Character Invasion: Radio 4 comedy at its worst

It started inauspiciously with the never remotely amusing Big Bird as the subject of Tweet of the Day.

(Photo By Peter White and Ed Reardon presented a spoof version of You and Yours. Photo: BBC Pictures)

Character Invasion
BBC Radio 4

Radio 4’s “Character Invasion” day (29 March), celebrating “great characters, past and present”, started inauspiciously with the never remotely amusing Big Bird as the subject of Tweet of the Day (5.58am). Dawn French delivered the Today programme’s Thought for the Day as the vicar of Dibley (7am), pointing out that Jesus was born in a stable rather than a Premier Inn (“The poor is where it’s at”). It was Radio 4 comedy at its worst: somehow there was always the whiff of Jeremy Hardy in the background, hooting at his own jokes.

Many of the characters being talked about had not been created by the BBC. For example, Hamlet: “He’s a lunatic,” concluded the actor Jamie Parker (Hamlet, 24-28 March, 2.15pm). But many had made their debut on Radio 4, not least Alan Partridge, a continually nation-tickling phenomenon discussed by a notably gracious Steve Coogan on the Today programme. “You look around you and you think, ‘Gosh!’” he said. “Is life imitating art or is art imitating life?” Success suits Coogan. Since his Bafta win and Oscar nod for Philomena, even his hair – greying, swept-back waves – is almost presidential.

The most striking moment of the Character Invasion strand actually took place a day earlier: it was Peter White taking a walk through a shopping centre with the saturnine writer Ed Reardon, pretending it was a special edition of the consumer complaints programme You & Yours (28 March, 12pm), once known among BBC staff as Moans & Moaners. Is it just me or is it not discombobulating when presenters or newscasters pitch up in movies or TV dramas playing themselves and turn out to be brilliant at acting? How seamlessly they slip into the spirit of it? Every time! Even Jenni Murray was at it on W1A, pretending to grill Hugh Bonneville without a hint of awkwardness. And here was the usually straight-up, get-the-thieving-bastards White, chatting with Reardon with all the largesse and ease of a chuckling plutocrat, a model of capability. Peter White as Suleiman the Magnificent. That’s more character than I can take.