Laughing stock: Jimmy Carr outed, comedy's top 100, Brand new Russell Kane

Accusations of tax avoidance, the most influential people in comedy, Russells, and Alastair and Armando square up

Best of the week's news

The 8 Out of 10 Cats host, Jimmy Carr, finds himself strewn across the newspapers this week, as the most conspicuous face of a Jersey-based accountancy arrangement which squirrels £168m away from the Inland Revenue. Carr himself is said to be sheltering £3.3m of his earnings in the scheme, and paying only 1% of his income in tax. "Morally repugnant," said George Osborne of tax avoidance in his Budget speech earlier this year – but that's unlikely to bother Carr, who's been laughing off accusations of ethical bankruptcy for years.

It hasn't done his standing in UK comedy much harm – as this week's Top 100 list of the Most Influential People in Comedy is likely to establish. "Who runs our comedy industry," asked the panel who devised this power parade for the website Such Small Portions; "and who has the influence to inspire a generation of new comedians?" So far, two-fifths of the list has been announced, and the Guardian's Charlie Brooker's place in the big ton is already secured ...

Many of the names on that list will be behind this week's announcements of new comedy programming on Channel 4 and BBC3. The former announced an August "Funny Fortnight" featuring pilots from Vic and Bob (a new spoof gameshow called Lucky Sexy Winners), Frankie Boyle (The Boyle Variety Performance) and Peep Show's Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong (Bad Sugar, starring Olivia Coleman, Sharon Horgan and Julia Davis). Chortle reports, meanwhile, that "BBC Three has revealed the sort of comedy shows it wants to make in a document sent out to producers." According to the memo, "our top priority is to find a studio show with well-defined, original, likeable, youthful characters like Two Pints of Lager, IT Crowd or Big Bang Theory ... [The] writing that should be 'innovative, laugh-out-loud and edgy without being patronising of our audience'." It also – and rather oddly – detailed three top-priority scenarios for new shows, which included a young woman discovering her father was a sperm donor, and two chalk-and-cheese brothers inheriting the family firm.

Elsewhere, we learn with a weary sense of inevitability that Russell Brand has been supporting the Dalai Lama on his UK tour. The spiritual leader is reported to have said of the self-adoring standup that "some people told me to listen to this strange person's explanations … I was surprised but I think your openness is wonderful." Meanwhile, Edinburgh Comedy award champ 2010 Russell Kane has adopted his namesake Brand as a love-life role model, according to an interview in the Sun that will endear him to no one. "I'm going to try for a tour of duty," says Kane, "[and] do the stuff the other Russell is so good at. Look out ladies, I might look gay but I'm not!"

Our pick of this week's Guardian comedy stories

• Always the bridesmaid, never the bride – until now. BBC2 announce a new sketch show by comedy's veteran right-hand man, Kevin Eldon

• Times columnist Caitlin Moran has written the pilot for a Channel 4 sitcom about an overweight 16-year-old looking for a boyfriend

• RIP Yuhudi Penzel, who has been "pickled at great expense", according to a mistranslation from the Hebrew in the BBC sitcom Episodes

• "Stupid videos might be the international language": the creators of UK-bound Found Footage Fest interviewed

• "An exhibition of technical mastery, with all the stately polish of a Sinatra gig" – Leo Benedictus's latest Comedy Gold column, on Jerry Seinfeld

Controversy of the week

Has to be the Twitter spat between Alastair Campbell and Armando Iannucci, over the latter's acceptance of an OBE in the Queen's birthday honours list. For what may have been a large number of Guardian readers, this tiff engendered the unwelcome feeling that Campbell ("So @AIannucci OBE joins the Establishment he claims to deride. Malcolm Tucker and I do not approve of honours system") might be a teensy bit more in the right than Iannucci. Notwithstanding his lethal deployment of WMD to shut Campbell up, Iannucci's line of defence in his later Observer interview ("Does Chris Hoy cycle less well after being honoured?") had more holes in it than the dodgiest of Campbell's dodgy dossiers.

Contributor

Brian Logan

The GuardianTramp

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