Thanks heavens for a) youtube b) comedians with big egos and wonderful musical taste. Morrissey's Friday night gig at the Roundhouse last week came to an abrupt halt four songs into proceedings when the singer retired due to a serious frog in his throat. That wasn't the end of the matter though. Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand and David Walliams were at the gig and somehow – though I don't imagine they took much persuading – they ended up onstage trying to placate a packed house of disgruntled Mozza fans. Brand, whose cat is, fact fans, named Morrissey, did his best to silence the unruly mob but he was fighting a losing battle from the start. It wasn't as if he was hijacking the gig for his own rampant self-publicising mic-hogging reasons, oh no, he was simply trying to explain the situation.
Jonathan Ross then chipped in to tell people to keep their tickets to claim refunds but instead of being the voice of reason only made the situation worse by suggesting that David Walliams would compensate the audience by doing "20 minutes of I'm A Lady." In the end the trio scarpered and who can blame them? I haven't seen anyone on the sharp end of so many boos since Ceausescu attempted to silence an angry mob from his balcony in the dying days of his Romanian regime.
Of course, rather than keep quiet about the whole embarrassing affair, Jonathan Ross turned it into a very good anecdote on his Radio 2 morning show on Saturday and then Russell Brand offered his version of events on his radio show in the evening. And thanks to the power of cameraphones and the interweb, you can see for yourself what happened here.

There used to be a theory that one didn't make sitcoms about telly because it was too inward looking and the viewers wouldn't be interested. That all seems to have changed these days, with even ITV getting in on the act with sunny soap Echo Beach and the behind-the-scenes comedy Moving Wallpaper. Viewing figures aren't great and reviews haven't been great either, but ITV has at least been applauded for trying something different.

Except that how different is it? Apart from an obvious debt to Extras (and, of course, America's Larry Sanders Show), ITV has actually been here before, except that no-one but me seems to remember watching it. In 2000 Michael Barrymore played troubled game show host Bob Martin. Each week, aided and abetted by Keith Allen and Denis Lawson, this neurotic prima donna – BM, not MB – had different problems on his fictional show-within-a-show. One week, for instance, he had a huge tantrum when he thought a contestant had been cheating to win a car. Looking back on it now, Barrymore's Martin, forever on the brink of meltdown, and Gervais's Andy Millman in the Extras Xmas Special had more in common than initially met the eye. For both of them fame was not everything it was cracked up to be.

What was also notable about Bob Martin was the inclusion of celebrities such as Jamie Theakston playing versions of themselves. In one episode, a young unknown Rob Brydon played a scary contestant with stalkerish tendencies who would not leave Dani Behr alone.

Bob Martin seems to have been weirdly written out of telly history. Partly because of the Barrymore fall-out, but also because it was overshadowed by the rise of Ricky Gervais, which suddenly made it look very old-fashioned. The last episode went out in June 2001, less than a month before the first episode of The Office. And as far as I know it has never been available on DVD.

I interviewed Stephen Merchant before Christmas and asked him if Bob Martin was an influence on Extras. He said he was aware of it, but was not that familiar with it. Not that I'm saying for a moment that he and Gervais copied it, in fact I'm sure they didn't. But as an ardent comedy fan I was surprised Merchant didn't remember more about it.

As for the creators of Bob Martin, they didn't do so badly anyway. Jeff Pope is a successful producer, while Bob Mills – who had already had a couple of decent bashes at subverting the telly formula with the much-missed In Bed With Medinner and the very Larry Sanders-ish The Show – went on to co-write Tim Spall's award-winning movie Pierrepoint. As for that Michael Barrymore though, whatever did ever happen to him?

It is not just about who you see, it is about where you sit when you see them. Last week I reviewed comedian Paul Foot at the Comedy Bunker club in West Ruislip, and while he definitely didn't storm it, as they say in comedy parlance, he didn't die on his bottom (a polite version of the comedy parlance here) either. The people around me definitely gave out the odd chuckle. Yet Dave from Hillingdon was there and posted a reply on the Standard's website saying that the audience was "obviously embarrassed by this act".

Which goes to show that different fans can have different experiences depending on where they sit. At club gigs I have to fight for a decent pew like everybody else, but at major gigs I'm spoilt. I may not be carried up to the Royal Box on a sedan chair, but I do get pretty good seats. At the Hammersmith Apollo for instance, reviewers usually get the front row of the second block back, which means we have great views and plenty of leg-room (and easy access to the bar). At Ricky Gervais's Edinburgh Castle show the press had really good seats and access to free peanuts.

Sitting on the end of a row as theatre critics traditionally do is always preferable. One of my pet hates is being stuck in the middle of a row next to a man who likes to sit with his legs apart, staking out as much territory as possible. On a really bad night I've been stuck between a man on either side doing this. And as much as you ask them to desist, it seems to be instinctive. After the interval they just return to their default splayed position. This happened at Russell Brand's Fairfield Hall gig last year. I think maybe they were so intimidated by Brand's relaxed attitude to his sexuality they had to assert their masculinity more than ever.

Sometimes being too far away can spoil your enjoyment, but sometimes it can enhance it. When Little Britain did their Hammersmith Apollo Comic Relief show I actually bought a ticket as it was for charity and the only one I could get was in the balcony. I thought I'd hate the show because I was so far away, but somehow the brain seemed to compensate for the long-distance view and the fact that I couldn't see Vicky Pollard's every expression and I enjoyed it more than ever.

Last Saturday I had another unexpected experience. Sitting on the far left of the row at the Red Rose Club and watching Pappy's Fun Club onstage, I could hear an increasingly threatening altercation going on in the corridor. I'm sure people on the right would not have heard this at all, but for me it just made me feel anxious. I feared the argument was going to spill out and come through the doors. I'm all for knockabout comedy, but seeing someone being knocked about at a comedy gig is a different thing entirely.

One website described Chris Langham's interview with Pamela Connolly on More4's Shrink Rap last night as a TV comeback, which was a little unfair, but only a little. While he wasn't attempting a comedy performance to rival his formidable turns in The Thick Of It and Help (in which, oh irony, he played a therapist) the programme did feel like a 60-minute plea for rehabilitation. Filmed only a few days after his release from prison (with no fee changing hands), Langham had a chance to put his case away from the glare of the courtroom and without real cross-examination, which was interesting to say the least. The result was utterly compelling, but it left me feeling decidedly uncomfortable.

Langham seems to put his rollercoaster car crash of a life – alcohol, drugs, compulsive lying – almost solely down to an abusive experience at the age of eight. Having been a victim then, he has never been able to get things fully back on track since. He talked movingly about how he tried to get a gram of coke on credit because his wife had just lost their new-born baby, about his friends who stood by him during his trial, and frequently sobbed. Though he was notably not so weepy when he was talking about viewing the images of abuse that the police found on his computer.

I'm no therapist, so I maybe I shouldn't pick holes in Pamela Connolly's interview, but something about this didn't feel right. What I'd really like to know is what was filmed and cut out. Were there pauses? Retakes? Connolly's questions were firm and to the point, but there were big gaps. One minute he was talking about cleaning up in 1986, the next he was talking about the police coming to his house nearly twenty years later. The introduction did not fill me with much confidence either, when it sad that Langham was arrested shortly after he won two BAFTAs. As I remember it, the news broke shortly after he won two British Comedy Awards in late 2005.

There were some odd observations from Connolly, a fully qualified and experienced therapist who at times still seemed to have learnt her trade from the university of life. She was keen to latch onto anything obviously traumatic that might be a clue to Langham's behaviour (much in the way that when she interviewed Stephen Fry she seemed obsessed wiith the abuse he suffered as a child, despite Fry's dismissiveness about it – or maybe because of that...) When Langham recalled being employed as a writer by Spike Milligan – hardly a model of mental stability – Connolly pounced and implied that the older Milligan was a surrogate father figure because Langham's own father had never shown that he loved his son.

Excuses seemed to be the name of the game rather than remorse. Langham does apologise and clearly regrets what he did, but this programme seemed to be about explaining the reasons behind his actions rather than putting his hands up, saying it was a fair cop guv and moving on with his life, which might be one way of finding closure, to put it in therapy-speak. A contender for the oddest bit of telly this year. Certainly the oddest bit of telly so far. Definitely the most voyeuristic. Forget reality TV, this felt very real indeed.

It is not often that comedy critics are a united bunch, but Chris Rock's UK shows this week have pretty much got across-the-board positive reviews. The only real dissenting voice was blogger Ian Winwood in The Guardian, who complained that Rock did not tailor his show to a UK audience. I personally thought Rock did a pretty good job at adjusting his act. He explained who Seabiscuit was and made references to Beckham, Frank Bruno and darts ("you think that's a sport? You are setting the bar way too low"). Given that a large chunk of his act was about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton what was he supposed to do, swap their names for Gordon Brown and Cherie Blair? The only reference that foxed me was the one about US baseball* player Barry Bonds taking steroids. The original story might have passed me by in south London, but not knowing this hardly ruined a powerhouse performance.

On the subject of comedy getting lost in translation it has come to my attention that Ricky Gervais made sure he covered all of his bases with the Extras Christmas Special. Some of the references were so specifically British that Gervais altered the names for the American HBO broadcast. Jade Goody ("over here she's like the Queen" explains Gervais on his website) was changed to Kramer – the actor Michael Richards who played Kramer in Seinfeld has also been involved in a racism row. Kate Adie became US news anchor Katie Couric. In a previous episode Billie Piper became Halle Berry, which almost sounds the same if you are a little hard of hearing.

Eddie Izzard once avoided the problem by performing in French when in France, but maybe Eddie missed a trick. It can be highly productive when comedians stick to their own language but are aware of linguistic differences. In the old days a visiting US stand-up could get a good five minutes out of the fact that pants means trousers in America and underpants over here. And recently Australian comics have got plenty of mileage out of the fact that thongs in Australia are flip flops. Did you here the one about the man who asked his girlfriend if he could wear her thong as he was just popping out to the shops?

*For those of you who kindly corrected me when I wrote above that Barry Bonds was a football player, I had originally written baseball player, but edited my copy last night when Rock referred to him as a football player on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross. I don't know whether this was a wind-up or a jet-lagged slip, but Rock definitely calls Bonds a football player three minutes into this clip here. I have now changed it back to baseball again.

It is interesting that a week after Ricky Gervais's Extras Christmas Special slammed stars for appearing in Big Brother one of the country's biggest comedy stars appears in the latest variant of the long-running reality TV show. But Little Britain's Matt Lucas wasn't in the actual house and he certainly wasn't doing this to raise his own profile. But why he was doing it remains a mystery to me. I guess the new format in which stars dictate the antics or the inmates was attempting to be subversive, but it didn't quite cut it in the right way on the first night.

I'm the sort of person who hates change, but it is clear that Big Brother decided it had to adapt or die after last year's Jade Goody debacle. The trouble is they have changed it too much. I don't have a problem with putting talented rising stars in the house to answer the critics who say they only use useless wannabes. But I do have a problem with the whole Celebrity Hijack concept, which in its own way feels meaner than ever. Just to make matters even worse, Matt Lucas was very funny and I couldn't help watching it. I just felt dirtier than ever afterwards.

This series seems to be putting power back in the hands of celebrities when one of the attractions of the early Celebrity Big Brothers was seeing stars reduced to the status of mere mortals, arguing over who had used up the milk and bickering over whose turn it was to do the washing up. Instead, last night, we had Matt "Dr Evil" Lucas playing the tyrant, instructing housemate John Loughton by secret microphone and humiliating him into playing a cretin in front of his new friends. Loughton is the Chairman of the Scottish Youth Parliament and presumably has political ambitions. In which case the clip of him crawling to the Diary Room on all fours as instructed by Lucas may come back to haunt him. Although the way politics and reality TV is blurring he may use it in his campaign manifesto in 20 years time.

The trouble is how far will the future famous puppeteers push things. With outrageous Joan Rivers and gormless Bo Selecta character Keith Lemon still to come things could get a lot nastier. We may soon look on the moment when Matt Lucas ordered Loughton to massage the back of a man he had only met seconds earlier as one of the nicer things to happen in the house this year. Hopefully the Evening Standard's esteemed art critic Brian Sewell will redress the balance and get them all reading Proust, doing flower arranging and going to bed early when it is his turn to be puppeteer. Now that would be really subversive.