Where there’s muck there’s laughs for Radio 4 comedy
With schools out and everyone heading away (or trying to), mid-summer seems an odd time for Radio 4 to be floating out a raft of new comedies. Perhaps someone in scheduling predicted the post-brexit gridlock at ports and decided all the poor holidaymakers stewing in cars would need something jolly on their car radios to sooth frayed nerves.
A spoof of The Archers, Mucking In (Friday) cheekily hijacked its target’s tagline, describing itself as
“an everyday story of sex, lies and agriculture”. Written by mother-anddaughter team Sue Limb and Betsy Vriend, it starred a grab-bag of comedy veterans: Nigel Planer, Morwenna Banks, Tony Gardner and, most of all, Alison Steadman as Cicely, a farmer’s wife who is as opposite to the rustic stereotype of reassuring, jam-andjerusalem earth mother as can be imagined.
We met her listening to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony while trying out a new scented candle – or “godawful stink” as her farmer husband Ben (Planer) complained. “It’s supposed to be calming. Although do I feel calmer? Do I?” she squealed, dialling up the shrill level to maximum – and not coming back down over the course of the opening episode (even to the point of barking out of the window at squirrels when her dog wouldn’t). The source of all their anxiety was an imminent visit from the “organic inspector” who held the future of their farm in his hands – a future in doubt due to their casual attitude to red tape.
Despite a drip-feed of overwrought one-liners from Planer (“You’re about as discrete as Miriam Margolyes with her dander up”), Steadman’s off-thescale Cicely dominated and might have become tiresome had it not been for the arrival of the couple’s “down from London” daughter Beatrix (Banks). It’s not often you hear a comedy pick itself up and shift into a different gear so decisively. Banks’s riper, more urban, over-the-top Beatrix acted as a much-needed counterbalance, peppering the script with a contemporary cynical charm. So much so, the rest of the half hour sprinted along merrily and finished leaving a lingering sense of, if not quite comedic genius at work, then at least a willingness to hear more.
The same could not be said for The Ultimate Choice (Thursday), a comedy panel game pilot that sought to “impale” guests on the horns of a dilemma and watch them wriggle. The problem was it was too reminiscent of Sue Perkins’s similar but infinitely more enjoyable series Dilemma. And the yawninducing quandaries (which would you rather share a flat with, a gorilla or a heron? Which board game would you rather inhabit, Monopoly or Cluedo?) never had a hope of pushing guests Ria Lina and Russell Kane out of their comfort zones. They engaged with professional enthusiasm, but mostly sounded baffled by the pointlessness of it all. If host Steph Mcgovern was hoping this would offer a way back from the wilderness of Channel 4 lunchtimes, she should probably think again.
Much more winning was the riotously mad Anneka Has Issues (Wednesdays). Thirty years on from the jumpsuit-andchopper days of Challenge Anneka (and ahead of its relaunch on Channel 5), Anneka Rice took to the stage to try her hand at stand-up in a show that was relentlessly, and joyfully, focused on sending herself up.
In the opening show of four she outlined her “weird” upbringing, with parents so reluctant to talk about their origins that she never knew who her grandparents were, let alone met them. Far from seeing this as holding her back in life, Rice took it as a positive, pushing her out of the nest in search of other, more embraceable families everywhere she went.
Presented within the framing device of a minorly traumatic appearance on
Grayson’s Art Club last year, this was a deceptively simple and hugely entertaining performance. It is hard, in fact, to think of anything delightfully less like the chiding-dressed-up-ascomedy that characterises so much of contemporary stand-up. And tonight’s edition, in which she riffs on the theme of therapy, takes us to even stranger places.
Also new and worth a mention is Andrew Maxwell’s Values (Tuesdays) in which the scathingly funny Irish comedian takes a look at the postpandemic world of work. The biggest laughs of the week are yet to come, though, as Friday sees the return of the ever-excellent Party’s Over in which Miles Jupp plays a mendacious, self-serving ex-prime minister who just can’t get over the fact that he’s been sacked. Trump that for perfect timing.