13 UK TV comedies that became movies, best to worst

Here's a rundown of the best and worst since the year 2000...

Tony Blair refused to ban Borat, says Sacha Baron Cohen

The comedian says the Kaskakhstani PM wanted to stop the 2006 film being released - and the row turned into an international incident, hitting trade.

Sacha Baron Cohen says FBI kept a file on him

Sacha Baron Cohen has revealed that the FBI showed an interest in him and his team during the filming of the movie Borat, and went as far as to go looking for him in his hotel.

Video: Borat says Donald Trump is fictional character

Borat appears on The Jimmy Kimmel Live show to promote Sacha Baron Cohen's new film. Cohen's character from Kazakhstan says Donald Trump must be a fictional person, because nobody would try to ban all Muslims from the US unless they have a brain 'the size of a female chicken'. Borat concludes that Trump must be another one of Cohen's 'offensive' characters.

Could anyone have foreseen just how great a comedy Borat - or to give it its full title, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan - was going to be? Its star, Sacha Baron Cohen, had honed the satirical stunt documentary to perfection in his Ali G TV series, but had crashed and burned when trying to put the character on the big screen, in the awful Ali G Indahouse. It's still a bit of a mystery why Baron Cohen ever got the chance to make a follow-up, but he wisely went back to the format that had proved itself time and again on TV: set up an apparently clueless fictional character, and send him in to encounter real-life types and get them to make idiots of themselves. Borat, the cheerfully antisemitic TV presenter from Kazakhstan, who had populated Baron Cohen's TV spots since the late 90s, may not have appeared promising material for a feature, but boy, was everyone wrong.

The film is based on a simple idea: Borat is making a documentary about the US. But the opening section, in which he introduces his home village and its inhabitants, establishes a tone of breathtaking offensiveness. The "Kazakh" actors clearly have no idea about the outrageous things Borat is saying about them, and Baron Cohen crowns proceedings by staging a "running of the Jew", supposedly a regular local pastime. Thus the stage is set: the film is an incredibly cruel satire, aimed at both post-Soviet bigotry and American social dysfunction.

By the time he gets to the US, Baron Cohen is in full flow, the superficial ingenuousness of his creation opening all sorts of doors. Arguably the most spectacular, and certainly unplanned, result is the consternation he causes by bravely singing a spoof national anthem at a rodeo in Texas; the electric hostility he triggers in the spectators unnerves one of the horses so much it stumbles and falls to the ground.

Baron Cohen, as has been pointed out, can be faulted perhaps for bamboozling the uncomprehending and the weak. But that misses the point of much of what makes Borat great: the joke is almost always on him as well. The sort of comedy that Baron Cohen is trying for is high-risk for sure, and hardly guaranteed to provide results - but Borat is all gold. We may never see its like again.

Back when he could still get away with hiding behind a large moustache, a Golden Globe winning Sacha Baron Cohen took various dim, unsuspecting Americans for a ride with this controversial mockumentary.

Posing as journalist Borat Sagdiyev, a racist, anti-Semitic simpleton from Kazakhstan, the London comic actor here goes to the US on a simple quest to find and marry Pamela Anderson.

Oscar-nominated for its screenplay, it was banned in all Arab countries except Lebanon and was initially denounced by the Kazakh government, who then embraced it when it was shown to have caused a surge in tourist interest.

Borat anthem stuns Kazakh gold medallist in Kuwait

Kazakhstan's shooting team has been left stunned after a comedy national anthem from the film Borat was played at a medal ceremony at championships in Kuwait instead of the real one.

Kazakhstan director shoots Borat sequel

A film director in Kazakhstan has shot a sequel to Sacha Baron Cohen's famous comedy Borat in a bid to improve the country's image.

Sacha Baron Cohen is a brave man. In this insensitive, vulgar and hilarious comedy, in which he meets real Americans while in the guise of a crude Kazakh reporter, he enrages a crowd of rednecks, insults the guests at a fine dining society and stalks Pamela Anderson. It's remarkable nobody throttles him.

Best films of the noughties No 2: Borat

Sacha Baron Cohen's fantastic satirical invention was unleashed on the world in 2006, and we've been recovering ever since.