Vic Reeves

After a one-off Christmas special, someone had the bright idea of bringing back Shooting Stars for a new series. It was an odd decision, as this surreal, not-a-panel-game feels threadbare and tired. Sadly, time has not been kind. Team captains Jack Dee and Ulrika Jonsson do their best, but they don't have much to work with. The guests, particularly The One Show's Christine Bleakley, are game and do their best but it's a slog. Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer still have their moments, of course; Reeves's impressions of an unintelligible club singer are still funny; and it's good to see Matt Lucas again as the excitable big baby George Dawes. At least he looks like he's having fun. But generally the humour is too scatological and the madness that characterised Shooting Stars in its heyday and which made the show feel fresh and unlike anything else, now feels forced.

Shooting Stars 'back in autumn'

Surreal comedy quiz show Shooting Stars will return to the BBC this autumn, according to its stars Vic Reeves and Matt Lucas.

Reeves, 50 - real name Jim Moir - told the Daily Express the show would return with Ulrika Jonsson and Jack Dee as team hosts.

The primary concept is one of baffling unreasonableness. Members of the public are encouraged to write in with their "wacky" suggestions for future inventions - basically rehashes of the "Letter Bocks" pages of Viz. If they are chosen, they then have to stand up and fill five minutes of prime-time television sparring with two professional comedians - who, additionally, have had time to prepare relevant material - in order to "win". As you would expect, it's a bloodbath - like a light entertainment Wounded Knee, but with a studio audience.

In the opening episode, Dave Gorman and Catherine Tate "challenged" four members of the public on their inventions, which included an anorak with an extra hood, for sharing with a friend, and some surrealist, sub-Vic Reeves nonsense about winning a race on stilts. As soon as Tate and Gorman started on them it was like watching two cats idly biting at frogs they'd found in the garden.

The BBC amazes me. It takes four years for Stewart Lee - a comedian with 17 years' experience - to get a six-part series; yet in Genius wholly inexperienced members of the public are expected to deliver five minutes of broadcast-quality improvised material at the drop of a hat. What, literally, is that all about?

Vic Reeves Interview

The good news for fans of Shooting Stars is that, after the excellent ratings of the one-off Christmas special, it looks likely that the BBC will be commissioning another series. Vic says he's crossing his fingers, but it's 99 per cent in the bag.

What's on the schtick? Just the same old Vic

It's not hard to work out why Vic Reeves's execrable 'comedy' panel show Does the Team Think... was given a second series (Radio 2, Saturdays, 1pm). Someone influential in the BBC labours under the false impression that Reeves appeals to that vital listening demographic, the Youth.

Jason Byrne, who follows Vic Reeves' show should have him weeping into his pillow. Not because what he does is that groundbreaking - it's just observational stand-up and sketches - but it's obvious that someone has sat down and thought about what he was going to say, memorised and rehearsed it, rather than believe that all you have to do is show up and be brilliantly funny because it's part of what you are.

You know just what you're getting with Does the Team Think..., Radio 2's quiz game - Bob Mortimer and Ulrika Jonsson are panellists, and it's all held together by host Vic Reeves's surreal whimsy, so it's basically Shooting Stars remade for the airwaves. Not that this means it's unsuccessful - its half-hour of panellists fielding unlikely questions from the studio audience passes in congenial fashion, with the fact that its participants are old friends making things very cosy (in a good way). Jonsson comes in for lots of flak from her pals - after she confessed to a horror of reading instruction manuals, Reeves chipped in: "Couldn't you get a man round to do it? And then marry him?", but she was more than equal to the task of sending herself up. Asked if she uses slaves in her house, she suggested, "My husbands?"

We were big fans of the Vic Reeves / Bob Mortimer comedy 'quiz' show and, although this revival made us laugh, it didn't make us feel the need to march on the BBC demanding that it is reinstated to the schedules.

While we're on the subject of wilful stupidity, BBC2 was celebrating the legacy of Shooting Stars, the Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer game show. Shooting Stars: the Inside Story was an engaging retrospective, which made it clear how much fun everybody had at the time (and wasn't Ulrika pretty?). It made me annoyed at not having watched it more regularly. But then along came All New Shooting Stars, a strained attempt to revive the fun, with everybody looking older and tireder, and a depressing sense that entertaining the audience came a long way down the list of priorities.

Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer first hosted their anarchic celebrity quiz show in 1993. The first of two programmes marking the show's 15th anniversary tonight is a documentary about the making of it - and, like Shooting Stars itself, the film is funny, eccentric and a little self-indulgent. Interspersed with interviews with some of the celebrities who found themselves subjected to Reeves' and Mortimer's particular kind of comedy (which veered from the surreal to the mildly offensive), the presenters themselves play various crew members reminiscing about their time working behind the scenes. This is a suitably unique way to contemplate a programme which Martine McCutcheon calls 'bizarre' and of which Larry Hagman said, "I've done some loony shows in my time but this is certainly the one."

Shooting Stars launched the career of Matt Lucas - who played scorekeeper George Dawes before he went on to global fame with David Walliams in Little Britain - and latterly also co-starred the often self-confessedly drunken comic Johnny Vegas.