Cabin Pressure

For the last six weeks, there has been one reason at least to put away the razor blade - a weekly appointment with Cabin Pressure, one of the funniest sitcoms ever to air on the radio.

It is always a puzzle to me as to why I sit through so much comedy with a 'We are not amused' expression when I find most of what goes on in real life belly-achingly diverting. Similarly, it is almost impossible to analyse the secret of good comic writing but John Finnemore's script for the six-parter had it in spadefuls.

So Finnemore, who has also written for Dead Ringers and Mitchell and Webb, had his characters with incompetence ranging against dry wit, and his landscape, that surreal world in the sky which is an airliner in transit. It could still have all gone wrong but his ear for a comic retort was equal to his instinct for a comical situation. The result was a six-week abdominal workout for listeners and, I hope, a recommission for Pozzitive Productions.

I gave the show a brief mention a few weeks ago, but now its run has finished, it's time to give Cabin Pressure its due. Its first episode was, I said, flawless. Nothing can be flawless for ever, but the writing and performances in this tight comedy have been exceptional. Let me put it like this: this is the only programme that has kept me close to a radio at 11.30 every Wednesday morning. Never mind Listen Again - you want to catch this as soon as you can.

The setting might be novel - a charter plane, with its skeleton crew of misfits - but the writing obeys pretty much all the necessary rules of classic British sitcom writing, which are simple. In fact, students of the art form would do well to listen to it and take notes. You need little more than an inverted class relationship, a sense of failure, an idiot, and a scary authority figure. What writer John Finnemore has done as well is to add, without tilting things off balance comedy-wise, some depth to the characters.

So the dragon of a boss, played by Stephanie Cole, is revealed to be scared of becoming a 'little old lady'; and the wonderfully supercilious Jeeves/Sergeant Wilson figure, the man who should be Captain but isn't (a perfect performance by Roger Allam), is shown to have weaknesses of his own. The show deserves an award.