ON THE RADIO

“I SAID, ‘I’m Tracey Ullman. I’m not blonde. I don’t have big breasts. I will not wear a bikini. I don’t want to be the butt of sexual jokes. I don’t want to be a sexy traffic warden. I want to do equal stuff with the guys.’”

This is how Ullman sold herself to the BBC before her first big hit comedy sketch show, Three of a Kind, back at the start of the 1980s. Speaking to Lauren Laverne on Desert Island Discs last Sunday, Ullman says she knew from the start that she didn’t care for how British comedy treated women in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s why she moved to America.

“I realised that women had been given a shot in American comedy much more so than in English comedy. Lucille Ball had her own show in the fifties and then people like Carol Burnett had a wonderful variety show in the sixties and Gilda Radner on Saturday Night Live, the wonderful Gilda Radner.”

So off she went and became a star over there, nurturing The Simpsons in passing.

Ullman made for good company, talking of her days in the Dougie Squires Second Generation (there’s a Proustian madeleine for anyone old enough to remember the 1970s), her nights partying in Cold War Berlin long before the Wall came down and of falling for her husband Allan

McKeown and then losing him. Throughout she would constantly break into impersonations because that’s what she has done all her life and may be the reason that she doesn’t get more to do as a serious actor, or a serious comic actor even though she’s so good at both.

Comedy can be stupid too, of course. And maybe not always intentional. Ask ex-Celtic and Blackburn Rovers player Chris Sutton.

After the misery of the North London derby on Sunday (guess who I support?), I wasn’t rushing to tune in The Monday Night Club on 5Live, but habit is habit and at least I got to hear Sutton’s gloriously ridiculous take on how the arrival of Ronaldo at Manchester United has put his team mate Bruno Fernandes’s nose out of joint.

(This is the edited version. Imagine that it is perfumed by the laughter of Micah Richards throughout)

“Go back a couple of seasons and Manchester United were a bunch of average goldfish in an average fish tank,” Sutton began. “But then what happened was they invested in a fish that was a little bit different. An upgrade. We could call Bruno a Neptune Grouper if you like.

“So, Bruno the Neptune Grouper, he raised the standards. He made the fish tank a happier fish tank. He swam around that fish tank with a huge smile. But then all of a sudden what happened is they signed Ronaldo the polka dot Stingray from Italy, who was a bigger fish.

“Ronaldo the polka dot Stingray goes into the Manchester United fish tank and Bruno isn’t the same, I’m afraid.”

After a beat, Mark Chapman summed it all up. “That’s three minutes of our life that we’ll never get back.”

Listen Out For: Poems for Thought, Radio 2, Thursday, all day.

Radio 2 is marking

National Poetry Day with a poet reading an original work in each of their daytime shows. Jackie Kay is on with Ken Bruce, Hollie McNish with Jeremy Vine and the wonderful Liz Berry makes an appearance on

Sara Cox.