A mixed bill rarely pleases all comedy tastes – whether in style or content – and so it proved at the launch of the Leicester Comedy Festival, which starts next month. In a line-up of eight comics that had few star names, the best came last – but more of that later.

It was a year in which we welcomed some big, big names back on stage, including Ben Elton, Clive Anderson and Jack Dee.

Medic-turned-comic Adam Kay had been performing for some years before he wrote his 2016 Edinburgh Fringe show Fingering a Minor at the Piano. It had a personal addendum – about why he left medicine – and was a call to arms to save the NHS. It hit a nerve with audiences and in 2017 he published his waspish memoir, This Is Going to Hurt, which has been on bestseller lists ever since.

Andy Parsons is a comic known to like a good old rant, particularly on a political issue. But in Healing the Nation he takes a calmer, more conversational approach as he tries to do what it says on the tin in a show that he fully expected to be performing after the UK left the EU – but more of Brexit later.

Jack Whitehall is hardly ever off the telly, appearing on gameshows or jollying around with his father, Michael, presenting the BRIT Awards and proving to be a decent actor in dramas such as Decline and Fall. But now he's gone back to live comedy with his new show Stood Up.

Ivo Graham's latest show The Game of Life follows on from his previous hour, in which he talked about passing a milestone in life and the prospect of starting a family.

Stewart Lee is back on the road after three years, and he comes back wonderfully refreshed and on marvellous form with this double header, Tornado/Snowflake.

Jack Dee has made a career out of being a grumpy old man, even though he started on the comedy circuit in 1986 when he was 25.

Is there anything Tim Minchin cannot do? He sings his own songs, plays hot bar-room piano and tells jokes about the existence of God. He composes musicals, performs in Lloyd Webber and Stoppard, writes a multimillion-dollar Hollywood cartoon which he is allowed to direct – until he isn’t.

Jonathan Pie is a YouTube star, a spoof television news reporter (created by actor and comic Tom Walker), who is prone to gaffes. It was one of those on-screen gaffes that led to Pie being sacked as the BBC's Westminster correspondent, footage of which we see here on the onstage big screen alongside the highlights and lowlights of Pie's career – mostly the latter.