David Quantick

David Quantick writes Miliband docudrama

More4 is reportedly planning to broadcast a docudrama about Ed and David Miliband.

It's not surprising that Monty Python faced the axe

The comedy series was not alone in being at the whim of frightened TV executives, says David Quantick.

Why Keith Chegwin will never be funny

It's not whether you're using your own gags - it's the way you tell them, argues David Quantick.

David Quantick's One (Radio 4, Wednesday) is a collection of sketches, each in a single voice, all unrelated to each other. Once you give up trying to make sense of what's going on, some of them are very good. This week's highlight, read in the cadences of the shipping forecast, began "and now, with the time coming up to 10 years later, it's the Britpop forecast". Oasis, Blur and Supergrass all got a mention, building to the conclusion: "Sleeper. What was that one? Fading rapidly. Manic Street Preachers. Still going. Amazingly. Menswear. Reforming. Gales of laughter later."

Blaggers are people who pretend to be more important than they really are in order to get past the doormen at significant events. The first rule of blagging is to get away with it. But this series could only have been made by someone who not only is in love with jazz but has passed, legally and often, through its many portals. It is wildly funny. It is also very clever in that David Quantick, who co-writes and presents it, and his producer, Simon Poole, have created a style that not only absolutely fits the subject but mirrors it too.

The funniest show on radio. Ronnie Scott and Benny Green would have loved it. It knows its subject intimately, makes fun of its more solemn advocates, yet celebrates true talent. It's fast, inventive (technically as well as verbally), mirroring its subject in its style, all the while hilariously and utterly accessibleto fans and non-jazzers alike. Co-written and presented by brilliant David Quantick (who has blagged other musical genres on this network in the past equally wittily), produced by Simon Poole for independents Unique.

The funniest programme on radio is The Blagger's Guide to Jazz (Radio 2, Thursdays). Readers may recall I wrote a year ago about David Quantick, a comedy writer and presenter of great talent, originality and industry. If you've listened to his Radio 4 series One or heard previous Blagger's Guides you'll already be a fan. If you have lately observed a woman on the bus to Oxford wheezing, hooting, barking with laughter, tears running down ample cheeks, that was me, listening to last week's Blagger's. There are four more to go. Do not miss a moment. Why? See my first sentence.

There's no segue between that and David Quantick's The Blagger's Guide to Jazz (R2). But then there's no segue between Quantick and anything else, really. This Blagger's Guide was as frenetic, hilarious and diligently produced as all previous Blagger's, a sonic whirlwind of jokes about Ann Widdecombe, Jools Holland, Quantick's dad and more sound samples than an old Coldcut record. Oh, and facts, too. "Louis Daniel Armstrong," pronounced Quantick, "is the godfather of the father of the motherlode of the nucleus of the catalyst of the embryo of the court of King Caractacus (sound of punch)... Thanks. Louis Armstrong was a genius." He's not wrong, you know.

David Quantick riffs gloriously through the first of a new series that, actually, tells you more than you think about jazz (and people who like it) as you variously wrinkle your brow at his presumption or fall into great gales of laughter at the speed of allusion, the acuity of vision. Wittily written, beautifully produced (by Simon Poole, for independents Unique) here are Duke Ellington, Stevie Wonder, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, snipped and pasted into a magical musical collage which also happens to be a pretty snazzy essay.

The Adventures of Sexton Blake!

Who is Sexton Blake? It's a mystery! Well, perhaps not that much of a mystery. In fact, as David Quantick explained in a Radio 2 documentary (still available to listen to for a few more days), Sexton is "one of the most famous and long-lived fictional detectives and adventurers of all time, a legend who battled opium smugglers, bandit chiefs albino fiends and the Kaiser. The missing link between Sherlock Holmes and James Bond".