Radio comedy is at its best when not afraid to take risks
Comedy without risk isn’t comedy at all, but the nature of risks is that they’re, well, risky. I was nervous when, last year, Elis James and John Robins transferred their popular commercial Radio X show to Friday afternoons on BBC 5 Live. I’d been a fan of them on Radio X for years, so it was a bit like introducing two of your old friends to one another. “He’s so much fun – you’re going to love him!” I’d say. And then they’d meet and someone says something awkward and nobody gets on and it’s all a disaster.
The 5 Live audience didn’t immediately warm to Elis and John’s show, which got off to a nervy start. It didn’t help that they’d been brought in ostensibly to “shake up” the schedule with the supposed goal of attracting young listeners, even though James is a 39-year-old fatherof-two and Robins, 37, is a wistful Oxford graduate whose favourite conversation topics include quaint old pubs and Philip Larkin. They can be nerdy and earnest one moment, and endearingly giddy the next.
It can take a few listens to get the joke. But once you do, the show is an absolute delight. The pair embraced an early accusation, from one texter-in, that they are “giggling, self-regarding twerps spouting incomprehensible garbage”, and turned it into a battle cry. And they seem to be winning hearts and minds: they’re nominated in the category of Funniest Show at the illustrious ARIA radio awards next week, and disgruntled texts from confused listeners are being replaced by creative contributions from new fans who feel part of the gang. It’s so nice when old friends get on.
At the moment, they’re making an extra podcast every week on BBC Sounds because they realised their contract obliged them to make 30 more podcasts than they’d been expecting. In the midst of the scraping of the barrel for content ideas is some of the funniest and oddest radio I’ve heard. Appointing James and Robins to 5 Live was a risk that has paid off in spades, and its currently the show I look forward to most every week.
Over on Radio 1, the chatter on social media was that breakfast show host Greg James hadn’t turned up to present his show on the morning after the Brit Awards.
Perhaps he was still out partying? There’s a fine tradition of Radio 1 breakfast DJS doing similar: Chris Evans was famous for not showing up in the Nineties, and Nick Grimshaw used to stay out all night before bringing his celebrity pals with him to present the show.
James isn’t usually like this, though. At heart he’s a radio geek who takes broadcasting very seriously, so it took about two seconds to work out that this was a stunt. James had been “kidnapped” at the Brits, we learned, and listeners were invited to solve a series of puzzles to get him back. What a shame; I liked the idea of Greg James having an out-of-character rock ’n’ roll interlude, but it turns out that Radio 1 is too stage-managed for that these days. Even wild stunts are planned in advance and given the OK by the boss. I feel quite sorry for teenage listeners – is there any rebellion in radio any more?
It wasn’t to be found in The
Skewer, either, an experimental satirical series by Jon Holmes which has just finished on Radio 4. It was slippery and directionless, with lots of woozily spliced together archive sounds and incongruous topical news clips put together to make people sound silly, but without real bite.
It felt disappointingly safe.
Maybe the answer is in going back to the source. Comedy inspiration was the theme of The Essay: Top of
the Bill (Radio 3, Monday to Friday) all last week, as five comedians and writers talked about the defining moment in their lives that made them turn to comedy. The best episode was Susan Calman’s.
She recalled the life-changing moment she saw An Audience with Victoria Wood as a young girl: “I don’t think a more perfect piece of comedy has ever been produced,” Calman said, with awe and joy streaming through her voice as she remembered Wood’s famously frisky Ballad of Barry and Freda (Let’s Do It). It was delicious to revisit Wood’s genius, and the whole series was a warming, invigorating study of laughter and influence. Letting comedians be serious, and to talk at length about their personal heroes, may have been the real risk this week, but it was one worth taking.