Egregiously, I thought My Favourite Joke (BBC1) involved comedians telling us what their favourite joke was of their own. That might have been a bit iffy, tending towards self-love and self-congratulation – as a format, a bit more Michael McIntyre than Stewart Lee. But it also would have been interesting, as a kind of comedy lit-crit, to see a joke spring from seed to tree. No such luck, people! This is another head-on-a-stick job, with comics saying what they like about funnymen and women from yore.
In a move so bad I actually laughed out loud, they take a joke – Billy Connolly, say, telling the one about the guy who parked a bike in his wife's arse – and break it up with "sweet" remarks, like Jo Brand saying how funny it was, and Pamela Stephenson reminiscing about his trip to the studio in the car, where his agent told him not to tell the joke (she wasn't there, of course; it was a kind of cut-price reminiscence, as befits the format). The whole secret of comedy is timing. So splicing a classic joke with a load of talking heads is a bit like kicking it to death. By the time they get to the punchline, it's barely funny. It's an act of unbelievable vandalism.
And so it goes on, through all the jokes. You can't blame the talking heads themselves, since I'm sure they didn't know it was going to be edited like that. What you can blame them for is a group inability to find a new way of saying "this was really funny"; "this made me laugh a lot". "It literally got over to the United States," said Joan Rivers, presumably in response to the question: "Did this get over to the United States?"
Jack Dee tries valiantly to locate his appreciation of this or that joke within his own life, so that at least there's some flesh on the bones, but he still looks embarrassed. Mate: if someone's chasing you for money, just declare yourself bankrupt. It is better than bankrupting your good name with these shonky programmes.