Facejacker

Kayvan Novak interview

An interview with Kayvan Novak, an actor and comedian, and star of Channel 4's Fonejacker.

Back on Channel 4 tonight is prankster Kayvan Novak's Facejacker (10pm).

It's another bunch of toe-curlingly brilliant sketches, including his Terry Tibbs character becoming a fantastically offensive judge in a US beauty pageant.

That, plus an excellent wind-up involving customers struggling to use a supermarket self-service till. I love the bit where the till demands proof of age from an old geezer trying to buy a tin of custard.

The show in which a man covered in blancmange harasses innocent members of the public is back. Those who prefer intelligence, subtlety or actual humour, look away now. There are three routines intercut throughout this first episode of Facejacker's new series: a sleazy car salesman judges an American beauty pageant, a sexually overactive middle-aged African woman makes aggressive advances towards two men trying to take their cabbie's exam, and an automatic checkout machine gets the prices wrong. The first is excruciatingly awkward, the second borderline racist and the third simply mindnumbing in its repetitiveness. Kayvan Novak won deserved acclaim for his role in Four Lions - but this is just Trigger Happy TV with even fewer jokes.

Kayvan Novak is back to Facejack

Kayvan Novak will be back on our screens soon.

Prankster Kayvan Novak's brand of surreal comedy is not to everyone's taste but it earned him a Bafta award for this series's first incarnation FoneJacker, and a Bafta nomination for the first series of FaceJacker. The latter returns tonight for a second series and this time Novak is taking his characters to the USA to unleash them on an unsuspecting public. Donning heavy prosthetics and adopting a wide variety of funny voices, he poses as bald geezer Terry Tibbs who takes over as a beauty pageant judge in Philadelphia. Meanwhile back in the UK, Augustine Kwembe becomes a minicab driving inspector in order to hunt for new sexual mates.

Kayvan Novak returns for a second series of dogged prankstering with Facejacker, much like his breakthrough show Fonejacker but with clammy prosthetics. Car dealer Terry Tibbs is back with a bang, travelling to the US to judge a beauty pageant in his own inimitably inappropriate style, while highly sexed minicab test examiner Augustine also returns. A sketch involving a faulty self-service check out perilously approaches Jeremy Beadle territory, but thankfully skirts around it.

Channel 4 scores Facejacker phone app first

Channel 4 is to become the UK's first terrestrial channel to launch a publicly available mobile app that uses hidden audio triggers to unlock exclusive additional content.