Comedy

Only one thing makes Frank Skinner nervous. ‘Water. Water scares me. I don’t get nervous on stage. Just in swimming pools. I didn’t learn to swim until 2013. Avoiding water is easier if you live in Birmingham.’ The stand-up comedian’s image is plastered across the centre of Edinburgh on six-foot placards to advertise the dates of his national tour. ‘SOLD OUT’ is blazoned across the top. This seems a weird strategy — promoting a product that’s no longer available — and I ask him about it when we meet at a quietly expensive hotel near Bristo Square. ‘I’ve sold out the Edinburgh run but there are tickets available for the

Games for Lovers feels like a smart, sexy TV comedy. Martha is still in love with her old flame Logan whose new girlfriend has a huge libido which he can’t hope to satisfy. When Martha starts flat-hunting she answers an advert coincidentally posted by Logan’s best friend, Darren. Thus, perhaps too neatly, the two warring couples are set up for a massive falling out. Darren (played brilliantly by Billy Postlethwaite, with shades of Kevin Kline) is the beating heart of this story. He’s a former nerd who works as a City analyst and uses tricks learned from the internet to bed women. But all his techniques backfire and he becomes

BBC2’s How the Middle Classes Ruined Britain (Tuesday) began rather promisingly. ‘I’m a working-class comedian who voted Leave,’ announced presenter Geoff Norcott, ‘and I think it’s about time you lot heard some home truths.’ But then came the programme itself — which turned out to be the TV equivalent of a footballer who, faced with an open goal, dribbles about aimlessly before falling over. The first bit of aimless dribbling followed the shock news that middle-class parents often try to get their children into the best local schools, sometimes by claiming to live nearer to them than they do. To prove it, Norcott joined Havering Council’s ‘dedicated team of sleuths’

Late Night is a comedy starring Emma Thompson as a chat-show host in America whose ratings are in decline and who hires her first female writer. This is Molly, who is welcomed by the bank of male writers, not. They initially mistake her for someone who has come to take their food orders and greet her with: ‘I’ll have the soup.’ So it’s that. And then it’s quite a lot more of that, one way or another. And, you know, good. A woman-centred comedy that satirises the white male stronghold on comedy? Count me in! And it does have its terrific moments, plus Thompson is absolutely superb, and clearly having

After its new costume drama You Go, Girl! (Sundays) about how amazing, empowered and better-than-men women are, especially if they are lesbians, the BBC ran its first ever Nike ad. At least that’s what I thought initially: rap music, moody shots of athletes, very high production values. Then I saw they were all grim-faced women and the word ‘RISE’ in flames and I thought: ‘Big new drama series? About girls who’ve been sucked into this very strict Christian cult, a bit like the Handmaid’s Tale, maybe?’ Then I noticed they were all wearing football kit and kicking balls around, and went back to my original Nike idea. Finally came the

‘Unfunny, boring and utterly unrelenting,’ says the Guardian’s one-star review of Chris Lilley’s new sketch series Lunatics (Netflix). And if that’s not incentive enough, our woke critical chum goes on to declare the series ‘problematic’. That’s a weaselly way of saying ‘this triggered all my snowflake sensitivities’ but in such a way as to make it sound like a loftily objective judgment. In truth, Lunatics is only problematic if a) you have no sense of humour and b) you’d prefer all comedy to be politically correct, inoffensive and utterly devoid of satirical edge. Sometimes, Lunatics is so cruel that it’s almost too painful to watch. But this isn’t because —

‘I spend a lot of time helping teenagers who’ve been sexually abused…’ — beat — ‘…find their way out of my house.’ You’d scarcely imagine, listening to Frankie Boyle now, that this was the kind of joke he was telling on TV as recently as this decade. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I didn’t have written evidence of it, in the form of a 2011 TV review of his now-forgotten shocker of a Channel 4 show, Tramadol Nights. Boyle was great back then because he went to places few other comics dared to tread. He joked about everything from cancer (‘What is it about people with cancer thinking they’re

If you liked Triumph of the Will, you’ll love this latest masterpiece of the genre: Our Planet. The Netflix nature series exploits the prestige, popularity and swansinging poignancy of Sir David Attenborough to promote an environmental message so relentlessly dishonest and alarmist it might have been scripted by the WWF. ‘Walruses committing suicide because of global warming.’ That was the nonsense from episode two repeated uncritically by all the newspapers, none of which seems to have been much interested in questioning the veracity of the claim. You’ll never guess what it was that really drove those walruses over the edge of the cliff… Ironically, the likely culprits were polar bears