GB News celebrated its four-year birthday at the weekend – and celebrated
by axing its sole intentional comedy show. The channel has pulled the plug
on Headliners, its late-night “anti-woke” newspaper round-up fronted by comedians who broadly tilted to the right.

Its host Leo Kearse has claimed it is due to it being “too anarchic” for the broadcaster, while other sources say it was down to the rather more prosaic reason of being very little watched.

Regular contributor Josh Howie posted on social media: “Ostensibly it’s about numbers… time will tell if this is the right direction.” Kearse added: “Headliners is perhaps too esoteric…for a news channel that’s moved from radical upstart to the respected mainstream.”

Other comics, however, took a more hard-nosed attitude to the show. “It was shit,” one tells Rats in a Sack. “But it paid on time and I’ve got a kid.”

PS: One GB News presenter unlikely to miss Headliners is its weekday evening host and occasional MP for Clacton, Nigel Farage. Stand-up comic Sara Pascoe told Armando Iannucci’s BBC Radio 4 show Strong Message Here this week of how she once found herself sharing a dressing room with the then Ukip leader.

“They said: ‘Nigel, this is Sara Pascoe, she’s a comedian,’ and then the door
slams,” she said. “And then he says to me: ‘I don’t find comedy funny’.”

What, not even Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown?