Fawlty Towers: For the Record

Chinese Arts Now was founded in 2005 and aims to produce and present work that explores Chinese themes, stories and art forms in the UK. Its annual festival includes a comedy night (presented in conjunction with Soho Theatre), and this year three comics of Chinese heritage – Evelyn Mok, Ken Cheng and Phil Wang – performed.

Lockdown has been mostly pants for live performers, comics included. There was that brief foray into open-air performances last summer, made even more fun by some lovely weather (although not always) – and I sincerely hope that promoters and comics will venture outdoors again this spring and summer.

The Leicester Comedy Festival, always great fun, was one of the last to be able to run fully in 2020, but this year it's not so lucky. Instead of several hundred events in and around Leicester, the 2021 iteration is an online-only version with many fewer shows of Zoom gigs and interviews.

There's something in the water, as no fewer than three comics are launching podcasts related to the one thing we can't do at the moment – travel. They're having a laugh, aren't they? Other offerings include escapist fun with superheroes, music collections and a spoof true-crime series.

Available on all podcast platforms unless stated

Alan Carr's Life's a Beach

It has taken three years for the second series of Back to reach our screens (a combination of the creator being busy, a star being unwell and Covid), but it was worth the wait. To recap for those who didn't see the first series of Simon Blackwell's very dark comedy (now on All4), it concerns Andrew (Robert Webb), who suddenly came back into the life of Stephen (David Mitchell), who is, he says, his long-lost foster

We're still some way off being able to see live performances in actual clubs and theatres, but here are some more comedy podcasts to keep your laughter quotient healthy in the meanwhile.

Available on all podcast platforms unless stated.

Office Ladies

What a year that was. Live performance was stopped dead in its tracks for most of 2020, and comedy – as viscerally live as you can get in dark and sweaty enclosed spaces above pubs or in club basements – was particularly hard hit. Never again, I suspect, will comedy fans complain about the privations of broom-cupboard venues at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Podcasts have got many of us through 2020, starved as we have been for most of it of live comedy to leave the house to see. Here's a selection of some of the best; they are available on all podcast platforms unless stated.

Dear Joan & Jericha

Edgy comedy runs the risk of discomfiting the audience so much that they can't relax and enjoy the show. But Natalie Palamides, appearing as Nate, her alter ego, in Nate: A One Man Show on Netflix, pulls it off, and then some.