"Actor: Alex Alonso"

• Ali G - Bling Bling | DVD | (26/11/2001) from £5.92   |  Saving you £14.07 (70.40%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Sacha Baron-Cohen's Ali G has become a hero to the very people he set out to satirise but, as Bling Bling demonstrates, this is no time to put this creation out to grass; as long as there's a Christmas every year, collections like this will keep appearing. Bling Bling is an assortment of Ali G's interviews; a couple of them with possibly the last people in Britain who didn't realise that someone was pulling their leg and several with American grandees of various sorts, including economist JK Galbraith and former CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner. The real selling point, however, is Ali G's undeniably spectacular Comic Relief interview with David and Victoria Beckham, which, incidentally, presented the pair in a far more favourable light than any amount of avuncular fawning by Michael Parkinson. Bling Bling also includes quite a lot of Baron-Cohen's other alter-ego, hapless Kazakh! reporter Borat. Though Borat is a lazy and disappointing retreat to a time when British comedy was grounded in a belief that all foreigners are inherently hilarious--he's basically Manuel from "Fawlty Towers" with a microphone--he deserves kudos for the interview with an insufferable English undergraduate comedy troupe, in which he manages to get invited to slap two of them, and does so with the force they deserve. On the DVD: The scene selector or, rather, "Scene Selecta" is straightforward enough. The only "extras" are some more Ali G interviews, and a trailer for the forthcoming Ali G film. --Andrew Mueller

• Ali G, Innit | DVD | (18/03/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  An oasis of chortles in the laugh desert that is Channel 4's The 11 O'Clock Show, Ali G has since progressed to both his own programme and comedy icon status. Innit, meanwhile, rounds up the finest moments from the rapper's time on 11 O'Clock with some extra footage thrown in for good measure, which show Sacha Baron Cohen's vowel-dropping, dope-smoking gangsta wannabe at home in his Berkshire "hood". However, it is the previously seen interview material that produces the best moments as Ali, resplendent in a series of eye-searing day-glo tracksuits, grills the likes of ex-film censor James Ferman ("Why did they ban Chocolate Orange?"), the late Tory educational expert Sir Rhodes Boyson ("Do you think porn stars ought to teach sex education in schools?") and a pre-Clapham Common Ron Davies ("What is so good about Wales? Because, no disrespect, but me's hears it's crap.") Exactly who is being lampooned--publicity-hungry celebs? misogynistic rappers? white middle-class wiggers?--is never entirely made clear but the results are rarely less than hilarious. Only the ever-argumentative Tony Benn succeeds in taking on his shades-sporting persecutor. Anyone yet to fall under Ali G's spell, though, is unlikely to be convinced by his opening assertion that 85% of the video's cost price will be spent on top-quality marijuana. --Clark Collis