Miranda Sawyer

David Sedaris is an upbeat listen too, his readings making me laugh along with his very enthusiastic audience. (This series is a repeat, but still worth checking out.) His writing always seems like such airy, inconsequential stuff, and yet it's perfectly timed, wonderfully written. There are some great lines and neatly observed scenes, especially about his family, and his light-voiced delivery is lovely - you feel he wants you to enjoy yourself as much as he does. If you listened to the end, this week, you got a couple of extracts from his diary, and the last ones - about women removing their bras as soon as they can after work - had me howling.

In the hit-and-miss Woman's Hour 15-Minute Drama slot, this was a jolly show, though it can occasionally seem a little like Rebecca Front's audition tape: "Listen! You don't always have to cast me as a decent, plucky, middle-England type! I can do accents!" And I'd have put this series' episodes in a different order: her first character, Danielle Simmons, a TV reality show star, is a character that has been overdone, and Front's vocal mannerisms were reminiscent of Catherine Tate's. (Can we ban all "satire" about reality shows now, please? There's nothing more to say.) Other characters, such as reluctant whistleblower Helen McKee and equestrian Annabel de Lacy, were more offbeat and better for it. This is all a bit picky, by the way: Incredible Women has a warmth and charm that keeps you listening, as well as lovely writing, so give it a go.

No Such Thing As a Fish (QI podcast) - review

A QI podcast spin-off affords Stephen Fry's little helpers the chance to really shine.

Rewind radio: Ayres on the Air

Though it's for her poems that Ayres is famous, I enjoyed the sitcom inserts rather more than I thought I would.

Radio 4 Comedy Advent Calendar - Review

You know what? They were all great, because they were all short.

Radio 4's Down the Line is back back BACK, baffling the uninitiated with its phone-in pronouncements. I love how the script is just the wrong side of normal. "Your call is an angry call, so I thought a bit of angry music would help"; "Why not put your headphones on and sit on a washing machine?"; "Have you noticed that if you say cheeky in front of something people think it's OK... how about a cheeky bit of genocide?"; "Nobody really likes those posh sausages you get in the supermarket, made of venison, apricots and snowdrops or something"; "My father would have killed for the rectum of a horse". All useful phrases for life, I think you'll agree.

The best combination of music, humour and real-life drama I heard last week was on Radio 4. Mark Thomas, known for political comedy, gave us Bravo Figaro, his standup show from last year's Edinburgh festival. Since then he's taken it on tour, apparently, though it had passed me by. I feel very lucky to have stumbled across it on late-night radio.

Essentially it was a short journey around his dad, Colin - "the rudest man in south London" - with Mark being funny and truthful, and peppering his tale with recorded interviews with his family. We knew that Colin wasn't well from the start: the show opened with the sound of him breathing and talking with difficulty, his wife, Mark's mum, fussing and chattering around him like an anxious sparrow. Mark performed with bombast and to-the-gut honesty; the show rattled along like a juggernaut. You were breathless keeping up. Every time you thought Mark was showing off, he called himself out. Every time you found yourself turning his dad into a cute character, Mark confronted you with what was real. The story, with all its stories within, was brilliantly told.

When Colin had been well he'd loved opera, and quite unbelievably Mark found himself in a position to get Royal Opera singers to perform in Colin's bungalow. Which they did, and we heard it, and it was great; but that wasn't what left the punch to the heart. That was done by Mark, who closed the show by acknowledging that this was a staged goodbye to his dad, that the real end would be "messy and smell of fear" and would lack the delight and beauty of this, his wonderful, powerful tribute. And then the programme ended and the announcer told us that Colin had died that morning.

Jeremy Hardy doesn't make a lovely programme. Oh no. He makes a comedy show that is so rabidly leftwing that Caroline Raphael, Radio 4's comedy commissioning editor, has to go on Feedback and confess that she finds it hard to locate comics of a Tory persuasion. Don't worry, Caroline! That's because there are no funny Conservatives. Only PJ O'Rourke can do rightwing humour and he's an iconoclast.

Anyway, cuddle your enemies and all that. Hardy knows who and what he's up against, and so do we. He sticks to his shtick, but gently pushes sideways: on Wednesday's programme he moved from whether it's right to compliment a woman on her haircut to checking out other blokes' trainers to going to the gym, where, he observed, there is always a man in his 70s, naked, talc-ing his privates. Not very political with a capital P. Funny, though, and that's what matters.

Mark Steel's back with his Sony Gold-winning stand-up programme, Mark Steel's in Town. And what a lovely show it is: slotting into that Radio 4 6.30pm slot with humanity, humility and, best of all, jokes that genuinely come out of the situation in which he finds himself. On Wednesday, Steel visited Handsworth and managed to engage the locals to such an extent that he could riff about a Rasta weatherman, in full Jamaican accent, and it not be offensive in any way. Good comedy is such an amazing skill, such a balancing act between telling the truth and pointing out faults, between teasing and bullying. Steel manages to be political and make an audience feel as though they've had a great big cuddle. That is a hard thing to do.

Hooray! - I discovered Rowan Atkinson's only ever radio series on 4 Extra. Originally broadcast in 1979, on Radio 3, The Atkinson People is a series of spoof interviews, written by Atkinson and Richard Curtis, with Atkinson playing all the parts. First up, Sir Corin Basin, actor, raconteur and crashing bore. There's no point in me retelling the jokes, as it's Atkinson's delivery - his vowels twanging and pinging, his intonation on a bungee jump - that really makes them funny. Just listen, it's a joy. Someone crack open the advocaat.