Comic Strip Presents ... Red Top review

Great turns from Maxine Peake as Rebekah Brooks, Nigel Planer as Rupert Murdoch and others provide lots of lols - especially the scene set in our offices.

News International gets a thorough skewering in this new instalment of the veteran satire series Comic Strip. The peerless Maxine Peake stars as flame-haired red top editor Rebekah Brooks, an "innocent and beguiling northern girl" who rises to the top of the tabloid publishing empire alongside Russell Tovey's Andy Coulson. As ever, it's a star-studded affair, with Stephen Mangan as a 70s Tony Blair and Harry Enfield as Ross Kemp, alongside top turns from Johnny Vegas, Nigel Planer and Alexei Sayle.

How the Comic Strip took on the phone hacking scandal

Maxine Peake, Stephen Mangan and the other cast of Red Top open up on their 70s-inspired take on News International.

The Red Top preview

It's 75-minutes of pure entertainment and pure escape, and if nothing else, watching Maxine Peake, Russell Tovey, Eleanor Matsuura, Johnny Vegas, Alexei Sayle, Harry Enfield, James Buckley, John Sessions, Stephen Mangan and Peter Richardson share the screen is a real joy.

Radio Times review

This will be the 42nd instalment of The Comic Strip Presents pageant to be aired over the best part of 35 years, and it promises to be the kind of shamelessly silly, flight-of-fancy spoof that has become something of a national institution in the other 41.

The target for their satirical boot this time is the phone-hacking scandal, but transposed to the disco-era 1970s. Rebekah Brooks (Maxine Peake) is here a naive northern girl who more or less accidentally becomes chief executive of News International and roller-skates (literally) through life unaware of the dreadful things going on around her.

One of the only survivors of the troupe that first launched Channel 4 on air in 1982 is Nigel Planer, here playing a hen-pecked Rupert Murdoch, while Stephen Mangan reprises his Tony Blair turn (as a groovy rocker) and Harry Enfield dons the bald cap to embody Brooks's sometime husband, Ross Kemp.

Maxine Peake confirmed as Women In Comedy patron

Maxine Peake has been confirmed as Patron of the Women in Comedy Festival, which opened in Manchester over the weekend. On her appointment, Peake commented, "I'm proud to be supporting the UK Women in Comedy Festival as a patron. A festival filled with laughter combined with feminist principles taking place in the North ... what's not to support!"

If you think of radio in colour this comedy comes in shades of sepia and charcoal with the occasional bright patch of green. It's also pretty addictive, a floaty tale of people looking for new starts, picking themselves up from failed ones, seeking change and consolation. The writer is Tony Pitts, the cast is superb (it includes Stephen Mangan and Ronnie Ancona), the narrator is Maxine Peake and this is a second series. If you're listening in bed be careful not to drop off as it will slot neatly into a dream.

Shedtown, a new programme from Johnny Vegas's production company, was far from ranty: a strange drama/comedy/soundscape, narrated by Maxine Peake, it took advantage of its 11pm slot to offer something much more dreamy and hilarious than the usual wait-for-the-laughter Radio 4 fare. It's about the final works trip for the staff of a failed museum. They go to the seaside. The jokes came in under the radar: "What can I get you?" asked the barmaid. "Peace of mind," said Barry. "I want a pint, me," said Dave. The barmaid talked them through the new menu, which included chicken catch-a-Tory.

How Shameless stars came of age on West End stage

Maxine Peake and Anne-Marie Duff are among many stars whose careers began on the show. And a pair of casting directors were vital to its success, writes Vanessa Thorpe.

It would be unfair to say that Shameless (C4) has grown aimless because it was always about lives that lacked what might be called orthodox direction. When it began in 2004, with a cast that included James McAvoy, Anne-Marie Duff and Maxine Peake, one of the show's obvious charms was a manic, scattergun energy that refused to conform to any preconfigured narrative or moral shape.

Here was the underclass in all its feckless, drunken, irresponsible, irrepressible, resourceful, violent and promiscuous splendour, and there were no homilies or apologies or tales of transforming personal growth. After all the plastic melodramatics on EastEnders, this was a series that revelled in mundane minor victories over an absent landlord state: dole scams, housing benefit fraud, disability swindles.

What's more, in Frank Gallagher we heard the slurring, finger-jabbing voice of Asbo Britain. He was an antihero for our times, rat-like in his cunning and rat-arsed in his habits, a man whose waywardness made Yosser Hughes seem like Alan Partridge. Frank was a brilliant creation, not just emblematically but in terms of the story itself. His chronic dysfunction lent a tragicomic grandeur to the Chatsworth Estate.

The anticonscience is a tough act to maintain, however, and after seven years Frank's no longer just a drunken bore. He has also become boring. The show has come to rely on his ranting dereliction as a kind of dramatic prop, a lifeless symbol of continuity, like Ena Sharples's hairnet. And as Frank has become louder and more obnoxious, the other characters have also been sucked into caricature.

Last week the first five episodes of the new series played out on consecutive nights in a story that had Frank appearing in a variety of classic film and TV settings - Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, Dr Who - but it turned out that he was drugged up in a psychiatric unit, where he'd been sectioned by his ex-wife Monica.

Yet even within the "reality" of the mental hospital, the film-makers couldn't resist pastiching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, with Frank recreating Jack Nicholson's role as the rebel patient Randle McMurphy. In fact all five episodes were awash with hallucinations and dream sequences, a disorienting prospect at the best of times, but deadeningly exhausting over the course of a week. It was as though jumping the shark - the moment at which a long-running TV series collapses into absurdity - had been turned into a marathon sport.

Everything about the new series - from the surreal film references to the relentlessly transgressive plotlines and the coarse, preachy tone - spoke of a frantic desperation to be meaningful. In seeking to demonstrate an urgent sense of purpose, Shameless may not have lost its aim, but it has lost its point.