Richard Hawley

I've never really been into Kay. I can give him Phoneix Nights which I put down to the majority of Spiky material and will acknowledge that he has the potential to play character-based parts.

His stand up for me can be condensed into this:

Do you remember the 80s? Remember the A-Team theme? Eeh, big light, eh? Garlic bread! Aren't old people funny? Remember the 80s?

As for the Pop Goes The X Factor...ad nasuem...I agree with the view that apart from the soft target of reality TV being about 5 years out of date, that the original source material is far funnier and desperate. This, as with the single release, was a pointless excerise on about five different levels. The gags were obvious and very basic.

Sure you can release the single 'The Winners Song' and argue that if it outsells the X Factor hopefuls that it shows that the same audience will go out and buy trite, bland ballads in droves, but part of the point is that you're sort of not supposed to buy into it. And anyway whether you do or you don't doesn't prove a thing because everything is so fucking post-modern and clever these days, eh? At least that's what you would have thought. It wasn't really satire, more of a pastiche. A really poor, obvious thing to have done in 2002 but in 2008...you have to wonder.

Shite like this doesn't move British comedy forward. It devolves it. It's as lazy as Katy Brand, Karen Taylor, Star Stories and much of the crap Channel 4, ITV 2 and BBC 3 claims passes for comedy these days.

If you want a vision of British comedy in the future imagine a clip of a grey haired Peter Kay shouting 'I want a bungalow! I want a bungalow! Garlic bread anyone!' at an empty chair where Parky used to sit, in a disused television studio.

two people can agree on 9 out of 10 comedians and disagree very strongly on number 10, you either find it funny or not and nothing can convince you otherwise