I felt I had discovered the comic dervishes responsible for Down the Line. How wrong I was

Imagine my delight. Having weathered the body blow of being the last person in the country to discover the Radio 4 sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Sound - and not the first, as I'd previously supposed - I lit upon a genuinely new Radio 4 jewel. My friend used to define the pointlessness of stand-up comedy by the World At One joke. It is the observational joke that can be as funny as you like, but nobody will ever get it, because they're all at work, you lazy, lazy gobshite. My life is one long World At One joke; it's not unusual for me to hear Midweek twice in the same day.

So it was only fitting that I should be the first person to laugh out loud at Down the Line (Tuesdays, 11pm). I felt I had discovered these comic dervishes, who were probably all 17, who had probably all won secret scholarships to the University of Precocious Genius when they were 12, and who needed nothing more now than a fervent and tireless media champion, who would be me.

It is a bobby-dazzler, this show. The first time I heard it, I laughed out loud - so loud that the person in front of me (I was out dog-walking) thought it was a kind of pre-mugging war chant, and started to run. That really happened.

Down the Line is a spoof phone-in; Radio 4 put some effort into obscuring its spoofery with dodgy press releases, presumably because it wanted to outwit journalists (who else is going to read a press release?). And lo, it did outwit the journalists, including this very column, but only because people don't habitually expect press releases to lie to them. The stunt hardly warranted a Nobel prize for pranking, unlike the show itself, which warrants just about every prize going.

It doesn't really have a theme. All I can tell you is that it makes you laugh so hard that strangers run away. Oh, except that when I finally did the smallest amount of digging, it turned out Radio 4 was just about to go public with who had put all this together. Maybe you've heard of them - they're called Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Sodding Higson. Let's not forget Harry Enfield. Arabella Weir. Everybody in the UK who's ever been mentioned in the same sentence as The Fast Show, and who, ergo, has ascended to the very highest stratum of comic sophistication, is in on Down the Line. Seventeen-year-olds, my arse.

We're all on safer turf with Heresy (Wednesdays, 6.30pm), the panel show presented by David Baddiel which aims to "challenge conventional wisdom". It's now in its third series and there are some new refinements, in the shape of little ditties chiming, "Good thing!" and "Bad thing!"

It takes a special kind of maturity to admit how good Baddiel is, especially when you made your early career out of needlessly slagging him off. Luckily, that's exactly the kind of maturity I have. He does an excellent job with this. It's tricky being host, having to navigate your nutty panel as they decide that Nazism was actually not all bad, while getting your own jokes in and at the same time not showing anybody else up. It's such a delicate mix of swagger and self-effacement, I honestly can't think of another person who could do it. But granted, he does sound a bit scared when his audience cranks start joining in.

He should thank his lucky stars that they're not the punters on Down the Line. Though of course, those people are made up.

Rachel Cooke is away

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