Comedy

Back in the last century, when people still watched television rather than computers, I fulfilled the lifetime ambition of every comedy nerd when I finally got to meet David Croft and Jimmy Perry. Whoever said ‘don’t meet your heroes’ clearly never met any sitcom writers. I was working on a BBC series about the history of British sitcom – since eclipsed by countless cheap clip shows, but actually quite a novelty back then – and though the actors were interesting, it was the writers who really shone. Like Galton & Simpson (Hancock, Steptoe) and Clement & La Frenais (Porridge, The Likely Lads), Croft & Perry were enchanting.

What We Did On Our Holiday is written and directed by Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton, the pair who created the hit BBC sitcom Outnumbered, and this is like an extended episode of Outnumbered minus anything that made it good in the first instance. This is Outnumbered: The Movie (But Crap). Hard to explain, considering Jenkin and Hamilton have more than proved their worth over the years (they also created the brilliant newsroom satire Drop the Dead Donkey) but we all have our off days, I suppose. And our supremely off days. We must put this down to a supremely off day, particularly as it even has one of those forced, saccharine endings where the violins go mad and everyone’s learnt An Important Life Lesson and hugs on a beach.

According to a poll, the funniest one-liner at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe was a joke about a vacuum cleaner: ‘I’ve decided to sell my hoover… well, it was just collecting dust’. Tim Vine, the man responsible for this curious bit of word play, said he was surprised to have won the coveted award. Presumably he hadn’t seen the rest of the top ten jokes, which ranged from cliché (‘I wanted to do a show about feminism. But my husband wouldn’t let me’) to stereotyping (‘Scotland had oil, but it’s running out thanks to all that deep frying’) and risky (‘Always leave them wanting more, my uncle used to say to me. Which is why he lost his job in disaster relief’).

Scotland’s on a knife-edge. Like all referendum-watchers at the Edinburgh Festival I grabbed a ticket for The Pitiless Storm, a drama about independence, which attracts big crowds every lunchtime at the Assembly Rooms. The play draws its inspiration from the passion and fury of Red Clydeside. David Hayman, an actor and lifelong leftie, plays a Glaswegian trade unionist who reflects on the troubles of Scottish socialism as the referendum approaches. Some of his rhetoric captures the best of the independence movement. ‘We’re not leaving the union, we’re joining the world.’ And he flavours his optimism with a dash of local irony.

John Bishop doesn’t just tell funny stories. He also tells the sort of life story that makes you sit up and listen. He grew up on a council estate outside Liverpool and, at the age of six, visited his father in prison. By the time he was in his mid-thirties he was working in middle management at a pharmaceutical company, had three children and was going through a divorce. Today he sells out 15,000-seat arenas, is still married to his wife and no longer works in middle management. It was a Monday night and Bishop was looking for something to do. His friends were tired of him ‘crying into his beer’ about his divorce. So, aged 34, he decided to visit a comedy club for only the third time in his life.

Visitors to Chatsworth House this spring might wonder if they have stumbled through the looking-glass. The estate’s rolling parkland has been invaded by an army of vibrantly coloured, outsized garden tools, whose outlines seem to hover, mirage-like, over the landscape. These painted-steel 2D ‘sculptures of drawings’ are the brainchildren of the conceptual artist Michael Craig-Martin. Craig-Martin finds poetry in the everyday and here he has taken 12 commonplace objects — a wheelbarrow; a spade; a lightbulb — and transformed them into something extraordinary. He also believes that context is everything when it comes to art and the works have been carefully positioned.