My Funniest Year

Addison takes to the stage of the Hackney Empire to deliver a live clip show based around his favourite year. His comedy odyssey takes us back to 2001, when Bush Jr came to power and ITV's Popstars gave us Hear'Say. News footage shows the year to be not that funny at all, with the twin towers falling and mass culling of foot and mouth-infected livestock, but this just gives Addison a chance to deploy the stockpile of gags he's had a decade to gather.

My Funniest Year may well give you the longest night of yours, though in putting this two-hour programme on at 10 at night, Channel 4 is clearly hoping that alcohol will already have done its bit to erode our judgement. It's classic slump television, the sort of thing you watch because there's nothing else on and your volition is lying on the floor somewhere, underneath a pizza box. The concept is insultingly lazy. Hire a comedian to stitch together a clip show along the lines of I Love the 80s, but take the word "love" out of the title so that he or she can slag everything off. This week it was Rufus Hound reading the autocue - a gamily flavoured comedian at the best of times, but one who can be funny in the right setting. He wasn't here, rarely rising above the level of pub abuse. The lines followed a formula: mention event from 2000, think of feebly insulting metaphor, try and stiffen it up with a heavily stressed vulgarity. Thus: "That river of fire looked like the funeral of the world's shittest Viking", "Castaway was like a microcosm of an island full of dicks" and Heather Mills described as "always on the hunt for treasure like a Long John Silver with tits". Fortunately for him, the year in question contained two moments that proved television can sink lower than this - Rebecca Loos manually pleasuring a pig and Richard Blackwood evacuating his bowels on camera. Alongside those clips, My Funniest Year looked almost classy.

My Funniest Year 2000 review

A few years ago this would be the sort of clip show fare Jimmy Carr would be fronting (with the jokes being pretty much the same) but Rufus Hound does a decent enough job in the stand-up role. He just needs a better platform than this to show off his talents and one that doesn't resort to obvious jokes about Big Brother contestants.

In a depressingly retrograde studio audience format, compere and comedian Rufus Hound does something the futurists never dreamt of - looks back with a wry, nostalgic eye to the year 2000. As clips remind us, this was the year of Big Brother's inauguration, of Geri Halliwell at the UN, of Tony Blair being booed by the Women's Institute, of the beginning of George Bush's disastrous Presidency. We could do without Hound's constant prompts as to what to find amusing in all this. Shaun Ryder, Mr 2000 himself, guests.

This new format attempts to combine the uncomplicated watchability of clip shows with stand-up, a genre that's currently enjoying something of a small-screen revival with the likes of Live at the Apollo and Michael McIntyre's Comedy Roadshow. The idea here is that a comedian tells the story of a past year - nothing too far back, mind, this is still aimed at a "yoof" audience - to a live crowd at London's Hackney Empire theatre, recounting news stories, playing archive footage and chatting to studio guests along the way. First up is moustachioed Let's Dance for Sport Relief champion Rufus Hound, rewinding to the year when Big Brother began and George W Bush was in the White House.

Essentially, this is Channel 4's answer to Live at the Apollo, with which, annoyingly, it clashes. Near-the-knuckle stand-up Rufus Hound performs live in front of an audience at London's Hackney Empire, with the twist that his routine is entirely based around mocking the people and events of the year 2000. He's not short of targets, from the arrival of Big Brother to the no-show of the millennium bug to doomed celebrity marriages (Brad and Jen, Madonna and Guy, Macca and Heather). His approach is unashamedly crude and cruel (there's some really off-colour material about Jill Dando and Barry George), but in the course of two hours, there are laughs too, as well as a bizarre appearance from gum-chewing Happy Monday Shaun Ryder.

Channel 4's answer to the Beeb's hit stand up extravaganza Live At The Apollo may not have the glitz and glamour of their competitor's production, but they have a terrific opening act in Rufus Hound. Playing in front of a live audience at London's Hackney Empire, the comic deconstructs the year 2000 in a superb set that takes in everything from Big Brother to Brad and Jen. Was it really ten years ago?

My Funniest Year - 2000 Review

My Funniest Year basically consists of two hours of YouTube clips which could have been assembled by chimps, interspersed with cutting and crude commentary from Rufus Hound.