Dom Joly: Don't do a TV prank on a member of the mafia

Joly tells RadioTimes.com that he was forced into hiding after trying to humliate someone who turned out to be a memebr of the Cosa Nostra.

Dom Joly: I nearly pranked David Cameron

ITV prankster Dom Joly tells RadioTimes.com that he nearly managed to trick the Prime Minister with his ASBO vicar character from Fool Britannia.

Dom Joly falls for outsized parking ticket prank

TV prankster Dom Joly was beaten at his own game - when he fell for a fake outsized parking ticket on his Range Rover.

Dom Joly talks about Series 2

Dom Joly says he will also be playing a six-year-old boy in the new series, but admitted the boy would be a "very large one".

Audio - Dom Joly: There's a witch hunt against hoax DJs

Comedian Dom Joly talks about the Australian royal hoaxers.

The Australian radio hosts at the centre of the hoax call to the King Edward VII hospital - pretending to be members of the Royal Family asking after the Duchess of Cambridge - say they are "gutted and heartbroken" over the death of nurse Jacintha Saldanha.

Mrs Saldanha was found dead on Friday, three days after taking the hoax call.

Her death has led many to ask where people involved in such programmes should draw the line.

Dom Joly, comedian and columnist in The Independent, was host of Trigger Happy TV - a Channel 4 series which played tricks on members of the public using hidden cameras.

"I do have sympathy with the DJs in the extent that there's been this sort of witch hunt against them online as though they intentionally did this with the view that the consequences were going to happen.

"When I do stuff I've got a rough judgement of who I'm doing things with.

"I draw the line on what makes me laugh and what doesn't. There are legal parameters anyway. I tend to have a traffic light system. When I start talking to someone, if there's something that doesn't feel right I walk away. I think it only works when you've got someone who's on a sort of equal footing."

Dom Joly: Hidden camera scares

When I turned up on set for my new ITV1 hidden camera series Fool Britannia, I thought someone was playing a joke on me. There were 25 crew waiting to get started, compared to the five of us who made Trigger Happy TV back in 2000. How can you secretly film people with 25 crew hanging about, I thought?

Interview: Dom Joly

With a new prime-time TV show and a book about his quest to find the world's legendary monsters, which included a visit to Loch Ness, there's just no hiding the talents of Dom Joly.

Dom Joly interview

Comic Dom Joly, 44, is reprising the format of his hidden-camera show Trigger Happy TV with Fool Britannia. Here he talks to Metro about how it's different to his previous shows, how he hunted the Ogopogo, Canada's Loch Ness Monster, and why he doesn't like Twitter.

So, last week the BBC broadcast The Revolution Will Be Televised and Channel 4 went with I'm Spazticus. Now ITV has hit back with its own hidden camera show, and brought in the genre's most famous name: Dom Joly.

However, Fool Britannia is a much tamer programme. It's being broadcast in a pre-watershed slot, for starters, in another attempt to make-up for the shortfall caused by the end of TV Burp. While it's a nice idea to try and make a more family-friendly prank show, the show appears to be suffering a bit in its slot.

You can tell that Fool Britannia goes out after You've Been Framed - and they share two key traits. A voice over, which for a prank show doesn't really work, and a laughter track. To make it worse, I happen to know that this is canned laughter. Genuine canned laughter, in this day and age! Shocking.

Admittedly, there are some genuine laughs to be gotten out of the show. My personal favourite was Joly's health and safety officer character Ian Yard trying to prevent coffee from being too hot by using a mini electric fan. It has some potential, but it needs to cast aside some of the more troublesome features of the programme.