The non-politically correct comedy old guard is not exactly dropping like flies but it is certainly looking a tad wobbly. After the demise of Bernard Manning, Mike Reid has now gone to the Great Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club in the sky. Frank Carson and Jim Bowen must be feeling particularly nervous.

To many readers Reid will be forever known as dodgy EastEnder Frank Butcher, but he was previously a stand-up performer, a rare working class southerner among the ranks of northern comedians who graced ITV's The Comedians in the seventies. He always seemed more like a dodgy car dealer delivering market stall patter than a true gagsmith, so it was no surprise when he ended up dabbling in the Walford motor trade. Reid apparently died in Spain, which seems appropriate – he was Costa Del Sol through and through.

To me and others of my particular vintage, however, Reid made his name as the amiable if occasionally menacing host of Runaround. So what was he best at – banter merchant, kids' entertainer or soap star? What do you think? 3-2-1 R-r-r-r-r-Runaround....

Comedy isn't the new rock and roll, it's clearly the new celebrity. David Gest is reportedly planning a stand-up/variety tour of the UK next year and Britt Ekland has just announced that she is going to appear onstage in Grumpy Old Women, but the most disturbing example of this everyone-is-a-comedian phenomenon is Victoria Beckham's recent pseudo-reality TV documentary. As she swanned through LaLaLand she clearly thought she was pitching herself as the funniest, most gifted comedian on the planet. And just to clarify that this show was a comedy not a fly-on-the-wall documentary, an Ugly Betty lookalike – an actor, not a real person – was cast as her new PA.
And, it pains me to say it, but given her abject inability to crack a smile, Posh did make a pretty good deadpan comedian, even if the whole project was painfully self-conscious. It was noticeable though, that in the scenes with David Beckham she pouted rather than played it for laughs. When will women realise that men like women with a sense of humour every bit as much as they like women with their tits shoved up under their chin. Or maybe that's just me.
Victoria Beckham's whole shameless juggernaut campaign to conquer America is a bit of a joke, but then who can blame her? In a country that rates Paris "bargain bin" Hilton as a celebrity Victoria Beckham is positively multi-talented. Besides, they probably think Posh Spice really is posh over there just because she speaks with an English accent.
One bit of good news though - Ricky Gervais has announced on his website that, despite recent reports, the Beckhams definitely aren't appearing in the Extras Christmas special. With a Gervais backlash looming after his recent lacklustre live Wembley shows, being associated with the publicity-hungry stick woman could have been a further dent in his reputation.

Not strictly a comedy blog today, but an observation that certainly made me smile. Spotted in the audience during Jarvis Cocker's performance at the Latitude Festival last night was Geoff Hoon, the former Secretary of State for Defence, recently appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury in Gordon's reshuffle. Nothing wrong with an MP getting out and about – in fact his taste in music certainly gets my vote. It was just funny and weirdly incongruous to see a member of Her Majesty's Government in the audience at a performance of someone who wrote a song call ***** Are Still Running The World (the first word is so rude I can't event print the first letter).

I also once saw Joan Collins at a stand-up gig in Ealing. Has anyone else seen unlikely people at unlikely events?

If you want conclusive proof that comedy and stadium rock don't mix you only had to glance at the coverage of Live Earth on Saturday. While Madonna stormed it, most of the hotshot comedians who introduced the acts struggled to take control of the vast space. After last week's dismal Di performance it was ironically only Ricky Gervais who got away with it by keeping it short and sweet when he introduced the briliantly wrinkly Spinal Tap (or at least director Rob Reiner, in the guise of Tap rockumentarist Marty DiBergi). And by the way, surely a highlight of the day was the massed ranks of celebrity guitarists joining Tap for a rendition of Big Bottom. Don't ask me who the guests were though – the BBC was screening some pre-recorded nonsense from Tokyo while that piece of rock-comedy history was happening.

As for the other comedians on the day, if I'm brutally honest it is hard to make a sofa-based conclusive judgment about their performances. The transmission of Chris Rock's intro for the Red Hot Chili Peppers was abruptly truncated after he said a mother-upsetting rude word, resulting in a quick cut to a visibly distracted compere Jonathan Ross (what was he up to? checking his bank balance?). Others didn't even get as much coverage as that. While Russell Brand was doing his turn in front of the masses the Beeb was busy making Ross earn his fat cheque in his comfy corporate suite.

Then again, maybe it was a good thing that we saw more of the comics gagging with Ross and Graham Norton offstage rather than gigging onstage. Stand-up and stadium benefits are uneasy bedfellows. The average gagsmith's default setting is world-weary cynicism and this was a day for save-the world sincerity. It made more sense that the Pussycat Dolls and James Blunt rather than Alan Carr and Dara O'Briain earnestly told us to stick long life bulbs in our sockets. If Jimmy Carr (who looked oddly like an oily Roger Federer this weekend) mentioned long life bulbs he'd probably be making a joke about where else we should stick them. Fair play to Eddie Izzard though, at least he has a bit of previous where the eco-case is concerned, having voiced recycling ads.

Comedians are supposed to be society's dissenting voices, so when a weighty establishment figure like Al Gore puts the case for saving the environment it is only natural that comedians should take an opposing stand and they could hardly do it at Wembley (though David Baddiel tried, by calling himself a Climate Change Denier – shame he fluffed his line and Freudianly nearly called himself a Holocaust Denier by mstake). So maybe it was good that the BBC failed to feature the greatest wits of our generation doing their bits onstage. If there is one thing worse than the BBC's coverage of Live Earth it is comedians taking themselves seriously. Or maybe the BBC, in its infinite wisdom, agrees with me that comedians don't work in stadia and that's why they edited them out. Somehow, though, I doubt it.

What an odd weekend for comedy. Ricky Gervais' performance at the Diana concert must rank as one of the most bizarre sets in recent years. A typically cheeky gag about Prince Harry never having heard anyone swear in the army, followed by a dreadful song from The Office (of course, if he was going to be irreverent The Office also featured a Brent tribute to Diana "A rose you never used your thorns/the ones you loved abandoned you...") followed by that dance, followed by the David Bowie Pug Nose Face song from Extras, although the audience looked so utterly square I'm not even sure if they'd heard the song before. All that plus Gervais seeming to flounder when he was told he had to fill in due to a technical fault. But were those scribbled paper signs continually telling him he had two more minutes genuine or part of the act? If they were part of the act they backfired, if they were genuine the concert was hardly the apotheosis of hi-tech entertainment.

This gob-smackingly cringeworthy gig trumped my plan to blog about the smoking ban. Despite a lot of moaning somehow I can't see the new laws killing live comedy stone dead – cigarettes are more likely to kill comedians stone dead. The ban has already been in place at the Kilkenny Comedy Festival and the Edinburgh Festival and there has barely been a kerfuffle. OK, some performers can't follow in Bill Hicks' footsteps and show how cool they are by smoking onstage, but at least they won't follow in Bill Hicks' footsteps and die an early death (though there was a cruel irony there – Hicks died of pancreatic cancer, rather than lung cancer)

Some are opposing the ban on the basis that it infringes civil liberties. Stand-up Liam Mullone – ironically an obituary writer in his spare time – has offered to let other comedians travel around in his converted hearse if they want a fag break during a gig today. Mullone also promoted a pre-ban compulsory smoking gig at which Russell Brand told gags while brandishing a shisha pipe. It is always good to hear dissenting voices, but I suspect that soon we will take no-smoking indoors for granted in the same way we take no-smoking on buses for granted.

Comedy will survive the ban. Whether Ricky Gervais will survive Sunday night is another matter.