Stand-Up With The Stars

The quartet of R4 presenters - Evan Davis, Libby Purves, Peter White and Laurie Taylor - who walked the comedy plank for Red Nose Day in Stand-Up For Comic Relief didn't exactly bring the house down.

In the video on the R4 website, Davies looked so far out of his comfort zone one could hardly bear to watch, while 73-year-old Taylor, a more natural humourist, seemed quite at home pacing the stage, cracking jokes. However it was White who had the edge by virtue of his comedian's voice and his lack of inhibition about doing disability jokes. Who else but a blind person would dare do jokes about being blind? The public voted him the winner by a wide margin.

My one night stand-up

What's it like to get up in front of a room full of people and try to make them laugh, for the first time? At 72, Magazine columnist Laurie Taylor took a belated and brief plunge into the notoriously tough world of that stand-up comedy. Features a video of his performance.

Will Radio 4 Please Stand Up?

Did they crack it? Well, Paul Merton might not need to be afraid for his job but at least they didn't die a death. It would have been lovely to see the process on television though - they didn't sound very frightened, though maybe you could have seen the fear in their eyes if they had been onscreen.

I did, however, feel that the programme was a tiny bit disingenuous. Of course stand-up comedy is different to their day jobs, but I couldn't help sensing that they had more of a natural aptitude for it than, say, miners or chefs. Maybe a gig at the dainty Drill Hall theatre in front of a R4 partisan crowd wasn't quite the dragon's den that midnight on a raucous, lager-fuelled Saturday at the Comedy Store would have been. Why not give them a real challenge and send them there? That might have really taken this bunch of softies out of their comfort zones.

Stand-up at Radio 4? You must be joking

Comic Relief has persuaded BBC presenters to try to make us laugh for charity - with mixed results.

Evan Davis' blog

For me, the idea of standing in front of an audience of several hundred people, each of whom keenly expects you to make them laugh out loud, was pretty close to a nightmare.