Fart gags, toilet humour, sex, nagging wives - no, not the set list for a Bernard Manning gig, but subjects that the Sumerians, Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Victorians all made jokes about.

In Michael Grade And The World's Oldest Joke, the presenter traces the history of the joke with a little help from a host of historians, academics, comedy experts and comedians including Ken Dodd, Tim Vine and Barry Cryer.

Along the way he discovers what tickled the Tudors, ribbed the Romans and made Renaissance wits roar as he sets out to discover whether jokes come and go with the rise and fall of civilisations or whether we're still laughing at the same things our ancestors did.