Will Smith (I)

I wasn't planning to review this show but things changed for reasons you will soon discover.

The long running satirical panel game, currently hosted by Sandi Toksvig, has been running since 1977, and last week saw the start of its 74th series. This week's guests included regular performers Jeremy Hardy and Susan Calman, semi-regular Will Smith, and journalist Matthew Parris.

There were some topics that you would expect to be covered, such as the royal wedding, super injunctions and Libya, but then it came to the subject of tuition fees, and how most universities are raising them to extortionate rates.

Among those are my old university, Teesside University in Middlesbrough, which this week announced it was planning to put up its fees of £8,500. As you would expect, they took the mickey out of the region. Parris said that what was actually going on was that they were actually selling the whole university for £8,500.

Smith said that £8,500 tuition fees were a status thing, but argued that if this was the reason that they should just change the name to "Oxbridge University of the North" or "Hogwarts".

It cost the university £20,000 to change its logo and the name of the establishment to "Teesside University" from "University of Teesside", so £8,500 is nothing, really. Toksvig at the end claimed that if anyone was offended, the £8,500 includes, "a whole row of terrace houses."

To be honest with you, I was shocked when I heard them talking about Teesside in such a fashion, because I am amazed that anyone on BBC Radio 4 has even heard of Teesside.

I didn't mind The News Quiz mocking my old university, though. I'm just glad it got the publicity, even if it was not the most glowing publicity. To be honest, when I heard that the fees were going up, I was on Twitter arguing the raise was impossible; because no-one in Teesside has £8,500. (It's true - I'm currently writing this on a Windows 98 in a skip near a Starbucks, leeching onto the Wi-Fi).

The News Quiz show is still entertaining after so many years, and because it is on at 6.30pm, it mocks the news two-and-a-half hours before Have I Got News for You does. Well worth a listen.

We must be nearing the point of critical mass at which there are more comedy panel shows than there are comedians. Argumental attempts, with intermittent success, to split the difference between Have I Got News For You and Mock The Week, by getting teams of the usual suspects to debate topics suggested by John Sergeant. Tonight, captains Marcus Brigstocke and Rufus Hound are joined, respectively, by comics Will Smith and Jimmy Carr. Subjects include sweatshops, face transplants, reality TV and homosexuality.

Happy Tuesdays: Mr and Mrs Smith

I listened to Will Smith's Mr and Mrs Smith the other day - part of the Happy Tuesdays season of pilots on Radio 4. It was a show about a married couple undergoing counselling, and starred Will Smith and Sarah Hadland. I rather liked it. In fact, I like it a lot.

More meditations on love came from Mr and Mrs Smith in Radio 4's late night Happy Tuesdays slot, a series whose reviews thus far must have prompted some horribly unhappy Wednesdays. Written by Will Smith, who starred as the Conservative aide in The Thick of It, the scene was a marriage-guidance session. She was unsatisfied - he gave her a draining rack for their first anniversary - he was unsatisfactory: "I only feel like a man when I'm playing Call of Duty". Their romantic mini-break was predictably disastrous. It was, I suppose, the kind of humour you can multi-task to. Gently amusing, and Smith will undoubtedly go on to write slicker and faster material.

Things I learned recording my radio pilot

If you are married, and you write a show where you play a character going to marriage counselling who has your name, you can expect a few awkward conversations with people on the outer ring of your social circle.

Audio: Ricky Gervais on hanging out with Will Smith

Comedy trio Ricky Gervais, Karl Pilkington and Stephen Merchant have seen their programme The Ricky Gervais Show find a celebrity audience in the States. They talk to Newsbeat about their success.

He's a man unaware of how out of kilter he is with the planet, but Will Smith has turned 35 and is concerned by his lack of achievement. Coming across like a more obsessive Adrian Mole, he's without savvy, disgruntled with his lot - and fearful at the thought of doing anything about it. Yet what can you expect from a person who never received birthday presents when he was growing up because his parents thought August was too close to Christmas?

Will Smith's considerable comic skill comes in releasing our inner geek and it's our job to decide how far we should go along with his diagnosis of what's gone wrong with the world. But come on - which one of us wouldn't be enraged by someone who couldn't put the Police Academy movies in order? Oh, so that'll be just me and Will then...

Comedian Will Smith (not to be confused with the American rapper and film star) has co-written this new sitcom in which he stars as himself. Reaching the age of 35 has depressed him at how little he has achieved. After all, he says, Christ had died and risen again by the age of 33, an observation which gives you a notion of the size of Will's fragile ego. So he draws in to this scenario his fictional godfather Peter (played by superb Roger Allam) who each week will invite a special guest to advise him on some perplexing aspect of his life.

Will Smith is one of those people who's always seemed middle-aged, despite being young. But now, he's turned 35 and begun to stress... Such is the setup for Smith's new sitcom, also starring Roger Allam as Will's godfather, Peter.

Armando Iannucci's radio show is a bit of a teeth-clencher... let's examine the components.

It's a sort of chat show, with three guests, except they aren't allowed to chat. They are there to make jokes on topics, presumably of which they have had notice, chosen to reflect the week's events. On Friday these included national holidays (Get Carter Day, suggested Will Smith, to rare studio audience silence), unlikely headlines (E.coli has entered the Big Brother house, offered Iannucci), David Cameron choosing a Benny Hill song on Desert Island Discs (here Natalie Haynes began talking, bafflingly, about shoes), who in public life you would like to kill and why (Clive Anderson pointed out that killing people is wrong, but Will Smith insisted that he still wants to kill Alan Rothwell for stealing his Action Man, the one with a parachute).

Iannucci joined in competitively and did solo riffs on why he hates Apple (his iPod froze) and his local gym. Croquet figured largely, of course, so largely that on Saturday, after the repeat, the weatherman said it would be a wonderful afternoon for it if the subject hadn't already been malleted to death.

Could it be that none of Iannucci's guests had spent enough time thinking what to say? Is it possible that Iannucci himself, back in 1990, when he was putting together the genuinely revolutionary On the Hour (and sweeping aside the News Quiz team waiting to get into the studio after him), would have allowed this show on air? I doubt it.

I think he's bored with the news and with radio. He's exhausted. He's had an exceptionally busy and productive year. Another, during which he will also set up the BBC's new comedy workshop, lies ahead. He has given energy and intelligence to some truly major work. Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive is, alas, the dregs.