David Hepworth

"Was Bowie really a bender or was he putting it on?" is one of the questions that come tumbling from the mouth of former glam-rocker Ray, a "service user" visited by the titular mental health professional in Nurse (Wednesday, 11pm, Radio 4). Ray feels that everybody did better than he did: Bolan, Springsteen and, unaccountably, Peter Andre.

Like all the male characters in this serious comedy, Ray is played by Paul Whitehouse, who created the show along with David Cummings. The nurse, played by Esther Coles, provides reassurance to each of them, from the bed-bound middle-aged man who lives with his mother to Ray, still furious that his star-spangled peers managed to spin out their careers longer than he did.

The cast of Channel 4's sketch show Absolutely are reassembled this week for The Absolutely Radio Show. Morwenna Banks gives us her Little Girl's bracingly candid guide to divorce ("and when your mum saw the pictures on Dad's phone she was very, very cross and did drink a pint of wine even when it was the morning"); Calum Gilhooley calls a company he has recently patronised to ask them to fill in a survey on how he performed as a customer; and a sibling in New Zealand is called with the sad news that Dad has once again taken a turn for the worse. She needs some persuading to book a flight. "Is he going to die this time? What colour is he?"

Mark Steel's In Town ... & he's looking for local laughs

In front of an audience of audibly refreshed locals, Steel sees how far he can push the famed British ability to laugh at ourselves. The answer is quite a long way.

Radio 4 is always trying to prove that it doesn't solely live in the world bounded by Waitrose, the Hay festival and this newspaper, but it can't help giving away the truth every time it broadcasts a comedy located on precisely those coordinates. The third series of Miles Jupp's In And Out Of The Kitchen was a note-perfect rendition of life in what they used to call at the BBC, "the hostility room". He plays Damien Trench, a celebrity chef who lives suspended between over-confidence and crippling insecurity and pretends not to have heard of anything or anyone more prominent than himself. Trench's swooning arias of condescension are interrupted for recipes which are accompanied by chopping, dicing and boiling sound effects. He always describes these recipes as "easy" despite the fact that they generally call for one ingredient only available by personal application to the sovereign or "a handful of duck meat from a leftover organic roast duck". Like the best radio comedy, In And Out Of The Kitchen has a music to it that keeps you coming back for a repeat listen.

Peter Curran and Patrick Marber's Bunk Bed wasn't quite comedy but it was certainly comic: two middle-aged men record their nocturnal musings on life and mortality, secure in the knowledge that since they're on different levels of the bunk, their eyes need never meet.

The Frequency Of Laughter was a simple but effective idea: the history of British radio comedy from the late 70s to the present-day, presented in the form of interviews with pairs of participants, ranging from Graeme Garden through Angus Deayton to Meera Syal, all talking to Grace Dent, who asked the right questions.

In the 1990s, I used to do a Sunday afternoon show on the late, lamented GLR (now BBC London). There would only be one person on the premises when I turned up and this was a tall, intense cove who unfailingly enquired whether I planned to play anything by the Pixies. This, I discovered, was Chris Morris, laying the foundations of a broadcasting career which would see him repeatedly fired by the very people who are now gathering to celebrate his contribution to British humour in special seasons on Radio 4 Extra and programmes such as Raw Meat Radio (Saturday, 7pm, Radio 4 Extra). The latter features collaborators, admirers and occasional firers such as Armando Iannucci, David Quantick and Matthew Bannister. There's also a repeat of his Radio 1 series Blue Jam on 4Extra at 11pm on Friday. Incidentally, if the powers that be wish to know how they can reproduce the circumstances in which Chris Morris did a lot of his best stuff, they might care to note that he was paid next to no money, given no help, and left the hell alone. I fear there's very little of that in today's BBC.

You may be wary of the current fashion for being prepared to tackle serious subjects only with the forceps of comedy but you will be eventually won over by Paul Sinha's History Revision (Wednesday, 6.30pm, Radio 4). The comedian and serial panellist takes as his text the popularity of football and carries his live audience back on a journey encompassing slavery, Brazil, the Pope and the treaty of Tordesillas of 1494.

It's never wise to announce that the new presenter of a programme is "comedian so-and-so". You're more likely to decide for yourself when someone is funny rather than take somebody else's word for it. Being told somebody is a stand-up usually makes you determined not to find them funny. Nonetheless, in line with the Corporation's present policy of ensuring that most radio shows are fronted by either television actors or comedians, the new presenter of Fighting Talk is Josh Widdicombe, who'll share his position with former Sky Sports anchor Georgie Thompson.

There's nothing on British radio quite as divisive as this comedy chat format, which solicits opinions on the sporting stories of the week, handing out "points for punditry". In a good week, they'll have guests such as Bob Mills, Martin Kelner and Eleanor Oldroyd, people who know how to tiptoe up to the precipice of scandal and then retreat before they end up in trouble. This has resulted in some fairly hair-raising moments in the past, even when the presenters were experienced self-op radio hands such as Colin Murray or Johnny Vaughan. There's a world of difference between a presenter who can be funny and a funny person who can present. It should be interesting to see how Widdicombe handles the job.

The drama His Master's Voice (Saturday, 2.30pm, Radio 4) stars Rob Brydon as ventriloquist Peter Brough. Back in the 1950s, up to 15 million Britons would tune in regularly to keep up with the adventures of Brough and his sidekick Archie Andrews. The latter was notionally a 14-year-old schoolboy; in fact, he was made of wood and voiced by Brough. For some unaccountable reason, vent acts were big on the radio in those days, but when television arrived, Brough failed to make the transition (the actress Dora Bryan assured him that she couldn't see his lips move, except when Archie was speaking). Most forms of showbusiness have their funny little ways, and the people who owe their fame and fortune to the smartly-tailored log on their knee are more given than most to losing their grip on reality. In the case of Brough, however, it seems his family was also badly affected by their timber breadwinner.