I agree. It's awful.

It really is. I've not found any of it funny at all.

They would have known about the Friday football since Chelsea won the Champions League final in May as winning the Champions League means you face the winner of the UEFA Cup in the Super Cup which is this Friday.

I enjoyed New Tricks tonight but it was a bit different from the normal kind of episode.

I was being serious, it's not that bad, better than The Royal Bodyguard by far... Although that isn't much of an accomplishment...

I think it will pull in 4 million as it is another trophy they could win and non Sky fitba fans like my brother will watch.

Citizen Khan makes The Crouches look like an accomplished sitcom.

I think we've got another Royal Bodyguard situation here, it will no doubt rate highly tonight but drop significantly over the next few episodes.

I'd love it to be soundly thrashed by Frankie Boyle's genuinely funny C4 show, but obviously that'll never happen. Realistically it'll probably be about 3m for Khan vs 1m for Boyle. Khan will probably fall though based on the reviews so far.

No doubt TRB will get one of our ratings awards, possibly David Jason's Golden Turkey award for such an awful show.
Mind you for this year I have my own Golden Turkeys for shows that are low rating and also purely awful: TRB, ROB( it gets worse by the minute), Shipwrecked( why, it's been cancelled twice) and Peter Andre's Bad Boyfriend Club( tosh of the highest order).
For the Golden Globes for mega ratings, excellent production and being very watchable: BBC Olympic coverage( broke the 20 million barrier twice), CTM( came from nowhere and battered DOI), and the Wimbledon men's final( highest ratings since the seventies).

Boyle... genuinely funny?

Not watching but I find that hard to believe.

Odious little man, full of hate. Some 'comedian' he is.

Depends how seriously you take him I suppose. I find him very funny but we're clearly never going to agree on that. I'm glad C4 have given him another show though - let's see how hysterical The Daily Mail get this time, should be fun.

I'd much rather watch him than banal rubbish like Citizen Khan apparently was.

Mock The Week's been crap since he left too.

Frankie leaving was the best thing to happen to Mock the Week. He became too overpowering a presence and not in a good way. Not sure he was well liked by his colleagues either. 'Edgy' C4 is the best place for him, nice and easy to avoid on there.

I suspect the key battleground tonight may have occurred in film as opposed to comedy, shaping up much better in that genre. Avatar (Film4), The Incredible Hulk (ITV2), Precious (BBC Two), Serenity (ITV1) and Airplane! (Sky1) combined to offer viewers a decent range. Lots of good movies on for the Bank Holiday.

Genuinely funny.. right.

It's him doing a rip off of Live at the Apollo, they even have celebrity guests in the audience(Olympians) His material so far has been mainly recycled from his twitter feed.

He did come up with some of the funniest lines on Mock the Week.

"Leon Jackson is still selling records... at his local HMV in Paisley"
[In scenes we'd like to see: what a television announcer is unlikely to say] "The following episode of Songs of Praise contains strong language and scenes of a sexual nature"
"The English are worried about the Euro being brought in because of loss of national identity and rising prices. In Scotland, people are just worried in case they have to close Poundstretcher. "

They're not your Mo Farahs or Jess Ennis' are they? Redgrave did nothing in 2012 and Pendleton is just a tabloid hunter. I was expecting better, but clearly the Olympians have more dignity than I thought...good on them.

Redgrave is arguably the most celebrated British Olympian of all time and Pendleton won a gold and silver medal. And frankly if Ennis and Farah had said yes they'd just be 'tabloid hunters' as well so the BBC can't win in this situation with you anyway.

Redgrave is still extremely popular, and Pendleton is the most successful female Olympian we've ever had... How much better can you get??

And Fudd is right too...

Wow, that's an 8 year old show that's sold millions of DVD copies. Kay really pulls in for C4. They must be desperate for him to do something new

Pendleton looks like the best bet in terms of being a "character". It would seem that she might be, shall we say, "difficult". The Daily Mail (which favours Strictly to X Factor) is already showing a fair bit of interest in her. Redgrave might not be as hot just now as Jessica Ennis or Chris Hoy but anything Olympic-related is bound to pull in punters for the next few months.

He was certainly overpowering but he was the star of the show and there's been a gaping hole ever since. You're right about some of his colleagues not liking him, mind. Hugh Dennis in particular seemed to hate him (probably because he got completely overshadowed every week). Russell Howard seemed to be the only one that liked him (I think Howard was the only one Boyle liked much too, and he's left now as well).

The show now is a shadow of it's former self. I'm not a great fan of any of the three regular panelists (Parsons is utterly useless) and whilst I like Dara I don't think he's enough to salvage the whole thing, unfortunately.


Nothing more subjective than comedy, Jake. Did you enjoy Citizen Khan? From what I've heard it was up there with other BBC1 gems like In With Flynns and The Royal Bodyguard so I think I'll give it a miss.


Well it wasn't supposed to be an original idea. The whole point of it was that it was a piss take of The Royal Variety (which has been around a lot longer than Live At The Apollo!) so it was obviously going to follow the same format.

Personally I'd much rather watch Boyle than sit through another hour of boring, half arsed material from Peter Kay, but looking at the ratings I'm clearly in the minority on that one.

I think in terms of Olympic 'IT' girls for Team GB, Pendleton is up there with Jessica Ennis. And she is hot!

If they have signed her up it'll be a great coup.

http://www.outofaces.com/victoria-pendleton/

Well, I thought Citizen Khan went far better than I feared. I genuinely laughed out loud several times. Then it faded as the episode dragged a bit.

It's actually a half decent sitcom, with a likeable lead and supporting cast. I just think the "sit" isn't going to register with a wide mainstream audience (contrast with Mrs Brown's), and frankly millions won't even give a sitcom unashamedly set in the Birmingham Pakistani community a chance.

With that in mind, I do think the Beeb missed a trick by not taking advantage of the Bank Holiday to launch it right after New Tricks - that the first 15 minutes was actually rather funny may just have snared a couple million more.

I guess it will rate around the 2m mark this week, but suspect it's headed for the 1.5m's hereafter.

Managed to find an article I remembered reading some time ago:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/bu...w-2251151.html

Seems pretty definitive that the BBC's Lottery contract expires in December this year - and that, quite obviously, the BBC weren't very interested in renewing it. I've heard nothing since this, though, and you'd have thought Camelot would be needing to get a solution in place by now.

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If many/most of those names were confirmed for Strictly, they'd all be pretty good acquisitions. SCD does get the better calibre of celebrity because it's pretty risk-free - you won't come out of it a hate figure (as you might on Big Brother), you won't wind up doing some really unpleasant things for food (as in I'm a Celebrity) and you stand a reasonable chance of surviving without doing yourself serious injury (as in Dancing on Ice). The money is less, and the commitment is longer - but its a much better platform than any other celebrity show, and much kinder to your character too.