This piece first appeared on Robin Ince's blog. Read more posts here.I’ve just been to a screening of Billy Connolly’s High Horse Tour Live.As we now know, mutation, heredity and natural selection... more
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A few years ago, following a performance in Edinburgh, someone said of my shows that they were all about freedom. Only on rare occasions throughout my nearly twenty-year career (if you can call it... more
It was interesting this week to see that Mel & Sue decided to quit The Great British Bake Off after it was announced that it will be moving to Channel 4. What will be even more interesting,... more
I was told earlier today that there is no press access for Dave Chappelle's run of intimate shows in London this week so I went on the website for the Electric Ballroom in Camden to buy tickets and... more
“It’s just not funny enough.” This was a comment that I kept hearing during the Edinburgh Fringe this year. Not necessarily about the newly-crowned lastminute.com Best Comedy Show winner Richard Gadd... more
The lastminute.com Edinburgh Comedy Award shortlist will be announced at lunchtime today. In previous years I’ve had a go at predicting the nominations. In some years I’ve been pretty close and... more
OK, so I need to start out by declaring that in a past life, before being a performer, I have been a reviewer. I was young, I needed the money (well, the free tickets to bands I was too skint to go... more
For me, and maybe for many others, Caroline Aherne will always be inextricably linked with the north. The umpteen obituaries and tributes have quite rightly placed her in lineage tying together... more
It’s Pete Sinclair that I feel sorry for. Among others of course. He is one of the writers of C4’s Power Monkeys and as if it wasn’t hard enough already to write a whole sitcom episode in a day, he... more
One of Rik Mayall’s very last projects was to play a modern version of Fagin. In the months leading up to his sudden death on June 9, 2014 Mayall had been collaborating on a script with American... more
