Metro - August 2006

Marcus Brigstocke is doing very nicely. A staple of Radio 4's comedy schedules, host of BBC 4 topical news programme The Late Edition, and a comic with an increasing stand-up profile, he crops up in the most unlikely of places. You may have caught his bit parts in movies including Brit romcom Love Actually and Bobby Darin bio-pic Beyond The Sea, starring Kevin Spacey. Most, however, will probably know him as the bloke from recent BBC reality TV show Excuse My French, the one who wasn't Esther Rantzen or Ron Atkinson.

On Excuse My French all three had to spend a month living in Provence together, attempting to learn French. Each then had to have a stab at doing what they do best, but in French. In Brigstocke's case this meant doing a stand-up show entirely in his newly acquired tongue, a challenge he rose to so well he's since been back to France to do some more. 'To be honest, the TV show didn't quite capture how exciting the experience was in a scared shitless kind of way,' says Brigstocke, who as well as presenting The Early Edition and broadcasting The Late Edition live at the Fringe is also previewing his forthcoming UK tour Planet Corduroy. 'I get asked to do reality TV all the time and I always come up with ten good reasons why these programmes are shit. But with this, I couldn't think of a good reason not to do it, other than I knew there'd be that thing of “Mmm… how will the young leftie comic get on with Ron?”'

So how did he get on with Atkinson, who famously lost his football pundit job in 2004 for a racist remark about Marcel Desailly?

'We've not stayed in touch, put it like that,' says Brigstocke whose stock set is self-mocking middle-class angst and right-on rage. 'Ron is someone I'd instinctively stay a million miles away from. He's actually quite a nice bloke but he makes racist comments in the way that generation quite often does, as it doesn't occur to them that those terms of abuse are not OK.'

As well as Big Ron, Brigstocke also got to rub shoulder pads with Rantzen, his second encounter with a grand dame of British TV. Last year he and Weakest Link host Anne Robinson acrimoniously presented What's The Problem?, the poor relation of Have I Got News For You. Anyone coming into contact with him will know that working with Robinson is not an experience he's ever likely to repeat. Actually make that never ever. Not even if hell freezes over.

I looked like the worst comedy whore ever, sitting behind this wretched woman

'We had a row the first day I met her about remarks Boris Johnson had made in The Spectator about Liverpool, and it was all downhill from there,' he says of the carrot-topped Scouser, the very mention of whose name has him breaking out in a sweat. 'Ten minutes into the first show I thought: “Oh my God what have I done?” I looked like the worst comedy whore ever, sitting behind this wretched woman being her dancing comedy monkey boy.'

A keen snowboarder – 'Am I any good? I f**kin' rock. It's my environmental black spot' – Brigstocke is a self-confessed posh boy from the Home Counties. And it's this liberalism that provides the stick with which he beats himself up in his act. Planet Corduroy, his biggest UK tour to date, will be no exception. New Labour's 'selling out' of the country will also feature high on the agenda. Just don't expect the kind of gags about rape and Jews that have been making the headlines at this year's Fringe.

'I got very depressed doing stand up about six years ago and changed the rules of the game so that I wouldn't talk about anything I didn't care about,' he says. 'I don't want to do down any of my comedy mates but I've noticed with a lot of shows in Edinburgh it just seems to be about charging into a subject area and being shocking for the sake of it: “F**king kids in the arse. Now what do we think about that?” Whereas I'm much more interested in a comic who has an opinion or ideas about things.' A comic not unlike one just about to take off for Planet Corduroy in fact.

New Statesman - Monday 13th February 2006

The BBC 5 Live website is incredibly weird. When I visited it the other day, I almost laughed out loud. Take the "presenters" page: it's up there with Hello! when it comes to insight. Each of the station's big names - and some of its small names, too, like Jo Sale, who reads out the traffic news - have answered a mini-quiz about themselves. Presumably, the idea is that this will make them seem friendly and accessible, but what I want to know is: who thought up the questions? And why did the presenters make so little effort to sound even vaguely interesting?

First, I looked up Jane Garvey (Drive, weekdays, 4pm-7pm), my radio heroine on account of her taking so little rubbish either from politicians or her hoity-toity co-presenter, Peter Allen. Oh dear. According to the website, Garvey's "favourite item of clothing" is her M&S support pants. Next, I clicked on Garry Richardson (Sportsweek, Sundays, 9am), because he is surely the presenter on whom Steve Coogan based Alan Partridge. His "favourite weather" is warm and sunny. Finally, I turned to Phil Williams, the station's holiday cover of choice. He had really got into the question about clothing. His favourite jacket is from Gap. It cost only £5.99 - down from £80! If only he'd bought a few more at the same time, he went on, he could have flogged them and made a tidy profit.

Looking at this stuff, I wondered if it didn't provide some clue as to why I am going off BBC 5 Live. These feeble dribblings speak volumes: they betray a near-pathological fear of controversy. If the phone-ins on which 5 Live is so dependent have any point, it is surely to let people (callers and presenters) let rip. But no. Everyone is so polite, pussyfooting their way around the most incendiary issues. Recently, I caught one about the government's doomed efforts to pass a law making it illegal to incite religious hatred. As issues go, this was as hot as hell - yet you'd never have known it. "Here's Muhammad in Gants Hill," Victoria Derbyshire would say. Cue lots of sympathetic "umming" and "aaahing" on her part. I've heard more interesting conversations at the bus stop.

If, like me, you travel in hope and still tune in to 5 Live, only to spend the next six hours banging your head on your desk, let me suggest a balm: Marcus Brigstocke. I have an aural crush on the mild-mannered, laconic comedian, who stars in several Radio 4 shows, not least the very jolly Giles Wemmbley-Hogg Goes Off, in which he plays a kind-hearted but tragically thick Sloane. His new series, As Safe As Houses (Radio 4, Saturdays, 10.30am), is about property. But it is not another programme for people who like to talk decking; I suggest they ring Victoria Derbyshire. Rather, it seeks to explain the peculiarly British attachment to owning one's home (70 per cent of us do).

The first part went right back to tenant farmers, with our hero attempting to conduct a survey of Cambridgeshire using only a few arrows and a length of chain. Various historians were wheeled on to tell us about the Diggers or John Locke. The joy of it was that any time they were in danger of becoming boring, Brigstocke would make a funny aside. At one point, a moral philosopher told him a favourite moral philosophers' joke. It wasn't very funny, though moral philosophers up and down the land were doubtless clutching their sides. "I'm on at the Comedy Store tonight," said Brigstocke, under his breath. And then: "I might not open with it."

Yes, Brigstocke is brilliant. How different things might be if 5 Live put him at the end of a telephone.

TV Scoop - December 2005

But Brigstocke wriggled free of the ginger faceache and is back where we like him best, fronting his increasingly confident Britification of Jon Stewart's Daily Show. It's a pity that hardly anyone watches BBC4, because The Late Edition and its channelmate The Thick of It were two of 2005's classiest comedies.

The Late Edition, whose second series is now half-way through its run, succeeds because Brigstocke is a likeable and whip-sharp frontman with an excellent band of scribblers at his service. Any man who can pull off a "gayer or straighter?" version of Play Your Cards Right deserves better than a digi-sat graveyard slot.

Best bit of Thursday's show, though, was the re-soundtracked news clip of Gordon Brown making a speech. Ever noticed the irritating paper-prod he does when he speaks at a podium? Late Edition turned Gord's quirk into art by inserting chords from a Bontempi organ. More wit than an entire series of Anne Robinson's big-channel excretion.

Chortle - June 2005

But away from this formulaic, make it quick, make it angry and make it funny-ish world, where productivity is more important than quality, Brigstocke is an accomplished stand-up with the ability and experience to play to any situation.

Sure, he's yet another middle-class left-leaning comic hectoring away from his soap box positioned at the very top of the moral high ground, but he does set himself apart from his fellow travellers by giving his rants a sharper edge.

He is often the most extreme of his band; being posher and even more furious than most, pushing the reactionary arguments he's trying to demolish to their ridiculous conclusions, and then some.

The rightly celebrated 'Mrs Brigstocke' response to the 'coming over here, taking our women' approach to immigration is sublime. Edgy, uncomfortable and with a serious point. Even if after the payoff he steps back from the brink, and back into safer ground.

True, some of the topics he tackles are hardly his exclusive domain. Since most comic's days comprise of little more than daytime and late-night TV, it's no surprise that many have come up with a take on the Claims Direct or loan-shark adverts that fill those hours.

But again, Brigstocke could stake a claim to having the definite routine on this, starting in cosy observational territory, but pushed on to a memorably vivid metaphor as a punchline, lent extra weight by the all-pervasive indignant rage.