A bumbling retired entertainer shows us just how comedy should be done
Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show! Tomorrow, Today! Radio 4
If all radio comedies - or continuity announcing, or economics reporting, for that matter - were like Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show!, I doubt I'd ever listen to anything else. The count, a fictional retired entertainer of the old school with whistling dentures and a daily appointment with the cooked meats section at his local minimart, is currently rambling unsteadily towards the end of a fourth series, after which no sound but that of tumbleweed is likely to emanate from my house between 11.30am and midday on Fridays.
Hope over experience every time, is all I'm saying. This time it'll be different, you think. Put on the radio at elevenses or teatime and you'll be rewarded with something other than the "hilarious" adventures of a flaky public-sector worker (it's Clare in the Community on Wednesdays at the moment, but there'll be another along in a minute) or a fourth wall-busting exposé of life in the recording booth (at the moment Tomorrow, Today!, of which more later).
Count Arthur Strong . . . so outperforms the rest of Radio 4's comedy output - Down the Line included, which does nothing more than remind me of On the Hour and Chris Morris's early-Nineties Radio 1 show, and causes me to wish they both still existed - that it sounds as if it's doing a little victory jig on the roof of Broadcasting House. It's the sound of pent-up dementedness being unleashed and the burden of upholding civic values being tossed to the wind, the sound of the BBC becoming something else for half an hour every week.
Steve Delaney plays Arthur Strong as though he knows this is the man he's destined to turn into. Strong is as iron-willed as he is deluded: he refuses to allow his long-tailed acting career to die and yet he is quite capable of spending several minutes each day haggling over the price of liver and bacon. On 25 January, he was to be heard buying a mobile phone and braying malapropically about his schedule of after-dinner speeches.
"In my game, you've got to be available 25-7, 380 degrees of the year - that's why Edward Woodworm's getting so much work!" He took his new phone to the butcher's, where he inadvertently took a picture of "my friend Wilf holding my black pudding up and sniffing it". Oof! Luncheon vouchers, in his confusion, became "luncheon meat" and Sue Perkins's Scouse call-centre operative was asked, "Are you a real woman?"
It's not so much irreverent as unaware that the need for reverence ever existed, and it is just generally batty in a way that tends not to be tolerated on Radio 4 unless performed by ex-public school boy types who are convinced of their own subversiveness.
Without the energy and spontaneity that recording in front of a live audience gives to any broadcast, radio comedy sounds hermetic and forced: nothing more than a bunch of people reading words to each other in a booth. In theory, you can make radio programming sound as though it could be coming from anywhere, but it takes good acting and superlative writing to make you forget that it's coming from a windowless room with towers of plastic coffee cups making rings on the scripts.
As if on cue comes Tomorrow, Today! (Mondays, 11.30am), a Radio 4 comedy straight from the same windowless room, which seemed to give up all hope of transcendence before it began. It's set in - what did I say? - a BBC recording studio in 1962, where a cluster of disappointed hacks labour through a terrible sci-fi script and try not to kill each other in the process.
"Who cares? It's so silly I doubt anyone's listening anyway," sulked Sylvia (played by Cheryl Campbell), which were my thoughts exactly.
What united Tomorrow, Today! and another new series, the late-night cab firm comedy Pick Ups (Thursdays, 11pm) - apart from their mirthless nature, obviously - was the way both made liberal use of the generic BBC Brummie accent to denote a character who was gormless and naive, but essentially likeable. It's this kind of tedious aural shorthand that sends you straight to the dial in search of something, anything, you haven't heard before. A BBC recording studio in 1962, fictional or otherwise, is not going to be that place.
Pick of the week
And the Academy Award Goes To . . .
2 February, 10.30am, Radio 4
Gambaccini on Lawrence of Arabia.
BBC Introducing . . . With Tom Robinson
3 February, 12 midnight, 6 Music
Good music on MySpace does exist.
Night Waves
5 February, 9.45pm, Radio 3
Peter Carey, and a review of There Will Be Blood. Fun, then.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
