The team behind The Comic Strip, the popular series of short spoof films shown on Channel 4 and BBC 2 in the 1980s and 1990s, are set to return later this year for a new one-off hour-long special.

Comic Strip: The Hunt For Tony Blair, which will be shot as a 1950s-style 'fugitive' film noir spoof, is to be shown on Channel 4 later this year. It has been written by Peter Richardson and Pete Richens - the writers behind the original four series and various specials of The Comic Strip Presents...

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I'm not too bothered about this one, i always found them rather hit and miss - They tried to be too arty for their own good at the end. I could watch the Bad News episodes over and over again though.

I'm very much in two minds, here... I certainly don't mind "artyness", I think it's in fact refreshing that someone, sometimes, tries to escape the "lowest common denominator" theory of TV entertainment, but I must admit the "Comic Strip Presents" series WAS very hit and miss, and the later episodes were far from the best.

My favourites are the same as everyone's, the "Famous Five" spoofs and, indeed, the two "Bad News".

It's funny when you think about it, the first one was made at about the same time as the much more famous and celebrated, albeit almost entirely identical, "This is Spinal Tap", and both massively owed to the mother of all mockumentaries, Eric Idle's "The Rutles: all you need is cash", which was the first, and is still the best in the "genre", methinks.

And I always had some reservations about Pete Richardson, can't put a finger on a reason, it's another of those things, and his heavy editing of the episodes in the DVD collection didn't do much to improve things in that respect, especially after I lost all my TV recordings, digitised from VHS, in a hard-disk crash some time ago... grrr...

However, what worries me is returns, returns, returns, of stuff that was successful 20 or 30 years ago, there's a heavy play on the nostalgia factor in action, seems to me, and that often hides lack of new ideas and artists...

But we'll have to wait and see, as usual, you never know.