Review: Alexander Armstrong's Real Ripping Yarns

This could easily have been just a rehash of jingoistic values, without the mitigating Python silliness - and sometimes it was - but Real Ripping Yarns also provided a novel lens though which to view a major change in British culture.

Boys "ought never to decline to climb up a tree ... merely because there is a possibility of their falling off and breaking their necks". RM Ballantyne there, in his 1861 novel The Gorilla Hunters - the sort of stiff upper-lip stuff sent up by Michael Palin and Terry Jones in their 70s comedy Ripping Yarns. In this gleeful one-off, a perfectly-cast Alexander Armstrong explores that show's influences, from an era when boys were men, girls were nurses and the empire ruled the waves. Spiffing.

Radio Times review

The post-Flying Circus break-up is a bit like the Beatles' story. After the Pythons initially "disbanded", there was a flowering of individual creativity: Cleese went on to Fawlty Towers, Idle to the underrated Rutland Weekend Television, Gilliam to Time Bandits and beyond, and Palin and Jones to their majestic upending of the Boy's Own universe...

Ripping Yarns ran for just nine episodes from 1976-9 but is fondly remembered by those who enjoyed its arcane world of bullying cups, crusty colonials and crossing the Andes by frog. It was a very different kind of comedy, expensive, all made on film after the pilot and with top-notch guest stars.

Alexander Armstrong briefly takes off his Pointless hat to explore the preoccupations that the Yarns found ripe for ridicule - the rituals of boarding school, aggressive imperialism, and scarcely credible sporting heroics.

Michael Palin and Terry Jones themselves chip in with genial observation. While not shirking the more indigestible ingredients of Boy's Own Paper - the xenophobia in particular - it also celebrates their more laudable aspects in these risk-averse times. A spiffing wheeze indeed.

Ben Miller interview

Ben Miller on starring in The Duck House, a farce about MPs' expenses, and sketch partnership with Alexander Armstrong.

Comic Alexander Armstrong to SING at the Assembly Hall

On September 26th comic and TV quiz show presenter Alexander Armstrong is performing in Tunbridge Wells, as you've never seen him before.

In 50 years from now, will some young comic be picking through Whitehall's career to proclaim him their hero? Unlikely.

But that was the deal with My Hero: Ben Miller On Tony Hancock (BBC1), in which Alexander Armstrong's ex sidekick paid tribute to the man who inspired him to pursue a career in comedy.

Hancock's 'cuddly, ineffectual misery' tickled Miller, who was filmed here chortling away at one of Hancock's old scripts.

Miller offered an affectionate portrait of Hancock's ultimately sad story, charting the great man's career from early stage fright, through dry-retching before filming a sketch to later performances fuelled by booze and autocues. As an advert forgetting into comedy, it was a pretty powerful deterrent.

Hancock committed suicide aged just 44, blighted by the eternal curse of the failing funny man. As Miller said: 'There was part of him that doesn't find anything... enough.'

Alexander Armstrong in cabaret controversy

Alexander Armstrong appears to have put his foot in it with his comments in the Evening Standard yesterday about the return of cabaret.

Alexander Armstrong: Don't blame us for being posh

Alexander Armstrong has little patience with what he calls "posh-bashing".

Pointless giant Richard Osman tears himself away from his desk by Alexander Armstrong's side to slide into one of the guest seats for the first of a new series of the topical news quiz. Osman is surely destined for the guest host gig at some point but tonight it's down to Stephen Mangan to give Ian Hislop and Paul Merton free rein to roam around the lunatic fringes of the news, while Osman's fellow guest, Joan Bakewell, offers sage titbits.