Taken separately, the words “topical” and “comedy” are nothing more than an overused adjective and a common-or-garden noun. Combine them and use the resulting phrase to describe a BBC radio series, however, and by some mysterious alchemy they start to radiate ennui. Something’s gone wrong with topical comedy on the radio.
The News Quiz (Radio 4, Friday), Britain’s longest-running series in this genre, is also the lead offender here. Worn smooth by nearly 40 years of regular airtime, it is now as cosy and predictable as pie and mash; to my knowledge it hasn’t caused a sharp intake of breath since 2011, when the host, Sandi Toksvig, made a pun about a four-letter-word.
Listening to the current – 86th – series, I’ve become convinced that if technicians programmed a computer with a wide-ranging set of News Quiz input-output rules (“Middle East peace talks = joke about Tony Blair”; “Education cuts = ironic reference to Eton,” etc) and fed it the week’s current affairs, they could accurately predict the show’s scripts.
The only curveball in this week’s edition was that regular panellist Jeremy Hardy had been asked to chair, as Toksvig was off sick. This seemingly humourless move had been singled out as a rich source of in-joke material by the writers. “I am the host this week because Sandi has been suspended for biting the producer’s knees when her pre-show herring was not chilled to the correct temperature,” Hardy began (Toksvig is 4ft 11in and from Denmark). He later returned to the theme during a limp segment about genealogy: “everyone on this panel will have a little bit of Scandinavian in them; could everybody just make sure they haven’t sat on Sandi?” Unsmiling, I added “ST absence = joke about smallness + Scandinavia” to the list.
As a younger show with an “open door” submissions policy – meaning that anyone can send in material for consideration – the topical sketch series Newsjack (Radio 4 Extra, Thursday) ought to be edgier, weirder, less formulaic than that; but ends up, somehow, being just as complacent. Currently fronted by the comedian Nish Kumar, with assistance from a revolving cast of comics and actors, it’s one of a small group of original, non-archival series on 4 Extra.
Ep 4 is done! Listen tonight on Radio4Extra at 22:30 with @MrNishKumar @ladycariad @KieranCHodgson & Celeste Dring. pic.twitter.com/1E25ZXeCHj
— Newsjack (@NewsjackBBC)
March 19, 2015
This week’s half-hour instalment was dispiriting in the way that only really unfunny comedy can be. A skit about a plane that had been forced to land at Heathrow because of a broken lavatory careered out of the radio and landed with a tin clunk on the floor. The nadir was reached during a skit about politicians doing drugs, in which Nicola Sturgeon was represented by someone doing a generic Scottish accent, David Cameron by someone who sounded vaguely like Ed Miliband, Ed Miliband by someone who sounded like a young Janet Street-Porter, and Nigel Farage by a woman making no attempt to do an accent at all.
Why does BBC radio so consistently fudge this kind of thing? Neither series is doing anything that pushes a boundary, finds an edge, or ventures anywhere outside of an ideological comfort zone. Chris Morris’s On the Hour, commissioned by Radio 4 nearly 25 years ago, retains more bite in a single sketch than they managed across an hour of broadcast time. Here’s hoping it doesn’t take another quarter-century for the BBC to try something different.
When the People Say Not Sure (Radio 4, Wednesday) was a reminder – a mightily welcome one – of the many things that BBC radio does better than anyone else. Presented by the historian Peter Hennessy, it considered the various parliamentary options that could present themselves after the election, in the likely event that no one party returns a controlling majority. Spread across four 15-minute episodes, each of which featured a different political expert, it was an illuminating, historically wide-ranging guide to an issue that often makes the head spin. The consensus – such as there was one – was that post-election negotiations would probably take about a week, and that the possibility of a minority government should not be ruled out.
The opening episode of Soundstage (Radio 4, Monday) was a superlative adventure for the ears. Made in conjunction with the wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson, it took the form of an “audio postcard” from the Kalahari Desert, based on his recordings there. Microphones had been placed under the bark of acacia trees, buried in sand dunes, left out to catch the roar of a male desert lion, the hissing wake of a sidewinder snake. Very hard not to close the eyes and float away, imagining.
