With Channel 4 and BBC2 continuing to chip in with the odd leftfield commission and HBO heroically maintaining its policy of alt.culture-only programming across the pond, the climate has arguably never been healthier for those comedic agitators with ambitions toward making the airwaves. But first, let us salute the biting wit of a well-known son of the royal county...

STAND-UP COMEDIAN OF THE YEAR:
Tommy Tiernan
When not selling out Vicar St. for weeks on end, adorning the cover of Ireland’s premier fortnightly publication and causing uproar in the tabloids (note to editors of Sun, Mirror, Evening Herald etc: those “TOMMY UPHOLSTERED HIS COUCH WITH MY ECSTASY STASH” “exclusives” are growing just a tad wearisome at this stage), Tiernan also found time to release a best-selling DVD, Cracked, and make a superb documentary on his walking-tour of Ireland, which served as the perfect antitode to Tony Hawks’ “Here’s a picture of me with a fridge in Castledermot” idiocy. Here’s to more comedic adventures of the pioneering kind in 2005.
RUNNER-UP: Rich Hall

TV SHOW OF THE YEAR:
Monkey Dust
Those of us who felt that comedy couldn’t possibly get any darker following the onslaught of The League Of Gentlemen, Nighty Night etc were in for a shock with Monkey Dust, the diabolical animated masterwork from the minds of former Have I Got News For You producer and Peter Cook biographer, Harry Thompson, and sometime Jonathan Ross collaborator, Shaun Pye. With their twisted sketches on such cheery topics as suicide, murder, drug abuse, marital breakdown and internet chatroom perverts, the Thompson/Pye outlook on the world seemed to confirm Blur’s decade-old assertion that modern life is rubbish.
But hey, when you’ve got such comedic joys to feast upon as “Richard Curtis Land” (complete with eerily accurate, near National Front-style mono-ethnicity), gibberish-spouting “hip” young urban taste-makers (“the Velvet Underground were the first interactive website”) and the truly terrifying visage of the quasi-medieval (and decidedly Blair-ite) Paedo-finder General, you can’t help but feel just a little insulated from the chill winds of modern decline.

Runner-up: Peep Show. Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain’s inventive Channel 4 show was both thematically insightful and technically innovative. Following the fortunes of socially inept, twenty-something under-achievers Jeremy and Mark (played by, respectively, David Mitchell and Robert Webb – fresh from a splendid turn in The Smoking Room), Peep Show was C4’s first worthwhile addition to the contemporary sitcom canon (albeit of the mightily skewed kind) for many a long day. Filmed entirely from the POVs of its beleaguered anti-heroes, Peep Show functioned as a painfully accurate observational tour de force of an odd couple stuck in a no-man’s-land of professional dissatisfaction, personal unhappiness and relentless sexual frustration. Like an even grimmer version of Curb Your Enthusiasm, this was gallows humour taken to the next level. Watch them and laugh before you turn into them, hee-hee.

IRISH TV SHOW OF THE YEAR:
The Des Bishop Work Experience
That difficult encounter with a freshly laid turd in the Aquadome! The emetic qualities of newly-shed body-hair blocking the draining system in said emporium’s changing rooms! And best of all, that now semi-legendary extempore riff on Justin Timberlake’s ‘Rock Your Body’ – ‘Don’t Be So Quick To Squidgee’! It could only be New York native Des Bishop’s morbidly fascinating stint in the underworld of minimum wage, budget accommodation and 3am Abrakebra psychosis (which we’re strongly suggesting be the title of his next programme), The Des Bishop Work Experience.
Funnier than Matthew Parris (highly camp Times columnist and ex-Tory MP attempts to “blend in” down The Bull And Shit by donning council worker over-coat and adopting blindingly original prole conversational topics – eg. birds, booze, football – come on!), less clueless than Portillo (“I wasn’t previously aware that great swathes of people lived like this”), and surprisingly bleak in places (you try surviving in a bedsit with no electricity, a sole pack of fish fingers to eat and five unmarried mothers to support), TDBWE was the last word in middle-class-ponce-slums-it-with-the-plebs-and-barely-survives (sur)reality television. A working class anti-hero is indeed something to be.
Runner-up: The Panel

AUDIO COMEDY OF THE YEAR:
Little Britain:
Although it’s been all but eclipsed by the huge success of the TV spin-off, many Little Britain fans retain a special place in their hearts for the original incarnation of Matt Lucas and David Walliams’ sketch show sensation. This compilation of highlights from the Radio 4 series contains all your favourite characters in embryonic form – including Vicky “Yeah but no but yeah” Pollard, Marjorie Dawes and Emily Howard – but an even bigger purchase incentive are those creations who, for one reason or another, didn’t make the transition to TV.
These include such wonderfully oddball individuals as the middle-class house-wives one-upping each other on child names (“Mine’s going to be called Hip Replacement”, “Yes, well, we’ve settled on Robert Mugabe”), a witch constructing her house out of confectionery a la Hansel & Gretel, and a masochistic Irish religious fanatic who bares an eerie resemblance to Matt Talbot. No wonder ex hotpress-er and Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan smelled a bona fide cult smash in the making.

COMEDY BOOK OF THE YEAR:
This Is Craig Brown
The Private Eye columnist mercilessly lampoons his targets (which range from Bono and Noel Gallagher to Andrew Rawnsley and Edwina Curry) with a surgically precise distillation of authorial idiosyncrasies.
Whether it be Tony Blair’s cumbersome attempts at zeitgeist-defining portentousness (“Today, we stand as a nation at the frontier of the threshold of the dawn of the foundations of the new millenium); the star-fucking obsequiousness of the truly insufferable Vanity Fair columnist Dominick Dunne (“There’s no actress I’d rather sit next to at dinner than Joan Collins, whose sixth husband, rock star Phil, is to appear at glamorous Queen Elizabeth II’s jubilee celebrations in her prestigious parkside mansion Buckingham Palace”); or the self-aggrandising pronouncements of Gore Vidal (“I have long worn the mantle of Unoffical Historian to the United States of Amnesia (sic!) and I regard it as essential part of my position to explain the inner-workings of that ungainly continent to its sluggish and frequently slack-buttocked but not entirely unreceptive peoples”), this was satire at its sharpest and funniest.
Henry Rollins once said that upon witnessing the virtuosity of Dave Navarro live in the flesh, he felt like “seeking out The Edge, bringing him to the next Jane’s Addiction show and saying, ‘Here, prick, this is how it’s done’”. After reading This Is Craig Brown, one feels like making a similar point to PJ O’Rourke.

XMAS DVD MUST BUY:
Seinfeld Seasons 1-3
As ever with the ingenious comedic outpourings of Mess(e)rs Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, the secret of Seinfeld’s success lay in the writers’ ability to harvest the minutiae of everyday life, throw the crop at a narrative and liberally sprinke with a generous measure of lethally hilarious observational gags. From George’s neurosis to Kramer’s eccentricity and Jerry and Elaine’s perennially tortuous romantic entanglements, there’s barely a pause for breath in amongst the social satire, mordant one-liners and brilliantly executed set-pieces. Beckett rewritten by Woody Allen, Seinfeld remains the Pet Sounds of prime-time US sitcoms.

SECOND ANNUAL “ADDING TO THE GAIETY OF THE NATION” AWARD:
The FAI
Runner-up: Ryan Tubridy