Tim Vine Interview

King of the puns, Tim Vine is unashamedly silly. Daft as a brush but as fast as lightning, the 42-year-old once held the world record for the most jokes told in an hour - a whopping 499.

Tim Vine interview

The king of puns? He may well be that. As he prepares for a brand new UK tour, we sit down for a chat with the comedy genius that is Mr Tim Vine...

Star interview: Tim Vine

Not only is Tim Vine able to come out with one-liners at lightening speed, so it seems he is able to shower at a rapid pace.

Miranda Hart, aka the dozy cleaner out of Lee Mack and Tim Vine's one-liner-thon Not Going Out, gets her own sitcom, in which she runs a joke shop - badly - and fawns over the sexy chef in the restaurant next door - badly. At first, the humour is all a bit trouser-round-the-ankles obvious but once the fabulous Sally Philips turns up as one of Miranda's toff school friends, the high levels of daffiness bludgeon us into submission.

Normally, one-liners are best left in the realms of Christmas crackers. But Lee Mack and Tim Vine are two of the best in the business at dreaming them up and machine-gunning them out, which makes this sitcom such a fun maelstrom of ridiculousness, and one that trumpets its own cheesiness. And no, Mack can't really act - but as the loose-moralled lead who'll do anything to get the girl, he strikes the perfect balance of loathsomeness and lovability.

It should come as no surprise that Tim Vine once held the world record for telling the most jokes in one hour.

This show seems to be aiming for the record for squeezing the most gags into one sitcom. And on a Friday night, after your brain has clocked off for the weekend and all it wants to do is chuckle foolishly for 30 minutes, then bless its smelly old cotton socks for that.

Tonight, as two pretty lesbians move in down the corridor from Lee and Lucy, we ask can you turn a straight girl gay just by kissing her? But also, how many lesbian jokes do you know? ee Mack knows loads and loads of them and they're all here, packed in tighter than elephants in a mini.

Series three of the one BBC1 sitcom we like got off to a rather unremarkable start. There was the usual sprinkling of fine one-liners and the lovely aerial shots of London (oh look, there's our house) and Tim Vine's Tim was as wonderfully pompous as ever. However, Lee Mack's Lee is normally so lovable, but this week he was just annoyingly idiotic, worrying that he'd made flatmate Lucy pregnant ("got a muffin in the breadbin") because she shared the bathwater he'd ejaculated into during a relaxing wank. The weakness of this show was at the forefront: poor storylines.

Apart from the inconvenient fact that Lee Mack isn't gay, Not Going Out almost reminds you of a British Will And Grace. The rat-a-tat gags and setup of unlikely flatmates might be as artificially manufactured and as full of dodgy additives as a market stall hamburger, but you can't get enough of it.

As series three opens tonight, Lee is pondering the urban myth about whether it's possible for a woman to get pregnant from bath water. Why? Well, his landlady Lucy (Sally Bretton) is mysteriously up the duff and there can only be one, disgusting, explanation. As Lee and best mate Tim (Tim Vine) consider the grim implications, the jokes come from all directions. Plus, we discover another reason why Lee is so keen to stay in the flat. Never mind that he fancies Lucy - the bathroom is amazing.

Written by and starring comedian Lee Mack, the flatshare sitcom returns for a new series. Tonight, the gags continue to come thick and fast as Lucy (Sally Bretton) announces to Lee that she thinks she's pregnant or, as Lee sarcastically puts it, "got a muffin in the breadbin". When he goes for a drink with Lucy's brother Tim (Tim Vine), Lee wonders if the father might accidentally be him and we discover how the unusual conception may have happened.

This sparkling, rapid-fire comedy - which boasts more smart and silly one-liners per minute than any other sitcom - is back with a third series. Starring Lee Mack and the brilliant punslinger Tim Vine, the charming larks generally revolve around Mack's continued efforts to impress Vine's sister. Better still, though, the writers have brought back Tim's dippy girlfriend, Daisy, as a regular character.