The most memorable comedy gigs of 2018

Chortle editor Steve Bennett's personal top ten

Craig Cash remembers Caroline Aherne

'I hope Caroline Aherne's heckling me from heaven!'

Early Doors review

Full of geniality and honest humour, the stage incarnation is a real crowd-pleaser, guaranteed - with the aid of an unexpected musical finale - to send the audience home with an inner glow equivalent to a couple of large brandies. Doubles all round!

Theatre review: Early Doors at the Lowry, Salford

An updating of the BBC sitcom does a fine, if predictable job of recapturing the ready wit and meandering storytelling of the original.

Early Doors - The Lowry, Salford

It should please the majority of its fans but by the musical number at the end it veered more towards Mrs Brown's Boys rather than the comedy that had heart.

Review: Early Doors

The script is packed with gags and some great one-liners, but it still flows well as a play and keeps the attention, although perhaps some of the serious scenes went on a bit too long.

Craig Cash and Phil Mealey interview

Early Doors stars Craig Cash and Phil Mealey on bringing their Stockport pub comedy back to life on stage.

Video: Craig Cash and Phil Mealey interview

Craig Cash and Phil Mealey talk about returning to Early Doors.

I'd been looking forward to Rovers. Anyone who loved The Royle Family would have been similarly interested to see it as it promised us a comedy about the dreary lives of the working classes, re-uniting Dave and Barbara (Craig Cash as Pete and Sue Johnston as Doreen), but it's there that comparisons with The Royle Family, or with any other decent comedy, have to end.

Rovers was a disappointment. Perhaps it's just a very gentle comedy, which seems to be the trend just now with recent BBC sitcoms such as Boomers and Mum. But are such shows "gentle" or just not particularly funny?

Rovers should have found it hard to be gentle, being set amid the northern English working class, whose lives seem to have been drained of all colour except the blue of their football team. This scenario should offer lavish opportunity for political comment and scathing observations - but there were none, unless we count a local woman who'd been "sloshing it about" and shamelessly wheeled her resultant "black baby" around a carpet showroom.

But Harry Enfield did this with his Wayne and Waynetta Slob characters in the 1990s, when Waynetta professed a need for "a little brown baby" so she could acquire imagined spectacular benefits from the council. There was little that was new in Rovers. Even its theme, melancholy brass band music, the nostalgic soundtrack of northern England, seemed pinched from Corrie.