Honestly, the reason I drifted out of this RPF fandom isn't that the main people involved betrayed me horribly; they just fell in love with wonderful people that they got on well with, and after that I didn't want to ship them with anyone else, but also shipping the real relationships felt not fictional enough? So I wandered out, and quit RPF altogether for awhile. So there's your other lesson: if you do start RPF shipping people who are genuinely ok people, they will go on to have nicer lives than you managed to imagine for them and all your fic is outshone. (Possibly the real enemyship these past two days is me/rpf.)

If you aren't familiar with comedy panel shows, they're basically if you mix game shows with improv comedy. Theoretically there are contestants competing in some kind of contest of skill; in practice everything's made up, the points don't matter, and everybody's playing to have the most fun, not to win. There are usually a few regular contestants and then a general pool of comedians/celebrities/entertainers who work the panel show circuit, and a lot of the appeal of the show is the sort of half-acting, half-real ongoing relationships between the regulars. For some reason they haven't really existed in the US since the 1970s, the closest we've got is right now is Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. And the British ones mostly don't even syndicate or legally stream here, mostly iirc because of copyright issues that make the format hard to license internationally. But you can usually watch a lot of them from several different Commonwealth countries on Youtube at any given time.

Because of the format with regular contestants theoretically competing against each other on teams, there are a lot of those onscreen relationships that are set up as comically adversarial. I give you recs for Paul and Ian, the long-time opposing team captains on Hignfy; Alan and Stephen, the long-time permanent panelist and host on QI; and Charlie Brooker and David Mitchell, who were on the circuit of all the shows together for a long time and always ended up hate-flirting across the desk.

• Revelations (895 words) by paranoidkitten
  Chapters: 1/1
  Fandom: Have I Got News For You RPF
  Rating: General Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Ian Hislop/Paul Merton
  Characters: Ian Hislop, Paul Merton
  Additional Tags: Coming Out, Newspapers
  Summary:

  A series of newspaper clippings.




• F Series (2379 words) by marginaliana
  Chapters: 1/1
  Fandom: QI RPF
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Alan Davies/Stephen Fry
  Characters: Alan Davies, Stephen Fry
  Series: Part 1 of letter series
  Summary:

  Alan has a cunning plan. Alan/Stephen.




• A Case of Unintentional Flirting (3151 words) by Irmelin
  Chapters: 1/1
  Fandom: British Comedian RPF
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Charlie Brooker/David Mitchell
  Characters: Charlie Brooker, David Mitchell
  Summary:

  For the anonymeme prompt: Mitchell becomes uncomfortable with Brooker's escalating flirtation in public (over Twitter, on panel shows) and tells him so. Brooker's been thinking of it as a joke; it's not until Mitchell confronts him about it that he realises that, shit, maybe he actually does...?