Sandi Toksvig

BBC Radio 4 comedy I've Never Seen Star Wars transferred to television recently, presented by Marcus Brigstocke - a stand-up comedian who resembles a geography teacher, and who's apparently determined to find fame by appearing on every British satirical show in existence.

INSSW is a variant of Room 101, where a weekly celebrity guest must talk amusingly about a certain topic. In the aforementioned series, it was pet hates; in this show it's things they've never experienced, but wish they had. Of course, a proviso is that each guest gets to plug the gaps in their life-experience beforehand, then relate everything to Brigstocke.

It's a show that clearly relies on its guests and their choices to amuse. I don't hate Clive Anderson, but it's difficult to remember why he was a fairly big star back in the '90s, despite the fact his enduring legacy is being bumbling while hosting Whose Line Is It Anyway. His wit has long since been exposed as relying solely on daft word-play, too. His choices here were uninspiring and not particularly strong to deconstruct for comedy. What humour can you mine from the revelation someone hasn't seen Withnail & I until very recently, let's be honest.

I've heard a few episodes of the Radio 4 series in my time, and that sounded much sillier and comically distended than anything here - recently, Sandi Toksvig admitted she's never eaten a Pot Noodle, and was promptly heard cooking and eating one in comic detail as if it were an epicurean delicacy. There was nothing to equal that amusement in two episodes of the TV version, despite the assumed a visual medium should bring.

Sandi Toksvig chairs this comedy panel game in which celebrities are given the answer, and they have to come up with possible questions. It sounds like a round of Mock the Week expanded into a full half-hour, but with Chris Addison and Sue Perkins as team captains should be diverting enough.

Sandi Toksvig Interview

As The News Quiz returns, host Sandi Toksvig tells The Telegraph why it's lasted so long - despite the 'galling' low pay she and her guests receive.

Sandi Toksvig presents a new cultural quiz show which features regular team captains Tim Brooke-Taylor and Dave Gorman. This opening edition was recorded at the Hay Festival so we're hopeful that guests who don't normally go quizzing may take part. We're promised tests on top plots, naming actors and finishing famous lines from well-known books.

Novel ideas for a literary quiz

Sandi Toksvig explains the appeal of Sky Arts literary panel game to The Telegraph.

The man once described as resembling "an incendiary vicar" returns with four more blistering sermons. Those who know Hardy only from his rather lacklustre performances on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue (on The News Quiz he confines himself to trying to outshout Sandi Toksvig) will be delighted to find that, when he puts his mind to it, he can educate through laughter, not a gift given to many.

Radio Head: Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation

Rowland Rivron, Sandi Toksvig, Mark Steel, Mark Thomas, Jo Brand, Graham Fellowes, Russell Brand . . . the list of modern comedians that divides the nation is a surprisingly lengthy one. And it will be only part of the listening public that will be rearranging its life to be in front of the wireless when the latest series of the sociopolitical lecture Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation kicks off next Tuesday (Radio 4, 6.30pm).

On a neighbouring day at the same time on the network is Darling You Were Marvellous, a panel game about showbiz, has a fair to middling team [...] but a terrific chair. Sandi Toksvig has already demonstrated her brisk wit on Just A Minute, and here again she exercises it splendidly.

Doubtless Sandi Toksvig and the other writers - yes, it took three people to construct this mighty work - will claim that this mighty work was parodying traditional British farce, deconstructing the genre. But they weren't. All they were doing was producing this mighty work.

Bye-bye to The Big One (Channel 4), the McShane and Toksvig comedy which definitely grew on you. There are not many romantic comedies - offhand I can't think of any - which end with a fat American dressed as a chicken, a shop window dummy who seems, on the face of it, British and a Danish dwarf sitting companionably together on a sofa. And the words "So now what?"