Dawn French, Lee Mack, Justin Lee Collins, Alan Carr… the list is endless.

Just thinking about them makes us want to round up every TV executive in a small room and hack the testicles off them that they haven’t even got in the first place.

And so the following is a list – in no particular order – of some of the most brilliant, unique, prime-time repellent and, therefore, largely anonymous comedians we’ve had the privilege to have never heard.

Read what we’ve got to say, watch and listen to what they have to say, fall in love and spread the word.

Doug Stanhope

For any of you who have ever thought ‘I wonder what Bill Hicks would say today if his pussy of a pancreas hadn’t of got all cancerous’ then what spews from Doug Stanhope’s gorgeously vitriolic mind is probably as close to an answer as you can get.

Not that he’s plagiarising the great man, not one bit. The topics are similar but the jokes and ideas have evolved and are all his own.

There are lots of people who will tell you that they don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks of them and they’re almost always talking bollocks, but with Doug you get the impression he means it and it’s this unparalleled lack of shame that separates him far, far away from the rest.

Any of you who have Mary Whitehouse posters blutacked all over your walls then this video is definitely the one for you:

Daniel Kitson

Basically, to be fair, at the end of the day, when all is said and done, etc, and so on, et al, blah blah; what we all want from our entertainers – be they comedians, musicians, novelists or people who do drawings with their own blood and poo – is for them to make us feel less lonely in this bloody horrible world; nothing beats a warm cockle in the heart, and no comedian can warm a heart-cockle like Daniel Kitson.

Take a man like Russell Brand; as undeniably talented as he is, it’s hard to fully empathise with a man whose sole motivation behind every gag is ‘how can I continue to successfully seduce/manipulate this myriad of celebrity-worshipping girls into having sex with me?’

He’ll say anything, so long as it doesn’t disrupt this masterplan, and we’re sure he couldn’t care less (it’s hard to care too much about anything when you’ve got four bent over bottoms baying for your boy – so Stuart Heritage informs us) but it does go some way to stifling your comic potential.

Luckily for us though, Daniel Kitson is unfettered by such distractions, perhaps due to being a bifocalled-ginger with a stutter, and we love him all the more for it – no doubt you will too.

You may know him as Spencer off Phoenix Nights, but what you should know him for is being one of the best stand-up comedians in the world:

Tony Law

Tony Law is a man from Canada. As if that wasn’t funny enough, he also tells jokes. Never before has an accent and an occupation been so perfectly matched, apart from maybe Adolf Hitler.

Until now, absolutely nobody has heard of Tony Law apart from his mum and it’s about time that changed, because the man is a fucking colossus.

A safe word to describe his act would be surreal, although we’re sure there is a better one out there, we’re just buggered if we know what it is, the illiterate frauds that we are.

We’ll just let him speak for himself. Enjoy:

John Hegley

Poetry, as we all know, is for limp wristed, mum-bumming toffs who actually enjoyed reading Shakespeare at secondary school.

But we are all wrong! A few centuries after Shakespeare butchered the art-form, along came a man from Luton called John Hegley, who taught anybody who was bothered enough to listen that poetry can actually be brilliant.

Unfortunately there isn’t much in the way of John Hegley videos around this here internet place, so this grainy, out of sync offering’ll have to do. Otherwise you can click here for an old-fashioned read.

Stewart Lee

How dare we group Stewart Lee amongst a list of unknowns? To be honest, we feel quite ashamed of ourselves too, but it’s been over a decade since he and Richard Herring (who is still touring and at the top of his game – click here for the ultimate lesson in how to handle a heckler) lit up our TV screens with the likes of Fist of Fun and This Morning With Richard Not Judy and, aside from some hardcore fans and an equally hardcore group of right-wing Christian lobbies, nobody seems to know who the man is, and so any exposure is worth it – mankind can only benefit from having Stewart Lee’s wisdom up inside it.

A couple of years back he was ranked 41st in a Channel 4 poll of the best stand-up comedians of all time, which is about 40 positions too low as far as we’re concerned.

We’re not saying he’s Jesus, that’s for you to decide. Watch this and judge for yourselves: