Charlie Brooker series returns next year

Controversial American stand-up Doug Stanhope is to join the team of Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe.

BBC Four has ordered a second six-part series to air in January, promising an ‘impudent’ way news is presented to the public.

Stanhope will be the programme’s US correspondent, covering ‘those stories that are driving him bonkers’, while journalists including Marina Hyde, Adam Curtis and Peter Oborne will also contribute.

Charlie Brooker says: ‘The return of Newswipe is both exciting and daunting, because it nearly killed me last time. Maybe this time it'll finish the job.

‘It’s hard to say precisely what we'll be featuring, because I can’t predict the future, but hopefully we won't be picking apart coverage of either an intercontinental nuclear war or a global ebola outbreak. Whatever happens, we'll be staring at it with amusement and horror.’

GQ magazine once branded Stanhope ‘America’s most depraved man’, and his TV appearances in the UK have so far been limited to a Channel 4 Comedy Lab on immigration entitled Doug Stanhope: Go Home, an appearance on 8 Out Of 10 Cats, and a set on BBC Two's Live Floor Show, which he said he performed on ecstasy.

He has previously caused outraged at the Just For Laughs festival in Kilkenny by claiming ‘Irish women are too ugly to rape’, was booed throughout his set at the Leeds Festival this summer and was accused of anti-semitism at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Published: 24 Nov 2009