Nosheen Iqbal

Review: Bridget Christie; Our Woman in Norton Tripton

Radio 4's dearth of good comedy is no joke - as these latest offerings from Bridget Christie and Jenny Eclair show.

There were fewer mixed feelings about Our Woman ... in which Jenny Eclair plays an ex-Fleet Street hack working in a tiny village on a community website. It's supposed to be a sitcom, but there was a lot of flailing, with neither enough situation or comedy to warrant the commission. Still, I listened all the way through.

Bridget Christie set herself the task of making feminism funny (because "last year misogyny, like shiny leggings, made an unexpected comeback"). It's a tough gig. Christie was charming and balanced a fine line between polemicist and standup, but the material felt at times too obvious. Maybe I'm too jaded. Or maybe 11pm on a Thursday is a bizarre slot to sell this in. I just ended up wanting to like the show much more than I had.

"It tastes like ... woman." So came the verdict of 54-year-old Benjamin Zephaniah, on drinking tea for the first time ever as part of I've Never Seen Star Wars (Radio 4). Hosted by Marcus Brigstocke, the programme dares famous types to try common experiences brand new to them; so the poet also had to read Pooh and listen to One Direction. Genuinely funny.

Light relief in the dreary first full working week of the year came from the return of Cabin Pressure to Radio 4. One of the station's few contemporary sitcom successes (more on that subject another week), it has lured Benedict Cumberbatch and Roger Allam back for a fourth run at playing odd-couple pilots Martin and Douglas. The pair man MJN Air: a tinpot, one-plane budget airline owned by middle-aged divorcee Carolyn, played by Stephanie Cole. It's an impressive cast - Allam does a great line in supercilious grumps and he is in his element as the snarky first officer to Cumberbatch's prissy, uptight captain. But perhaps the real star of the show is its writer John Finnemore, who also plays Carolyn's doofus air-steward son, Arthur.

"The code red is there to stop me being too helpful, and I can't stop being too helpful by being more helpful," he bumbled at his mum, in a script packed tight with superb lines. The crew had assembled for Birling Day, the annual jolly enjoyed by their stupidly rich (and often drunk) regular customer, who charters a flight each year to take him to see the Six Nations rugby final. Except this year, the match was taking place at Twickenham, a short drive from Birling's own house. No matter.

After a row with his wife and in a fit of pique, Birling ordered a trip to watch the match in Timbuktu. Miles of daft behaviour followed, the highlight being Allam's smug laugh - "Madame is a humourist?" - as Douglas bartered with Carolyn over a bottle of whisky.

Do you remember the day you discovered Kettle crisps? Dawn French does: it was at Kirsty MacColl's house, apparently - and amazing they were too. A revolution in fried potatoes that was up there in hers and Jennifer Saunders's list of top 10 nibbles, as shared with the nation over four daft minutes of primetime Christmas Day radio (French and Saunders, Radio 2). "I had some lovely nuts last night," giggled Saunders. Schoolgirl stuff, it's true, but French and Saunders always mined gold from the silliest, most irreverent material. And so, Dawn French dumped Simon Cowell live on air for Gary Barlow, hoping she would stop having to read Hello! magazine to keep tabs on her celebrity boyfriend. Saunders, thoroughly English in her expert self-deprecation, reeled off a list of prestigious awards her badly reviewed Spice Girl musical, Viva Forever, had won, while French gently ribbed her for her post-cancer press coverage. "You're not even brave any more!"

Best of all was the surprise kiss and tell on celebrity snoggers. Having smooched George Clooney, David Beckham and Brad Pitt over the years, French told Emma Bunton (who popped up on the Someone And Their Mum feature) that none of the world's hottest men came close to matching her real favourite: Jamie Theakston (who knew?), former children's TV presenter and Bunton's breakfast show co-host on Heart FM. But mostly it was a joy to simply listen to French and Saunders chatter in the background of my mum's busy kitchen, emitting exactly the right frequency of festive jolliness without being smug or irritating. No mean feat - you just wish they would do more shows.

Paul Chowdhry: 'I just want to make people laugh'

He's been called offensive, dated, lazy and misogynistic. Is Paul Chowdhry - Britain's first Asian standup superstar - bothered? Nosheen Iqbal finds out.

For most of us, 'For The Win' (generally shortened to 'FTW', to those still abbreviating 'lots of love' as 'LOL') is a mildly annoying linguistic meme, popping up less frequently than it once did back in 2010. Quite why any writer would want to date their work so pointedly, and embarrassingly, by naming their sketch show after an internet tic is one thing. Trying as hard as For The Win does for surreal irreverence is another. The show isn't wholly terrible: there's the germ of a good idea in the Come Dine With Me-cum-Last Supper spoof and the metacritical review of the show within a show is a nice touch. But talking nipples, a man-python and an extended riff on bumbags? It's an unfunny improv class that needs work and while the cast are, as expected, enthusiastic, the results just seem too desperate.

Set above a village pub and starring a motley crew of British TV's bit-part stars, there's a lot of goodwill riding on The Function Room to work. Comic's comic Kevin Eldon takes the lead as local bobby Tony Marks, playing the unlikely straight man in a roomful of idiots as he hosts a daft residents' meeting on home security. Naturally, the agenda is hijacked to resolve a whodunnit on the mysterious identity of the 'shit egg killer' - the local kook terrorising victims by chucking parcels of turd through their windows. Reece Shearsmith, Simon Day and Josephine Butler all take a turn at scene-stealing, but this is a conventional studio sitcom with all the traits that genre brings: gentle jokes, obvious characters and an audience always laughing harder than you are.

Russell Tovey interview

Former History Boy is also the man who might have been Tintin but what he really wants is 'the career of Julie Walters. As a man'.