Stand Up & Deliver
CHANNEL 4, 9PM
The premise of this Channel 4 fundraiser is simple but effective as five stand-up comedians are given two weeks to teach five celebrities how to perform a short live set. The celebrities – Happy Mondays lead singer Shaun Ryder, vicar Richard Coles, former Coronation Street actor Katie Mcglynn, dancer and Love Island star Curtis Pritchard and Tory peer Baroness Sayeeda Warsi – are initially nonchalant about the task but that changes pretty quickly after they perform.
There’s a lot of fun to be had as the comedians – David Baddiel, Jason Manford, Zoe Lyons, Judi Love and Nick Helm – gradually realise who is mentoring a star (Baddiel has the charismatic Cole, who admits to having a secret dream of becoming a stand-up, Mcglynn has strong delivery although Lyons notes that the material needs work) and who has a probable dud (Love struggles to get Pritchard to relax, Manford struggles to get sense out of Ryder) but there are some surprises too. Chief among those is the changing relationship
between the very anti-tory Helm and his protegee Warsi, which culminates in a very funny rant from
the latter. Can she be persuaded to repeat the material in front of an audience?