Sunday Night At The London Palladium (1955-74 ATV) Youthful Scouse Mod Jimmy Tarbuck, and an already skeletal Bruce Forsythe, host this insanely programmed institution of diamond-honed variety circuit stand-ups, proto-psychedelic beat pop, and people doing weird things with planks. Makes Live At The Apollo look like a content-driven engagement platform.

The Comedians (1971 – 79 Granada) Deftly edited showcase of effortlessly sexist and casually racist Seventies club comics of undeniable skill but no ambition. Their fifty interchangeable quips are interspersed with Dixieland jazz played by white people.

Wheeltappers’ and Shunters’ Social Club (1974-77 Granada) In a convincing studio mock-up of the sort of Working Men’s Club already dying, fag smoke rises and Watneys flows as Bernard Manning and the Frank Skinner-faced Colin Crompton introduce fruity variety, terrible 70s pop, and sometimes unexpectedly palettable pre-Alternative stand-ups. Cannon and Ball’s debut is stunning comedy theatre. The usual racist and sexist shit aside, visually and aesthetically this remains a high point of TV stand-up, which I rip off.

Boom Boom Out Go The Lights (1980-81 BBC2) Short-lived, two episode showcase for newfangled “Alternative Comedy”, comprising the DNA of the next thirty years of British stand-up. Brightly-lit social workers drinking BBC orange squash fail to process the innovations of Rik and Ade’s Dangerous Brothers double act, Pauline Melville, and masked machine-gunman Keith Allen, all inexplicably interspersed with feelgood r’n’b from Paul Jones.

O.T.T. (1982 Central) An over-excited Chris Tarrant reveals his inner-Rugby club social sec, hosting this Janus-faced late night aberration, featuring anti-Thatcher pop bands and communist Alexei Sayle, alongside race hate poster boy Bernard Manning and gratuitous 1970s female nudity, during which the young and unique black British comic Lenny Henry, and the Oxford fine art graduate Helen Atkinson Wood, wilted like whipped dogs.

Saturday Live (1985-88 Channel 4) Blabby Ben Elton shouts over a floodlit sheep-pen of caned casuals, and subtly distances himself from the weird and interesting acts he introduces (such as a brilliant Kevin McAleer with his unequalled owl slide show). Prefiguring the mass modern comedy phenomenon of Failed Irony, Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney scores big with the cash rich Thatcherites it ridicules.

Gas, Comedy Network (C4, Paramount 1997-98) The twin last gasps of straight stand-up on TV in the 20th century, then presumed by executives to “not really work”. Endlessly repeated for years on late night cable under the terms of the acts’ one-payment buy-out deals, and featuring many stars of the future – Noel Fielding, Lee Mack, Julian Barrat, Jason Byrne, Peter Kay – the shows typify the time when TV stand-up started to feel like worthless one-size fits all filler. Like peasants with free milk we lapped up what they offered us, only to see our virgin sets chopped into differently titled shows, and sliced into 79p audio-only I-tunes clips, for time immemorial.

Live At The Apollo, Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow, Stand Up For The Week (Open Mike Productions, BBC1, C4, 2008 +) Michael McIntyre’s management’s production outfit dominate the stand-up TV spectrum with a relatively narrow range of acts and approaches, mainly all managed by the production company’s parent group and two other big agencies. Mutually masturbatory backroom trade-offs of Masonic complexity inflate their clients’ lucrative private corporate gig rates by showing them working in front of vast crowds of laughing people and influential celebrities, which also convince the viewer at home that they are being entertained. Tight six minute sets with little to spook the horses, or with the consensus youth-danger flavor of Stand Up For The Week’s ersatz controversialists, characterize three ruthlessly efficient steamroller stand-up vehicles that must, nevertheless, be congratulated for reinvigorating the notion of funny people talking on TV for the new century, even as they kill live club comedy by luring in the alchopop crowd with their TV-induced expectations of post-produced bulletproof content.

The Alternative Comedy Experience (Comedy Central 2013 +) The best stand-up showcase ever made for television places two dozen of the sort of comics broadsheet critics and other comedians rate way above all the shit the public and TV executives like, including the highest ever proportion of women on a TV stand-up show, in a dimly lit Scottish basement. Without any supportive cutaways to laughing claques of no-taste divs, the focus is thrown onto the naked material and the raw performances, not the spectacle and the showbiz. The hard short edits of Granada’s The Comedians mesh impossibly with long extended routines in a Wheeltappers’ and Shunters’ live ambience that eschews the fake bonhomie of the Open Mike Productions showcases for an art house documentary style journey to the flourishing fringes of our rapidly emulsifying TV stand-up scene.

Paul Sinha‘s ability to spike obsessively detailed sport trivia through artful extended sets detailing the political and social concerns of an out-gay ex-doctor Hindu means club crowds are conned into loving him before they realise they’re applauding a textbook liberal.

The low energy Scottish shuffler David Kay sounds like a mumbling old lady, twittering away unnoticed, bit concentrate for a moment and it’s clear his uniquely odd worldview has the power to transform the dull mundanities of everyday existence into fascinatingly funny and surreal stories.

Like all the best Irish writers, Eleanor Tiernan sounds like she’s bending an unruly English idiom, not historically her own, into service of an essentially Irish vision, a bleak but nonetheless blackly comic view of life, expressed in clipped economic sentences, illuminated with occasional florid flourishes.

Andy Zaltzman, his ’60s satirist-shaped brain visibly bulging out of his enormous head, offers dictionary-dense demolitions of global political stupidity with a self-deprecating sleight of hand and a vast vocabulary.

Bridget Christie spouts old-school Eighties style feminist stand-up with a lightness of touch and a playful silliness her female forebears weren’t encouraged to entertain, and is the comedian of choice for The South Bank’s Women of The World Festival on March 8th.

Hated by crypto-fascist internet trolls the world-wide web over, Josie Long has found a fertile stream of heartfelt yet cuddly anti-capitalist invective, softened by her sentimental streak and occasional lapses into passionate frenzied faux-incoherence.