‘As white, middle-class men, we’re not high on the pecking order’
Following the end of Radio 4’s The Now Show, Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis talk to about its demise and their future
‘The BBC is very large. You are not always aware of what agendas are at play’
Eyebrows were raised and a few eyes misted up (mine included) when it was suddenly announced in March that The Now Show, one of Radio 4’s flagship topical comedy shows, which attained listenership figures of around two million, was being axed after just over 25 years.
Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis have reliably presided over scripted rounds of sharp, lateral-minded commentary about everything from Asbos and phone hacking to Brexit and the pandemic, with impressions, stand-up turns and music part of the mix. Those with suspicious minds might wonder why the news of the show’s expiry came so close to its final series, and why the axe has fallen on several other BBC current affairs-based entertainment programmes of late. The Mash Report was felled in 2021, after just four years, and BBC Two’s Mock the Week was chopped in 2022. Those suspicions are sharpened by a confab with the duo, at their manager’s office near Buckingham Palace – the first time the pair have spoken at length about the decision to pull the plug. It turns out they were briefed about the termination in the summer of 2022, but were required to keep quiet, not least because the show’s departure was to be compensated for by the development of a new radio project, and they’re not in the business of Beeb-bashing. Still, they concede that the delay helped forestall any fightback.
“I think when they tried to get rid of [Radio] 6 Music, they didn’t anticipate the number of people who said: having a station that plays new music is what the BBC is for,” Punt reflects. “It’s possible that’s why they’re announcing things late now. We did notice that they stopped trailing the show. For years we would be asked to make a trail for each new series. A couple of years ago, this stopped, and we were not asked to make one for the last series – I guess the show was deprioritised in advance of its demise.”
They’re determined not to sound bitter about all this. “You can go ‘That’s a shame’, and get cross for a bit, but it does make sense,” Dennis offers, while Punt is aware of the dangers of sounding overly put-out. “There are times when presenters whose shows have been brought to an end have reacted in a really undignified way and I’ve thought ‘Don’t do that’.”
The irony of the show being ditched in a general election year isn’t lost on them: “We did say that the logical time to stop would be at the election – it would finish the era,” Punt says. That sensible plea fell on deaf ears. They’re in the dark about what will replace the show and will forever remain so, they add, about the exact reasons for the show’s axing. They were taken out to lunch by Julia McKenzie, Radio 4’s comedy commissioning editor, who relayed a decision one deduces was made by the Radio 4 controller Mohit Bakaya.
There has been a trickle of stories about presenters – the late DJ Steve Wright, Frank Skinner – who’ve seemingly lost their perch on the grounds of being “male, pale and stale”. When Jon Holmes, a key part of their line-up, left The Now Show in 2016, he railed that he had been ousted to make room for more diversity. Was that a factor?
While conceding there was a shake-up to broaden the supporting entourage, and stating that the decision about Holmes was outside their domain, Punt, 61, a year younger than Dennis, suggests that positive discrimination wasn’t the culprit. “I remember them saying they had research that the audiences supposedly weren’t as keen on Jon as they were on the rest of the show. It wasn’t anything to do with him being white.” He maintains positive discrimination is not relevant to them, either. “We are aware that being male, white, middle-aged and middle-class does not put you high on the peckingorder in modern broadcasting. But given that Jack Dee, Miles Jupp and Andy Zaltzman have all recently been appointed hosts of long-running Radio 4 shows, I don’t think that’s the issue here.”
The odd lack of transparency itself stokes speculation. Yes, the show might simply have grown long in the tooth, and become relatively expensive to make, at a time when the licence fee has been frozen. But perhaps the BBC has become more nervous about
‘Against Newman and Baddiel we were judged as old-fashioned, but it didn’t bother us’
political comedy? BBC directorgeneral Tim Davie’s focus on “impartiality” might be considered a tectonic shift. “The BBC is very large – you’re not [always] aware of what agendas are in play,” Punt says. There’s a hint of exasperation about the broad expectation that The Now Show and its ilk be politically balanced.
“One of the real problems with ‘balance’,” he explains, “is that from a political person’s point of view, you’ve got two parties. But from a comedy perspective you’ve got a government and an opposition and the former clearly have a lot more sway over your life and are setting the agenda in a way that the opposition don’t. We would sometimes be told ‘You need to mention Labour’ and would go ‘Yes, but Labour haven’t done anything, or anything the audience would know about’.”
Dennis, the more famous face on account of his roles in Outnumbered (his partner is co-star Claire Skinner), Not Going Out and as presenter on The Great British Dig, is the more reticent of the pair, listening with an air of wry detachment. That subordinate yet subversive streak matches the pair’s playful dynamic on stage (they’re currently on their first tour in over a decade, with Punt, clipboard in hand, leading the comic look-back at the intervening years). They met at Cambridge university in 1983, where Punt studied English and Dennis Geography. They bonded over their suburban backgrounds: “I’m from Edgware, he’s from Reigate,” says Dennis. “We understand Middle England”.
And it’s true that their material snubs metropolitan liberal elite sniggers to take in topics such as potholes and train schedules, NHS strikes and sewage spills. For a while they were almost hip, teaming up with Robert Newman and David Baddiel for the sharp but silly sketch show The Mary Whitehouse Experience, first on radio then TV (1989-1992). After going their separate ways, Newman and Baddiel went stratospheric, playing Wembley Arena, but then bitterly breaking apart as a double-act. The less glamorous side of the quartet effectively got the last laugh. “I remember a producer telling us that it’s a marathon not a sprint,” Punt says.
“People judged us as oldfashioned, especially against David and Rob,” he continues. “But it didn’t bother us. I thought: “Well, we’ve done sketches for Jasper Carrott, that’s who we are.” The only unforgivable sin in comedy is not to be who you are. Audiences will forgive almost everything – I don’t think they care about where you went to school or your background – except people faking it.”
A new dawn beckons – the autumn sees them launch their new Radio 4 series, RouteMasters, in which they’ll take the most entertaining conversational route between random topics, with the help of a guest. While they’ve always had other projects, you sense a slight relief that they’ll be free from the constraints of topical comedy. Given our frantic digital age, does that genre have a future?
“The Now Show started the year Google was founded,” Punt reflects. “The BBC and The Telegraph even had news information lines to call up. I remember people used the
Telegraph one, because the BBC was so slow in coming back to you.” Now algorithms shape people’s newsfeeds. “No one sees the same news.”
Punt and Dennis don’t seem to be aggrieved with their paymasters at the BBC. If anything, they’re inclined to sympathy, given the challenges. “The irony is that audio comedy is now vastly bigger than when The Now Show started,” Punt says. “Radio comedy used to be regarded as a backwater, now a lot of the biggest names in comedy want to do audio.” “But equally,” Dennis chimes, with a wistful smirk: “The BBC once had a monopoly on speech radio. Now there are all these competing platforms. I can imagine there’s a real sense of ‘Aargh, what do we do?’ It’s a new era.”
‘Punt and Dennis: We Are Not a Robot’ tours to June 26; rbmcomedy.com