Zoe Williams (I)

Radio Head: David Mitchell

The Unbelievable Truth, for instance, should never have been recommissioned. It's only funny when Clive Anderson is speaking. They could more profitably devise a show that was just Clive Anderson, speaking.

Its failures as a quiz are admirably demonstrated by the fact that the scoring is now inverse to the drollery, so that Clive scores no points at all, and Lucy Porter sometimes wins. I don't care about scoring when it's like I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue and it's meant to mean nothing, but they can't all be spoof game-shows. Some of them have to be actual games that work.

It'll take three men to replace one Humphrey Lyttelton

No one person could take over from Lyttelton. Perhaps that's why Radio 4 are replacing him with three British comedy giants.

Radio Head: 4 Stands Up

This season I must protest about 4 Stands Up, a show in which Radio 4 has selected, apparently at random, some stand-up comedians and just wheeled them out. You can tell things are bad when the announcer gives you, "4 Stands Up, compered by the Welsh comedian Rhod Gilbert". That's all you've got, a postcode? He has nothing else going for him? He's never won, or done, anything? He has impinged upon our consciousness in no way? Can't you even call him a newcomer? I don't even know how bad the jokes were, because it was audience-participation heavy and they hadn't even mic-ed the audience! All I could hear was a kind of scuffle.

Radio Head: Just A Minute

A Guardian columnist talks about what she likes about the comedy.

Guardian Article

An article about Radio 4 and the laughter track, focusing on Safety Catch

I'm in radio mourning for All Bar Luke

But the delivery is beyond funny - he has this high, girlish laugh that encapsulates surrender, self-pity, despair, craven hope, self-delusion, panic. Every blow of psychic pain that has ever beset mankind is in this laugh. From every one of 360 degrees, you want to stop and admire it. I wonder whether the writing is any good at all, so blinded am I by the terrible giggle.

Winging It

He was standing around, minding his own business, Julian Rhind-Tutt tells Zoe Williams, when he got 'very, very lucky' and became an actor. Couldn't talent, she asks, have had something to do with it?