Rory Bremner attacks BBC's Mock the Week I felt that there was a new and highly competitive and quite aggressive tendency there and felt uncomfortable. But I've since found out that very few people have felt comfortable doing Mock the Week," he told a newspaper. The impressionist said that the new breed of stand-up comedians who appear on panel shows such as Mock the Week "are like prize fighters." Mr Bremner, who won numerous awards for his satirical TV shows Rory Bremner, Who Else? and Bremner, Bird and Fortune, claimed that fellow comedian Linda Smith, who died in 2006, was not treated with enough respect when she appeared as a guest on the show in its early days. He said: "I did it with [the late] Linda Smith once and she was extraordinary. She was such a brilliant comedian and, in a strange sort of way, the show didn't particularly respect her reputation or her intelligence. Mock the Week has attracted criticism in the past due to its content. After Mr Boyle made his comments about Ms Adlington in 2008, the BBC Trust was forced to apologise for the "humiliating" remarks. In a separate incident, the trust also ruled that a joke about the Queen's age by Mr Boyle was "in poor taste," although it concluded that the gag did not go "beyond audience expectations for the programme." Mr Boyle left the show in 2009, saying he felt he was "going through the motions." Other comedians have also attacked Mock the Week, which is hosted by Irish comedian Dara O Briain. In 2009 Jo Brand said that she had stopped appearing on the programme due to the lack of women on its panels and the difficulty in getting her voice heard among the other comedians. She said that some male comedians also found the environment ultra-competitive. I don't do Mock the Week any more and neither do some male stand-ups I know who have tried it once. We just don't like the prospect of having to bite someone's foot off before they let us say something," said Ms Brand at the time. Many TV comedy shows have become increasingly controversial as channels battle for ratings in the face of growing competition. Ofcom, the regulator, said that week that it has received complaints about Channel 4"s The Big Fat Quiz of 2012, which aired on Sunday night. The primetime quiz featured guests such as Jimmy Carr and James Cordon, who were accused of making vulgar jokes about the Queen and President Obama. A BBC spokesman was not available to comment on Mr Bremner's criticism of Mock the Week.