David Quantick

It's all right, Bob, he's only joking

It was Bob Dylan's turn for the David Quantick treatment: well-aimed, well-informed, gentle sending up.

Hilariously sardonic host David Quantick introduces an irreverent romp through Bob Dylan's career, including faked archive recordings and made-up adverts.

I looked forward to some lighthearted banter in the shape of Broken Arts, described by pre-publicity as 'a fast-moving and comical guide to culture'. "Just think South Bank Show for people who can't read," suggested host David Quantick.

It is an idea which has potential as there is much in both low and high brow culture that screams out for parody and satire. Unfortunately, though, this isn't the answer. By the end of the half hour, I was left slightly dumbfounded by how dull and unoriginal the majority of the material was. Admittedly, the idea of having Gilbert and Sullivan back from the grave - singing about things such as football and The X-Factor - was vaguely amusing, but on the whole it was an opportunity missed.

The exception was the Pinter set of stamps sketch (with the suggestion of a wide stamp with a pause in the middle) but the comedy pickings overall were poor. Five episodes remain for Quantick and company to raise their game.

Popular culture is dangerously entertaining: the desire to consume leaves us helpless and clueless. Thanks heavens for the razor-sharp brain cells of David Quantick who, in this new series, presents a fast-moving and genuinely comical guide to culture. Front Row fans need not feel left out: he, and his assembled team of players, musicians and comedians, will be sneering at highbrow as well as Neanderthal-level performances through the medium of song, sketches, poems, reviews and interviews.

One of my favourite comic writers, David Quantick, turns his comedic gaze to the arts and popular culture. With assistance from Daniel Maier, Richie Webb, Margaret Cabourn-Smith and Jane Lamacraft. Expect humour on a par with The Now Show and Harry Hill's TV Burp (two projects Quantick has also had a hand in).

Tribute is paid to a very different form of entertainment in Comedy Songs: The Pop Years. But what exactly, one of the first questions asks, is a comedy song?

"A song that makes you laugh," suggests Victoria Wood. She should know, having sung dozens in her breakthrough TV gig on consumer show, That's Life.

She's an original whose song, Let's Do It Again, is described as a mix of George Gershwin and Alan Bennett, as she celebrates "the absurdity of the mundane".

Who cannot warm to a song whose lyrics include the lines "Bend me over backwards on me Hostess trolley" and "Beat me on the bottom with a Woman's Weekly"? Eat your heart out, Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The history of comedy songs reflects the changing voice of comedy in general, from music hall songs, to Peter Kay's recent number one, as Geraldine with The Winner's Song.

Writer David Quantick traces the origins of the comedy song back to "some pillock in a jester's hat with a lute, singing about his genitals to the king, making it up as he went along".

One thing about comedy songs is that they may be irritating, but you can't stop singing them. The skiffle era gave birth to such memorable ditties as Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour On The Bedpost Overnight? What sort of mind comes up with a lyric like that?

The birth of the singles chart in the early 1950s meant that comedy songs could make money. The Barron Knights and The Goons had hits. There were topical songs at the start of TV's That Was The Week That Was, and Benny Hill sang about Ernie, who drove the fastest milkcart in the west.

Many songs came from TV shows like The Two Ronnies, The Goodies (doing the funky gibbon) and It Ain't Half Hot Mum duo Don Estelle and Windsor Davies duetting on Whispering Grass.

Comedy songs gave hits to people who wouldn't normally expect to make the charts. Barry Cryer recalls having a number one in Finland 50 years ago with a cover version of Purple People Eater - which, on reflection, sounds like something you might find in Crooked House.

To find myself recommending a makeover of any genre is a first for me. But the 15 Minute Musical is hardly in the same league as those bowel-evacuation-obsessed offerings on television.

In this series written by the sharply pointed comic nibs of Dave Cohen, David Quantick and Richie Webb, celebrities and politicians get a West End revamp, and in timely fashion, following last night's US Presidential Elections, the focus here is on Barack Obama. But that's where all actuality ends, for this is summer lovin' (and loathin') in the style of Grease. Obama is the John Travolta character and his Olivia Newton-John equivalent is Hillary Clinton.

As musicals go, its main attraction is the power to invoke an entirely enjoyable cringe. As song-writing goes, this is the one and only time you'll ever here 'Hillary' rhymed with 'ancillary' and 'capillary'. Genius.

Another six-episode package of pocket-sized feasts of song and dance (not seen, for obvious reasons, but referred to for one of those staples of radio comedy, the cheap laugh) from the fluent pens of Richie Webb, David Quantick and Dave Cohen.

The first is the strangest, as Washington High School Musical depends, for its cutting-edge satire, on the contest for the Democratic nomination between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, so there's a certain air of old news about it. Also old musicals - this is less High School Musical than Grease. So Clinton gets to sing a wistful ballad which goes, in part, Hillary, the lady they tried to pillory/ I am ancillary to you. It's better than that, though. There's a nice anti-Bush rocker with the chorus: Go, Georgie go/ Georgie no good and the Little Richard-esque 'Barackobama alopbamboom'.

As his delectable series on how to get by in cultured company begins a new run we asked David Quantick what we could expect to hear this time: The Blagger's returns like a prodigal pig, if there is such a thing, he said. And for those who've never encountered it before, this is the perfect introduction to the style of Mr Quantick's advice: what he says sounds believable, but there's always a gentle fib or even an outrageous lie to counteract any actual truths that he might offer up. This time he's teaching us everything we ever needed to know about country and western music.

The funniest show on radio for the last few weeks has been David Quantick's The Blagger's Guide, whose run is now sadly over.