Stand-up comedians: is there anything they can’t do? Not only do they make up a huge proportion of chat-show guests — and of chat-show hosts — they also present Horizon, give us guides to the night sky, utterly dominate panel shows and regularly pop up on Question Time. Recently, they even set up their own news discussion programme in the as yet formless shape of Ten O’Clock Live.
And that’s just television. In the lead-up to Christmas, Dawn French saw off Stephen King, John Grisham and Maeve Binchy to have the country’s bestselling hardback novel, while the fastest selling DVD in British history is Michael McIntyre’s ‘Hello Wembley!’, whose title is a clue to the type of places he and many of his fellow comics play these days. So how on earth did all this come about — and what effect has it had on the sort of comedy on offer?
It’s hard to imagine now, but, as one BBC producer puts it, ‘The received wisdom a few years ago was that you couldn’t put stand-up on telly.
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