BBC New Comedy Awards

If this is the future of comedy, BBC lend me a TARDIS. When I saw Rosie Jones walk on to host, my heart sank, as she takes longer to deliver than VAR.

She killed the audience atmosphere in the theatre stone dead after the brilliant American warm up had the audience up for a good time.

Unfortunately, the heat winners were not uplifting or particularly funny and regurgitated line for line their heat performance and repeatedly told us how downtrodden and disadvantaged they were.

My wife & I escaped at the interval before the winner was announced but we won't watch to confirm our suspicions as to who "won".

The BBC's New Comedy Awards act as a shaky platform for a new generation of young comedians. Strangely IMBD lists this as a standalone "series" but there's much more of it (and the 2022 competition is currently airing as I write). For 2021, the returning head judge was the charismatic Mawaan Rizwan and the hosts and secondary judges were a solid who's who of contemporary stand-up talent as the competition roamed around the UK. It was nice to see places like Halifax and Portrush getting to play host to the competition - even if we were mainly seeing London folk showing up regardless of where it was being staged.

My biggest bugbear of the series though (and I hope this isn't replicated again in future competitions) is that the up-and-coming comedians weren't credited in any form. No caption went up when they came on, and no names were listed in the credits or on the website. So if you thought one was particularly good (and a lot of them were) apart from having to skip back to hear their names being announced there was no way to follow up. A serious shame.