I watched Kim Jong-Il's Comedy Club on BBC Four last night. It was a compelling piece of television and it's hard to articulate my reaction to it.

Quoting from the BBC website's description: "A journalist with no scruples and a pair of Danish comedians travel to North Korea with a mission to use humour to uncover the truth behind one of the world's most notorious regimes."

Essentially the three men, Mads Brugger, Danish journalist, and Jakob and Simon, two Danish/Korean comedians, posed as a Danish cultural exchange group hoping to perform a well-known Danish skit as theatre for a North Korean audience. In the process they shone a light on the remarkably twisted and Orwellian life of North Korea, and in so doing they faced the reality of their own lies too.

I was both moved to laughter (painful to me as I have a very sore chest from coughing lately) and tears. The absurd contrast between the edifice of lies and fear that underpins everything in North Korea and the presentation of a sketch about a transvestite called Mrs Kristoff to a solemn audience of North Koreans had me in stitches, while the segment on the show school filled with indoctrinated children stopped the laughter with chilling speed.

I had the greatest respect and sympathy for Jakob, the younger of the two comedians. He has a condition involving a muscular palsy. This let him act as the troupe's voice of truth. No Korean could understand a word he spoke in Danish, so he was able to comment in real time about the regime. A brave and funny young man who, it must be said, was being used for propaganda purposes by both the North Koreans and Mads Brugger, yet managed to stand apart from both agendas.

Best and most troubling piece of television I've watched in a long while.

As sammywol posted about here, we watched the first episode of Terry Pratchett: Living with Alzheimer's last night. It's upsetting viewing, but compelling. Pratchett's humanity and pluck are undefeated however, and I admire him for standing up and dragging the spotlight onto the real lives affected by this terrifying disease.

Ed Byrne has just saved President Bartlett from death by painted tennis ball on Graham Norton's show. TV at its finest. Accent Monkey must be so proud.

We're watching a re-run of "Long Way Round", Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman's travel documentary, where Ewan gets a face full of petrol and has to go to a Ukrainian hospital to have his eyes checked.

Then they show the poor guy being examined and then show the eye chart he has to look at.

I doubt McGregor knows much Cyrillic.

I've just come downstairs from getting Rowan off to bed and Sam's watching with a sort of hypnotised fascination a show called 'Hair Wars'. It's about international level hair dressing competitions. "These people take this seriously. They're the elite of hairdressing. They're like the SAS of hairdressers."

Wow.

On the show "50 Questions of Political Incorrectness", one of the commentators just said: 'Prince Philip: what happens when Bernard Manning marries well.'

Hee, hee.

Thanks to the miracle of the internet, sammywol and I watched the third episode of the current Doctor Who season, "School Reunion", last night.

It were fab.

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