The 30th anniversary of ITV's satirical puppet show Spitting Image is to be marked with a special documentary on BBC Four.

In Whatever Happened To Spitting Image? the arts strand Arena will reunite the founding creative team and tell the vexed and frequently hilarious story of the genesis of the satirical puppet show, with exclusive contributions from caricaturists Peter Fluck, Roger Law, and TV producer John Lloyd.

Spanning 131 episodes over 18 series from February 1984 to February 1996, the show was made for Central Independent Television and broadcast across the ITV network.

The puppets became almost as famous as the politicians they lampooned, and in 2000 were auctioned off at Sotheby's. In the course of the documentary, the team sets out to discover where they now reside and who is taking care of them in their old age.

Revealing the extraordinary technical achievement of the series, Arena meets the caricaturists, puppet-mould-makers, designers, puppeteers, impressionists, writers, and directors who worked tirelessly to ensure the show landed its weekly jibes and punches at the politicians, royals, and celebrities of the day. And, tracing its journey to our TV screens, through 12 years of huge audience figures and weekly controversy to its eventual demise, Arena will ask what Spitting Image got right, where it went wrong, and whether its absence for the past 17 years has left a hole in the schedules that has yet to be filled by modern broadcasting.

The documentary has been directed by Arena series editor Anthony Wall, who said: Cassian Harrison, the channel editor for BBC Four, commented: A date for broadcasting the one-hour programme is yet to be confirmed, with the BBC currently saying that it will air in the spring, but it will have a preview screening at the BFI Southbank on Thursday 27th February at 6.10pm.
After the screening, there will be a question-and-answer session with Fluck, Law, Lloyd, and Wall.

The big-screen showing and Q&A will be followed at 8.45pm with a special two-hour celebration and Q&A featuring clips and guests including impressionist Steve Nallon plus "victims" Lord Roy Hattersley and Lord David Steel.
Tickets to both events go on public sale at 11.30am on Tuesday 11th February - click here for the preview screening/Q&A and here for the celebration/Q&A - with a joint event ticket also being made available.

A fourth series of the BBC Two comedy Episodes has been given the green light - with the third one yet to air.

Starring Tamsin Greig as Beverly Lincoln, Stephen Mangan as Sean Lincoln, and Matt LeBlanc as a stylised version of himself, the co-production between the BBC and Showtime - an American TV company - will start shooting next year. As with the second and third series, it will comprise a run of nine episodes.

The show is about British husband-and-wife comedy-writing duo Sean and Beverly who travel to Hollywood to remake their successful British TV series, with disastrous results.

Series three - which sees the couple back together following Beverly's fling with Matt - will begin in the USA on Sunday 12th January. A date for its start on BBC Two is yet to be announced. The second series aired in the UK between 11th May and 6th July 2012.

The surviving members of Monty Python's Flying Circus are to reunite on stage.

Terry Jones, one of the iconic group of comedians, told the BBC: His announcement ended speculation following tweets by fellow Python Eric Idle yesterday and today in which he said:


and


It is understood that John Cleese, Michael Palin, and Terry Gilliam will join Jones and Idle for the press conference, which is expected to be held at The Playhouse Theatre in London, where the hit stage show Spamalot is playing.

The sixth member of the comedy group, Graham Chapman, died of cancer in October 1989.

The five surviving Pythons last appeared together at the 1998 Aspen Comedy Festival.

The comedy group started life as a BBC television sketch show that ran for four series between 1969 and 1974, spawning five films as well as various books and albums, and proved to be a massive influence on comedy.

UPDATE - FRIDAY 22nd NOVEMBER: The show will take place at the O2 Arena in London on Tuesday 1st July 2014, and will see the team performing some of their best-known sketches "with modern and topical Pythonesque twists", as well as new material. Tickets go on sale on Monday 25th November from 10am, with prices starting at £27.50 and going up to £95 (plus fees). More details are available via this link. The performance will be filmed and released commercially.

Sitcom The Big Bang Theory returns to E4 on Thursday 31st October for its seventh series.

The first episode of the 24-episode run is called The Hofstadter Insufficiency.
It will air at 8.30pm, having premiered exactly five weeks earlier in the USA on CBS.

Cult classic Blackadder has been voted the favourite British comedy of BBC Entertainment viewers across Europe and the Middle East.

A Christmas Comedy Countdown poll was held between 3rd November and 9th December 2012 to determine the top ten from a choice of 30 shows, with viewers casting more than 1,000 votes. In the end, there was less than 3.9 per cent between the top three programmes, but Blackadder - co-written by Richard Curtis and starring Rowan Atkinson, who played one of the Doctors in the 1999 Comic Relief spoof The Curse of Fatal Death, written by Steven Moffat - came out on top, with 12.2 per cent of the vote.

Tony Robinson, who played Baldrick in the show, said: The top ten as voted for by viewers were:

• 1: Blackadder (with Rowan Atkinson and Tim McInnerney)
• 2: My Family (with Zoë Wanamaker)
• 3: Fawlty Towers (with John Cleese)
• 4: Keeping Up Appearances (with Clive Swift, Geoffrey Hughes, and David Griffin)
• 5: 'Allo 'Allo (with Guy Siner, Hilary Minster, and Carmen Silvera)
• 6: Little Britain (with David Walliams and Anthony Head, and narrated by Tom Baker)
• 7: Gavin & Stacey (with James Corden, Ruth Jones, Adrian Scarborough, Russell Tovey, Margaret John, and Sheridan Smith, who played the Eighth Doctor's companion Lucie Miller in the Big Finish audio dramas)
• 8: As Time Goes By (with Geoffrey Palmer and Joan Sims)
• 9: One Foot In The Grave (with Richard Wilson and Annette Crosbie)
• 10: 2point4 children

The other 20 shows in the poll were: After You've Gone, Beautiful People, Big Top, The Cup, Dad's Army, dinnerladies, Getting On, Him & Her, Ideal, Jam & Jerusalem, Last Of The Summer Wine, Lead Balloon, The Old Guys, Rev, Roger And Val Have Just Got In, The Royle Family, Supernova, Taking The Flak, Twenty Twelve, and Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps.

Blackadder ran for four series between 1983 and 1989. There were also three specials, one of which - Blackadder's Christmas Carol - featured Nicola Bryant and Denis Lill as well as another Curse of Fatal Death Doctor, Jim Broadbent, among the cast.

The life and career of comedian Dave Allen is to be celebrated by a documentary for BBC Two.

The one-hour programme, entitled Dave Allen Night, will feature rare and often previously-unseen archive footage plus interviews with family, friends, and colleagues.

Together with Allen's family, other interviewees include Dame Maggie Smith, Stephen Frears, and Steven Berkoff. It will also feature archive interviews with Bill Cotton - the former head of light entertainment at BBC TV who went on to become the controller of BBC1 - conducted shortly before the television executive's death in 2008.

In addition, the cast and crew of the triple-BAFTA-winning Dave Allen At Large - the comic's best-known, long-running BBC show - unite to talk about their memories of working with Allen, who often courted controversy with his views on politics and religion.

The documentary - whose broadcast date is yet to be confirmed - is a Vera production and has been executive-produced by Geoff Atkinson. It was commissioned by BBC Two controller Janice Hadlow and entertainment commissioning executives Gilly Hall and Mark Linsey. Hall said: Allen - who won the Variety Club's ITV Personality of the Year Award for his comedy/chat series Tonight With Dave Allen - died in March 2005 at the age of 68.