Mock The Week

Get some of the country's most renowned stand-ups, throw in some up-and-coming talent, and what have you got? A show with an inexplicable fixation on 70s pop combo Showaddywaddy. But which also takes a marvellously disrespectful view of current affairs (you know, the stuff that seems so depressing when you watch it on the news).

If you want to terrify a comedian, go after them with a chainsaw while roaring like a rabid dog. Or, less illegally, ask them to improvise a routine on the spot. Apart from that chainsaw, few things are as scary as improvisation - mainly because few things are as teeth-grindingly difficult.

So let us applaud the brave comedic souls who grace Mock The Week. They're expected to dissect, satirise, lampoon and generally warp the affairs of the day on cue, and frankly we doff our cap at their talents.

Created by Dan Patterson and Mark Leveson, who gave us that other great improvisational show, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, the series features a number of rounds designed to extract as many jokes and jibes as possible from the comedians. These include the PR-puncturing Between the Lines (in which one player pretends to be a famous person giving a press conference while another player tells us what the famous person really means), and Spinning the News - which sees the contestants deliver instant stand-up riffs based on news items selected at random. Oh mother, watch the talent fly.