comedy? that’s a laugh

Well the British Comedy Awards event , in its 21st year,  finds itself two new homes – on C4 and at the Indigo venue at the O2. About time, some might say, that it grew up a bit. And has it? Well here’s a shot of the presenters of the first award; a big Irishman with a dwarf on his shoulders.  Now I happen to think Dara O’Briain is brilliant and that Warwick Davis is a hugely talented comic actor but this was as close to a visual Jim Davidson joke as I’ve seen in recent years. Mature? Not really. Bizarre? Just a little. And these weren’t the only odd things on the night.

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farewell parky, thank goodness

Did you happen to see the final interviews on the Parkinson show on Saturday night? What did you think? I thought it was all a touch indulgent and a bit sad really. Not because he’s going but because it looked like a tired format which had long overrun its time – an old silver-haired guy chatting to 3 other grey-haired old geysers whose conversations were re-hashes of previous chats. Then a change in pace with a less-than challenging chat with David Beckham followed by ‘young’ Peter Kay, whose routine was just embarrassing. Dressing Parkinson up as a lollypop man wasn’t exactly cutting edge. Then a song tribute from Dame Judy and a 2 minute chat with her which was hi-jacked by Billy Connolly, which was immediately followed by… a song tribute from Dame Edna with both songs trying futilely to find a decent rhyme with Parky. Now if Dame Judy had sung about the ‘flirt from Yorkshire who chats… whilst he porks yer’ I’d have shown more interest.

moyles going down

Did you see last week’s Rajar figures covering radio listening figures for Q3? Radio 2’s Wogan show was down around quarter of a million listeners, J Ross down around 200k and Radio 5 Live’s overall results the lowest for 7 years. So a bad day at the office for the increasingly pressured BBC. But nothing gave me a warmer feeling than to see that the self-proclaimed ‘saviour’ of Radio 1, old potato-head Moyles, had lost 280k listeners in a single quarter. He’s been on every day time chat-show around over the last couple of months too which makes me smile even more. For 3 months at least, every critic of his will be spared those late night messages from Qwerty 08 reminding us that farmers pants Moyles was attracting no less than 8M listeners to his Radio show and demanding that we ‘do the math’. Well you’re going to have to change that line CM. Over 7.71M listeners is still good but it’s not as snappy now eh Moylesey?

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le ross v le moyles

I’m not sure why I’ve reverted to French there in the headline. But tonight the Moyles was a guest on the Jonathan Ross show. He was the sandwich filling between A1-ish Hollywood film stars Michelle Pfeiffer and Ewan Mcgregor, and his motor bike mate. Now I don’t normally watch JR; I don’t find his sense of fun/talent to be worth anything like £18m of licence payers’ money to be honest. Is it just me? I know this sounds like I don’t like anybody at the BBC but that’s simply not true. There are many great presenters, and I’ll get back to you with my list.