Laughs with Johnny Vegas.Starring: ; Johnny Vegas

Rather than a conventional record of a stand-up comic at work, Johnny Vegas's Who's Ready for Ice Cream? is a pseudo-documentary meditation on what makes good comedy, and how success is a threat to comic spontaneity. Trapped by his own celebrity, Vegas is kidnapped by a brutal de- programmer and shipped off to the Edinburgh fringe to rediscover his roots in humiliation and despair. True comedy, we learn, comes from pain. He is forced to share a room with a truly unfunny comic who wakes him up to tell him gags and forces him to eat baby food; he is sponsored by an ice-cream man, who wants ice cream to figure in the routines; and to cap it all he is randomly beaten by the de-programmer.

Not all of this is remotely as funny as Vegas and his co-stars thought it was, though there are wonderful moments of excruciating embarrassment. However, the routines framed by it include moments of real genius--Vegas at his foul-mouthed, self-hating best. Talking about, say, how he was conned into working with the famous monkey puppet in the belief it was going to be released into the wild is inventive fantasy of the highest order. --Roz Kaveney