Wandered over to a studio recording for Have I Got News for You last night, with a fairly decent line up of Victoria Coren and Ross Noble as guests and the ever reliable host in the form of Alexander Armstrong.

Oddly, on the way to the studio passed some big PR tent thing and a bright bubbly chap jumped out to ask if I wanted to test a Smart Car. It would have to be damn smart for me to drive it though, as I have never actually learnt to drive a car. I could test crash one if they prefer? Tom tried it though.

Fortunately, we had Jo Caulfield as the warm up act once we all got inside – who is very good and a vast improvement on the other blokes who they occasionally have in, who don’t quite deliver the right sort of humour for a HIGNFY audience.

The recording was quite good, and it was nice that it was a quick recording and not the slow stilted affair that happened the last time I was there, where the host seemed to lose the ability to read an autocue correctly.

Victoria Coren spent most of the show giving Alexander evil glares, but did quip at the beginning that someone had told her on Twitter that they get all the questions in advance. She was a bit annoyed that old rumour still circulates, and I can also confirm that autocue for host aside, the whole thing is improvised and then edited to make it coherent.

I’ve never seen Ross Noble do anything other than HIGNFY, and he came across much better live than he does in the edited shows – unless he was just particularly good last night?

For a moment at the end of the recording when they do a few retakes, I thought they were going to drop the super-injunction stuff due to lawyers getting twitchy – but that seems to have been kept.

Talking of twitchy, Paul Merton got a bit annoyed about some people chatting during the recording which did seem a bit rude of them.

Also, something new, the floor manager asked people sitting in front of the wide angle camera to refrain from waving their hands when the credits role – if you look carefully at the end, you’ll see a few declined to take his advise and clapped with hands right up in the air. Sigh.

If you want to be in the recording – which is essentially a 2-hour version of the TV show – then tickets to the next series are released in September, and details are here.

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One comment
  1. Andrew says:

    Ross Noble, a Geordie who now lives in outer Melbourne, Australia.

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