Jane Thynne

Budget-related cuts are squeezing comedy on Radio 2. The plan is to "move away from built comedy slots" to "ad hoc" series across the year, including decommissioning The Comedy Hour on Saturday evenings. Last Saturday evening's slot contained Two Episodes of Mash, an offbeat, surreal and occasionally hilarious sketch show from Diane Morgan, a kind of depressive female Larry David with a deadpan Lancashire accent, and Joe Wilkinson. It's the prerogative of sketch shows to be inconsistently funny, and having laughed out throughout the second episode, the third was a little downbeat, but given that downbeat is the signature mood of the show, it seems wrong to complain. The pleasure of the series is the way sketches merge seamlessly into each other, so one moment it's a pair of lobsters in a restaurant tank, "I feel trapped, I'm hyperventilating. Why she's pointing at me?" and then it's a tarot reader with football cards. "The John Fashanu card means at some point you will become invisible. Gordon Strachan - your hair's prone to matting and you may become dormant." A striking thing about this show, and so unusual for topical comedy, is that the sketches are entirely detached from the news agenda and none the worse for it.

Rory Bremner's new show, Tonight, is aiming to satirise a week's worth of politics. I'm ambivalent about this. On the one hand, the line between politics and satire is more blurred than ever, so politics has hardly happened before it's a sketch and it's impossible to sound either daring or cutting edge. On the other hand, it's about time Radio 4 had something other than the kneejerk sniping of The News Quiz. Bremner settled for being amusing. Or as he put it, "printing more jokes and then quantitatively easing them into the show. We're not doing this to be popular, we're doing it for ordinary men and women who exist on one decent chuckle in the week." Note to the Conservative leadership. I'm not sure how this will focus group, but Rory only needed to use the words "Boris Johnson" to get the single biggest laugh of the night.

It was the comic genius of Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci that was celebrated in six programmes on Radio 4 Extra commemorating the 20th anniversary of On the Hour, one of the sharpest comedies to satirise our love affair with the news media. I can hardly believe it's two decades since we heard Steve Coogan in his first incarnation as Alan Partridge and Chris Morris uttering surreal headlines with Paxmanesque urgency. "Cream is good for you if you're left-handed, according to a survey in 'Which Survey' magazine!" But the big surprise, especially given the gnat's attention span of the broadcast media, was how nothing had really dated. All the pomposities and absurdities were recognisable. Then, as now, there is much pleasure to be had from regional programme running orders. "Hopping lessons for Tim the amputee badger, and later, how news of the 17,000-megaton warhead that blew up France affects plans for a cycle path in Tarrogate city centre!"

It may be, in the age of social media and fragmenting news sources that our love affair with news will diminish. Our information addiction will perhaps, decline. So far, thankfully, there's no sign of it, but will future comedians ever tackle it so brilliantly?

The debut show was funny, but this week's impenetrable Second World War sketches, including a running gag about trying to establish "cat nav" instead of radar, was just bizarre. As usual on Radio 4, one thing that did work was self-referential humour, hence the explanatory trail for "people who don't really listen to The Archers but know sometimes it's on". "A new arrival at the Bull doesn't mean a baby, it just means someone's come in".

On Saturday, the network took a tip from The X Factor with the live final of its New Comedy Award, presented by Patrick Kielty. Six hundred acts were boiled down to six, voted on by the audience. This being Radio 2, the audience sounded about as edgy as a Parent Teacher Association drinking Merlot, but that came as a relief to one comedian who said, "There's nothing worse than looking at the crowd and thinking I've got things in my medicine cabinet older than you." There was lots of encouraging applause and no one heckled. My favourite was the acerbic Joe Lycett, with his mordantly Frankie Howerd-esque story of a driving lesson in Manchester, but Pat Cahills ingenious rap about having your dog put down was also very good. The winner was Angela Barnes from Maidstone whose weapon was the one-liner ("It's no mistake that the anagram of Maidstone is I am Stoned - that's all there is to do!") and who should fit seamlessly into the throng of talented female comedians on radio and TV.

If though, you are one of those people who want to hear more about north London, or indeed the talented David Tennant, who pops up like a specially resilient strain of ground elder in every part of our cultural experience these days, then The Gobetweenies is for you. It features the kind of hands-on, amicably divorced parents who discuss Duchamp's urinals with their children over tea. Mimi, played by Sarah Alexander, is "a smart award-winning children's fiction writer" intent on 24/7 education. As one of her children says, "anything you ever want to talk about it's bingo, she's off to get a book." David Tennant as Joe frets satirically about the agony of children having to shuttle between two sets of parents, and decides to move back in. Phoebe Abbott, who sounds uncannily like Pip in The Archers, plays an irritating child very convincingly. Anyone who rues the day that "parent" became a verb will hate this, but to the rest of us it's all very recognisable. It's occasionally funny. Whether that makes it satire is another matter.

It's Your Round marks a radio comeback for Angus Deayton. Deayton, like [Nicholas] Parsons, is a born host, an arch, deadpan foil to contestants' excesses. The twist in this format is that guests invent their own round, and in the first episode, Rufus Hound devised "Them Next Door" in which contestants had to guess famous neighbours from a sound recording. Sex Pistols and a sewing machine made Vivienne Westwood, "Nessun Dorma" and weeping meant Gazza, and the sound of complete silence suggested Charlie Chaplin. Miles Jupp dreamt up "What Does My Dad Know?" in which contestants guessed whether his father, a church minister, would have seen Titanic, or understand what an emo was.

It was jolly and high spirited, but the threat to this game, apart from the cruel 11pm scheduling, is that it may have inbuilt obsolescence. It's Your Round promises something different each week, whereas everything we know about radio tells us that audiences like continuity. Just a Minute is Britain's longest-running quiz show for a reason. People like to know what's coming and then to have it repeated. Again and again for several years.

Just a Minute, the Methuselah of panel games, has been going since 1967 with plenty of hesitation and repetition, but still no sight of the final whistle. Preserved like an intact fossil in the sedimentary layer of radio history, its formula remains perfect, its host Nicholas Parsons unchanged, despite 60 years on radio, and new talent accretes like barnacles on its venerable frame. The latest guests who are likely to stay the distance are Terry Wogan, who should be fabulous if he can cope with the hesitation rule, and Rick Wakeman, rock star and anarchic thinker who turns out to be an amusing and quick-witted addition to the ranks of Radio 4 comedians.

While we're grateful for anyone trying to make us laugh right now, Hudd and Quantick's Global Village never quite hit the spot. Sketches ranged from the surreal - a complaint from one of Nigella Lawson's breasts that "we never even get a mention, it's always her bloody food!" - to what the show referred to as "deliciously daft" vignettes inspired by everyday life. Someone of these had potential, like the man complaining that the drawing from his adopted African child is substandard. "I pay £14 a month and what do I get? A crap lion." But the radio sudoku sketch - a running gag about how fantastically dull such an idea would be - was just fantastically dull.

Now, I know there's no greater irritant than people whining that comedy is "just not funny". A GSOH is overwhelmingly a subjective thing and Roy Hudd has had 50 distinguished years on radio. But the same policy statement did suggest Radio 2 take more creative risks and with a series of comedy masterclasses starting next week, let's hope that's where it starts.

Now starting his seventh series, Ed Reardon is attaining the kind of popularity that makes those of us who discovered him early feel possessive. Andrew Nickolds and Christopher Douglas's creation gets endless trails, repeated by presenters with a chuckle in their voices. The first episode of Ed Reardon's Week was a classic, pitting the freelance hack yet again against the forces of useless youth. Starving and forced to forage for blackberries, Ed gets a break when he is commissioned to help out Ben Herbert, young author of the "Dude, Where My Career?" column in The Observer. How did he get that? Ed inquires. "I was spending the weekend with my uncle and he was like, 'I've got this Sunday newspaper that needs filling every week'." "Ah!" says Ed bitterly, "The plot thins." Drafted in to help write "How to Survive with Like No Cash", Ed suggests hiding in the luggage space on National Express, stealing flowers from cemeteries and recycling Christmas cards. Fortunately, the lucrative venture falls through when Ben is talent spotted by Downing Street and promoted to Graduate Employment Tsar, leaving Ed just as starving and bitter as before.

The success of Ed Reardon the series is in inverse proportion to Ed Reardon the character. He is now critic-proof, which is great but a fresh danger awaits. Just like all those Archers photographs, which totally ruined everyone's love of the characters, so visualising Ed Reardon in any way would be disastrous. While I can hear him cursing me even now, can I just say please BBC, don't ever commission Ed Reardon the TV series.