Gary Brown (I)

Afternoon play: Higher

I've wanted to do a series about Higher Education for some time. I taught part time at a university for ten years and always thought it was an area ripe for satire. The expansion of tertiary education in the Blair years meant our newer universities were unprepared for the overload of bureaucracy, ideology and sheer student numbers.

Last week Radio 4's Afternoon Play was full of such temptation. In Gary Brown's comedy Prospero, Ariel, Reith and Gill (Wednesday), John Reith, the BBC's first director general (played by Tim McInnerny) faced up to his inner sexual demons, as did the sculptor Eric Gill (Anton Lesser), finishing off his famous Prospero and Ariel statue over the doorway to Broadcasting House. Because it was full of obvious signals (funny voices from Jon Glover, comic whizzing noises) we were clearly warned not to take it literally. Yet there seemed an earnest hankering, in the confessional bits, to show us the author's solemn side too. Mistake.

Tim McInnerny was an acerbic Sir John Reith with a truly scary bag of repressed desires in Gary Brown's hilariously over-the-top account of the making of the Broadcasting House sculptures in Prospero, Ariel, Reith and Gill. No one more likes to poke fun at Aunty's first director-general than the BBC itself, especially to synchronise with the Reith Lectures, and Anton Lesser as the lascivious sculptor Eric Gill was in full-blown connivance.