Bruce Dessau's top comedy gigs for 2016

Having been spoilt for choice when it came to picking TV highlights the live highlights felt thinner on the ground this year. The Edinburgh Fringe featured a lot of very good shows but few really great ones. Maybe comedians were a little knocked sideways by the Brexit vote. but two did respond well - see below. Elsewhere there were a few excellent big gigs and small gigs and it was nice to see some West End runs rather than bank raid arena one-offs. These shows are listed in absolutely no particular order.

Robert Newman: The Brain Show review

Dissing bad science, capitalists and Brian Cox, Newman's low-octane cabinet of neuroscientific curiosities has nonconformist bite.

Five of the best comedy gigs for Christmas 2015

Sara Pascoe, Margaret Cho, Brian Cox and Kevin Bridges are among those promising better laughs than you'll get from your Christmas crackers.

Radio Times review

Radio 1 DJ Greg James is the poor rube dropped into the entertaining, immersive murder mystery. He's got to work out why Reese Witherspoon, owner of Successville's biggest chain of bars (see what they did there?), has been murdered. Playing junior to the gruff, unorthodox-verging-on-insane DI Sleet (deadpanned brilliantly by Tom Davis), he's criticised for being "a bit camp and weird".

But then he's got to contend with Prof Brian Cox as an awe-filled forensic scientist and Frances Barber giving a delicious turn as a rapacious Mary Berry, owner of strip club Soggy Bottoms. He can't help laughing incredulously at it all and neither will you.

Phill Jupitus to play Arthur Conan Doyle on stage

Phill Jupitus will portray the Edinburgh-born author opposite Alan Cox, the actor son of the Dundee-born star Brian Cox, at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Rob Auton: the Brian Cox of comedy

An award-winning joke about a chocolate bar gave the impression that Rob Auton was a ruthless gag-merchant. But his meandering, poetic shows, riffing on his amazement at the world, encompass a whole lot more than that.

Radio Times review

Frank and Dorothy are planning their wedding but pig-headed Bob is determined to be the centre of attention - that is if he doesn't stop their big day in the first place. Bob cannot envisage life without Frank, his best pal (and dogsbody) of 52 years standing, and when he hears the couple will move to Fife, he takes drastic action unbecoming of a best man.

Bob Servant is a gift role for Brian Cox, who manages to make Bob sympathetic no matter how deluded and bonkers he becomes. But the second run of Neil Forsyth's breezy Dundonian comedy comes to a halt after just three episodes. Let's hope for more soon.

Brian Cox blows like a salty hurricane through another episode of this garrulous sitcom. In a moment of madness, Bob lobs a bin bag full of frozen burgers on to the skull of a love rival and is charged with aggravated assault. His regular brief, Objection McNally, is drunk and trouserless, so Bob conducts his own defence, leading to a pleasingly retro courtroom farce in which our man bickers with the jury, calls the judge "Skipper" and asks his nearest and dearest to perjure themselves. He's a guilty pleasure.

Bob Servant, despite Brian Cox, and my having loved his first outing, isn't (yet) funny. Cox and Miller are deeply talented comedy actors, let down here by pilot scripts. I know that the writer of the second, Neil Forsyth, is capable of far greater nuanced stuff, and a fine pawky Dundonian sense of humour, than which there are few finer this side of Brooklyn, and can only hope that he and Cox haven't already alienated audiences. BBC Four prides itself on "experimental", but these should have been sure things. Wh'appen?