Jane Thynne

Week In Radio: Good sense of humour desperately needed

For an organisation devoted to popular entertainment, the BBC's public pronouncements always carry a drearily leaden ring. Just look at the statement of policy, vision and challenges for Radio 2 this year. The plan, apparently, is to "refresh and refocus its comedy output to gain greater impact from existing levels of investment in this genre, ensuring differentiation from comedy on Radio 4". Different from Radio 4? Please God, they don't mean less funny.

I tried hard to resist The Fry Chronicles on Radio 4, the latest instalment from a man who has taken the Socratic idea about a life unexamined to heart. But it was of course perfectly pitched, intelligent, amusing and endearing. This week it was Stephen Fry's celibate years, in which an all-consuming passion for Apple Macintosh stood in for sex. It is amazing to hear that Fry lies awake reflecting on his lack of achievement. Where that leaves the rest of us just doesn't bear thinking.

Embracing ageing with open arms, the crustiest antediluvian on radio was back in the form of Ed Reardon, performing "With Great Pleasure without the pleasure" in a stage version of his own works. Written by Andrew Nickolds and Christopher Douglas, An Audience With Ed Reardon was a savage hymn to the horror of freelance life, complete with rejection slips, ("Dear Mr Reardon, how did you get this address?") and excerpts from his afternoon play, A Bargeful of Blood, described by one reviewer as "the most harrowing afternoon's ironing I've ever had". Failure is a theme that English writers have always done well - think of Dickens - and Reardon encapsulates brilliantly the plight of an ageing hack beset by new technology, patronising publishers and "12-year-old commissioning editors". You wonder what will happen when Ed encounters a BBC Media Literacy Ambassador, but somehow you can already imagine.

One artistic response to radical Islam you hardly ever see is comedy. So the gently sardonic humour of Shai Hussein's play, 'Til Jihad Do Us Part, was a joy. Meena is a DJ, nearly 30 and still single. Her mother is growing increasingly desperate, her stance shifting from no boyfriends in the house to "Muslims, Christians, Jews OK, but no pagans". When she meets a handsome stranger, Meena resolves to tell him everything. Played by Rokhsaneh Ghawam-Shahidi, Meena is a wonderful creation, "pretty whorish for a Muslim girl" as she explains, but perfectly capturing the plight of young Pakistanis caught between two cultures. "Nine sexual partners? A bit higher than I was expecting," gulps her fiancé. "No, nine boyfriends. I've had a few more sexual partners." It turns out the handsome stranger is only after a visa, and when Meena checks him out online she suspects he may be a terrorist. "How can you trust a man without a Facebook profile?" Smitten however, she agrees to a wedding service, even though as she puts it, "the verses of the Koran made about as much sense to me as the storylines of Lost".

The best resurrection of the undead came in Craig Brown's Lost Diaries, which assembled a formidable clutch of impressionist talent, including Rory Bremner, Alistair McGowan and Jan Ravens, to deliver gobbets of satire on figures who may have vanished from public life, but burn brightly in collective memory. There was Edwina Currie's diary on her trysts with John Major: "'Essentially,' he coos, 'these proposals for renewing the essential health of our domestic economy are the same as those I previously mentioned.' 'Go on!' I beg him." There is John Prescott, whose malapropisms and bulimia are a gift, and Antonia Fraser on Harold Pinter's poem about Humpty Dumpty as a denunciation of the Bush regime. "Serves you bloody right for being an egg, chum!" Antonia records that, "Both mummy and daddy had their eyes closed in immense concentration." Bliss.

More meditations on love came from Mr and Mrs Smith in Radio 4's late night Happy Tuesdays slot, a series whose reviews thus far must have prompted some horribly unhappy Wednesdays. Written by Will Smith, who starred as the Conservative aide in The Thick of It, the scene was a marriage-guidance session. She was unsatisfied - he gave her a draining rack for their first anniversary - he was unsatisfactory: "I only feel like a man when I'm playing Call of Duty". Their romantic mini-break was predictably disastrous. It was, I suppose, the kind of humour you can multi-task to. Gently amusing, and Smith will undoubtedly go on to write slicker and faster material.

Happy campers who are still raising a laugh

Review of Carry On Forever!

The discovery by Doreen Wise of a forgotten stash of early Morecambe and Wise performances in the eaves of her garage was hailed by the BBC as comedy gold. Well, up to a point, maybe. While no-one is saying The Garage Tapes should have stayed in the garage, these early performances on shows like Variety Bandbox and Variety Fanfare raise only the weakest of smiles. Heavily reliant on wordplay and delivered with a curious, mid-Atlantic twang, their sketches dwell on tales of yore like Robin Hood. "How did you fall in with outlaws? I fell out with in-laws." The most interesting thing the programme revealed was the strength of the two men's relationship. It was Ernie who had the ability to spot what was special about Eric. "I never heard Eric criticise Ernie or allow anyone else to say anything about Ernie," said Joan Morecambe. "All either of them wanted was a nice little home, a nice wife and a nice car." Rather touchingly, that's pretty much what they got.

Ian Davidson and Peter Vincent's delightful When the Dog Dies cast Ronnie Corbett as Sandy Hopper, a widower whose daughter and son-in-law are impatient for him to move out of his house - a move he has agreed to make "when the dog dies". The need, therefore, is to keep Henry - 116 in dog years - alive. This is a gentle, credit-crunch comedy for our times and Corbett is beautifully cast as the beleaguered oldie whose ungrateful offspring watch his every move like vultures. When he gets a sat-nav his daughter is horrified. "You shouldn't be spending money on that, there's already inheritance tax without you spending!" He is banned from burying the dog in the garden because, as his monstrous son-in-law tells him, "People won't buy the house with dead dogs everywhere". And when he graciously suggests, "we should all be singing from the same hymn sheet," the son-in-law ominously riposts, "We will soon Sandy."

I've taken a while to get round to this panel game, and can hardly believe it has already embarked on its fifth series, yet it does seem curiously appropriate to our times. Whereas a format like Just a Minute relies on old-fashioned verbal fluency, the success of this show, developed by Graeme Garden, rests on the modern taste for factoids coupled with our newfound habit of subjecting everything we hear to a kind of plausibility pre-screening.

The likeable David Mitchell, who has managed in a very short time to step into Stephen Fry's commodious shoes, rules with a kind of brainy decency and surely has Radio 4 engraved on his heart. But the result is quirky rather than hilarious.

Up for discussion were beer, babies and spiders and among the diverting facts that emerged were that "most babies cry in the key of A", that Germany has a unique species of flea that is only found near beer-mats, and that Isaac Newton's only reported speech in the House of Commons as an MP was to ask someone to close the window.

Some of the alleged truths seemed a bit suspect to me, though. A spider is the only animal that sleeps on its back, for example. What about my cat, as I and a lot of other listeners protested? Then again, these truths are probably as reliable as anything else you'll hear this side of a general election.