Horrible Histories books have naturally come to an end

Popular children's book series, Horrible Histories, is to end after 20 years according to author Terry Deary.

Deary's attack on libraries branded 'ignorant twadle'

Authors, including artistic director of Bath Children's Literature Festival David Almond have criticised Horrible Histories author Terry Deary's comments that libraries are damaging the book industry.

Terry Deary: The man behind the Horrible Histories

The wildly successful Horrible Histories books and TV shows - facts boosted by lots of jokes - are adored by children and adults alike. Writer Terry Deary thinks it's because his characters often subvert authority.

Horrible Histories' Barmy Britain comes to the Fringe

Superbly ill-humoured Terry Deary pours scorn on his success but praises Birmingham Theatre adaptation.

The best comedy of the week was to be found over on CBBC, where series four of Horrible Histories made its debut (confusingly, BBC1 is currently showing series two).

Based on the cheerfully bloodthirsty books by Terry Deary and Martin Brown, it plays a bit like Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time, if you replaced the visiting professor of history from Queen's College, Oxford, with a talking rat making jokes about wee.

There have been plenty of bloody revolutions featured in Horrible Histories, but the team's most recent coup was to reunite The League of Gentlemen for the first time in a bronze age. Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith turned up as craven Hollywood execs keen to panel-beat the messy lives of historical figures into award-bait biopics, and while Gatiss's American accent was pretty duff, the bickering spark between the three gentlemen remained.

Recruiting the league should not distract from the tireless efforts of the core cast, particularly Jim Howick, who has matured from being an off-model David Mitchell into a gifted comic actor in his own right. But ultimately, the highlight of this first salvo of new shows was a prancing Charles Darwin explaining the ch-ch-changes of evolutionary theory via an exquisite David Bowie pastiche. Horribly good.

Horrible Histories creator blasts 'boring' classes

His Horrible History books have sold in their millions and author Terry Deary believes giving children facts, not fairytales, is a great way to get them to read.

Hurrah for Horrible Histories & the youth of the future

Terry Deary's wonderful books show us not that things used to be worse, but that today's kids are savvier than ever before.

Video: Horrible Histories author hates historians

Terry Deary, author of the Horrible Histories series, which has sold more than 25 million copies, has admitted that he dislikes historians.

Horrible Histories with Stephen Fry, based on the best-selling books by Terry Deary, has been making youngsters (and a few adults) chuckle for three series quietly on the CBBC channel. Having been the surprise winner of Best Sketch Show in the British Comedy Awards - which, not to put it down, was in part to do with lack of competition - it has been awarded the dubious honour of a promotion to BBC1, with its best bits repackaged with spurious links from Stephen Fry.

The sketches are still good fun, including the ones you might have seen on YouTube already where King Charles II raps and the Vikings do a soft rock number, but the point of Fry is lost on me: he's in a studio half-heartedly decorated with random historical objects basically repeating what the sketches have already told us more amusingly ("No one really knows how much of the story of Troy is true and how much is myth," he intones: well, thanks for that Stephen, otherwise I obviously would have assumed that Menelaus really did greet Helen with "you is well fit, innit?").

It's a bit like those 'adult' editions of the Harry Potter books with different covers for people who didn't want to look as if they were reading a children's book, even though they were.

When Horrible Histories beat the truly excellent third series of The Armstrong and Miller Show to the Best Sketch Show gong at the Comedy Awards last year, I was a bit miffed. Surely people were just being nice because it happened to be a bit better than your average kids' show? Nope. Turns out it's just really, really good.

This, actually, is Horrible Histories with Stephen Fry, a best-of collection with a plumb slot on BBC 1, 6pm on Sundays. All the cool cats have been watching it for years of course, but for johnny-come-latelies (that's the correct pluralisation, I believe) such as myself, this is a nice little catch-up.

The show has several things going for it, starting with the sublime source material. Author Terry Deary had the fine idea of getting kids into history by giving the facts a human face and a joke or two and - most importantly - not talking down to his readership. The producers of the CBBC show have perfectly transferred Deary's ethos to television, and added some genuinely excellent comic actors, including Simon Farnaby and Katy Wix. It's pretty wonderful.

This week, I was particularly tickled by a sketch in which the entire English Civil War was summed up at a frantic pace by a newsreader in front of a map of the UK - all very Peter Snow on election night, with ridiculous graphics and snarky asides. Plus, who doesn't want to learn about the Vikings through the medium of soft rock? Funny, silly and (whisper it) very informative.