Vic Reeves

Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer interview

Could a new fishing partnership really come between comedy's most anarchic duo?

Vic and Bob interview

Grow up? You must be joking! Almost 30 years after they subverted television comedy with the anarchic Big Night Out, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer are bringing it back.

Vic and Bob: Neither of us want to be super famous

Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer have said they never wanted to be "super f****** famous" and chose comedy as a career because it seemed like a "pleasant" way to live.

TV Preview: Vic & Bob's Big Night Out, BBC4

I don't know how they've done it but Vic and Bob really have recaptured the old magic again.

Funny Cow review

Maxine Peake is wonderful as a female comedian.

Funny Cow review

If Adrian Shergold's film tells us anything about life in 1970s England, the overriding message is that being a female standup comedian was clearly no laughing matter.

Movies about comedy are rarely funny but Funny Cow takes the sad clown cliché to such a grim extreme it becomes almost laughable. Starring the excellent Maxine Peake as an aspiring British stand-up in the sexist, racist, homophobic environs of the Northern working men's clubs of the 1970s and early 1980s, the film around her is such a wilfully incoherent mess it renders her performance all but dead on arrival.

She plays the eponymous Funny Cow (no other character name is given), a battered wife who has apparently found success by transforming the trauma of her life into a stage act that mixes the sort of politically incorrect gags of the era with uncomfortable confessionals about her childhood, her marriage and her surroundings. Using what seems like a television special or a monologue-based theatre show as a framing device, the film deploys random flashbacks (with occasional magical realist flourishes) to various incidents in her life in order to track her evolution from defiant child who stood up to her violent father (Stephen Graham) to self-determining woman able to conquer the male-dominated club circuit with racist and fat-shaming jokes of her own.

Along the way she's mentored by a terminally depressed veteran comic (Alun Armstrong) and meets a cartoonishly conceived bookseller (a woefully miscast Paddy Considine), whose Pygmalion fantasies she's more than happy to exploit as she escapes her brutal marriage to the knuckle-dragging Bob (played by the film's writer Tony Pitts). Blink-and-you'll-miss-them cameos from the likes of Vic Reeves and John Bishop capture some of the sad, broken spirit of the variety circuit, but the film's determination to avoid the rise-fall-redemption character arc of the biopic (even a fictional biopic) backfires. By plotting a more elliptical and impressionistic course - one perhaps inspired by Nicholas Winding Refn's Bronson or the Andy Serkis-starring Ian Dury biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll - Funny Cow might give some sense of the chaos of its protagonist's life, but that's not the same thing as making it compelling on screen. In the end it feels like a hollow and rather pointless exercise.

Review: Funny Cow

Maxine Peake captivates in a film that takes a serious look at being funny.