BBC releases some historic comedy moments

The BBC is making hundreds of clips from its archive available to watch on a new website. Comics featured include Spike Milligan, Pete and Dud, Kenny Everett and Billy Connolly.

The delightful David Nobbs proved in With Nobbs On what his friends and colleagues had known for years - that he is has perfect comic timing, both as writer and performer. In the first of a three-part audio autobiography he recalled his days as a cub reporter in Sheffield and London and how, while covering Hampstead Magistrates' Court, he got the call from That Was The Week That Was (TW3) to join its team of scriptwriters. It was to be some years before he conjured up Reginald Perrin but the combined enthusiasm of David Frost and Ned Sherrin, presenter and producer of TW3 respectively, was what elevated him from humble hack to satirical sketch writer.

We've had to wait 13 years for the second volume of Stephen Fry's autobiography, but thankfully this latest memoir is just as self-deprecatory and likeable as Moab is My Washpot. Here we get episodes from Fry's time at Cambridge plus his years of professional success (or "career harlotry" as he describes it) during the 1980s. As you'd expect from this period in the performer's life, the anecdotes are incredibly name-droppy. But Fry treats himself with such savagery and, at times, borderline contempt, that the result is never smug or supercilious. Which isn't to say that he stints on the laughs - indeed a passage about the pleasures of Radio 4 and going on Loose Ends with Ned Sherrin should be enough to inspire you to seek out the unabridged version.