gallop around Bob's beautiful home in this week's surreal scamper as Vic Reeves pastes up some unique wallpaper he bought on eBay. And while ex-con Bosh ropes the gang in on impressing his probation officer - guest star Nikki Amuka-Bird (Luther) - the Beef (Matt Berry) shows up sporting a buttercup-yellow belt. So naturally he gets Vic and Bob to kneel before him to try that thing you do with buttercups - but with belts instead. Come close... no, closer.

If ever there was evidence that you should quit while you're not as ahead as you once were, House of Fools provides it by the bucketload. The inexorable decline of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer was pretty apparent during their recent online-only sketch affair, for which the description of tepid would have constituted a rave review. And now they're back with a sitcom that almost defiles the memory of their greatest hits (Shooting Stars and Catterick for two) and drags down the normally excellent Matt Berry with them.

It's full of the standard Vic 'n' Bob nonsense, but time has simply not been kind to their brand of non-sequitur surrealism, and you can't help but long for the days of the dove from above and Les Facts. House of Fools is oovavoo indeed.