Funny people

I've now replaced the ads on the right (which earned me nothing! and just continually taunted me with offers of competent tilers in Stokenchurch or somewhere) with a very web2.0 list of feeds by people I consider funny. So far they're all women, curiously. Let's as it were run through them.

Nancy Banks-Smith is, as any Guardian reader know, just the funniest reviewer of television in the world. She must be about a hundred and eight by now. Looks like she's immortal. Let's hope so.

Lucy Mangan is her natural successor. Sometimes her tv reviewing is too obviously influenced by NBS but she's genuinely witty. It helps that she has a Lewisham background - in one of the entries she talks about reading a book in Torridon Road library - and lives, I believe, in Beckenham, where she uses the same Waitrose as me. I'm beginning to sound like a stalker now.

On Balderdash and Piffle Victoria Coren managed to make etymology sexy. Since then, she's hosted Only Connect and is clearly dead clever and dead rich. Talks about poker too often, leaving me utterly confused ("when the flop went down I found I'd been flanneling a turbot"), but has the advantage of brevity that many bloggers (I mean you, Richard Herring) lack. Here's a fascinating recent article from the Observer.

Finally (for now) the one you won't have heard of, Ariane Sherine. She seems to have started the Atheist Bus campaign, and while we'll have to forgive her for having written for My Family, has promise, I think.