Craig Brown's Lost Diaries

While I was away I discovered a gem. Craig Brown's Lost Diaries (Radio 4, Monday mornings). This is so funny you will snort, hoot, chortle and guffaw loudly enough to dismay the neighbours. Hearing Gyles Brandreth, Esther Rantzen, Paddy Ashdown, Heather Mills, David Blunkett, Barbara Cartland, Andy Warhol and Prince Charles all reading from their personal journals is a fantasy, of course, but a glorious one. The cast is superb, the scripts are diamond bright. Why haven't I heard it before? Because on Monday mornings I am usually writing this. And glad to do so, even in a week when the tremors of history shook the BBC's foundations.

Keen to enjoy some legit giggling, I tuned into Craig Brown's Lost Diaries. Brown's Private Eye diaries make me laugh more than anything else in print. But they seem not to work on radio, in spite of the brilliant impressionists (Alistair McGowan, Jan Ravens) who perform them. Perhaps it's that topicality has been lost; Edwina Currie and John Major appeared and, for a moment, I struggled to remember that they once had - oh my God! - an affair.

Then again, any programme that does not take Harold Pinter's egregious "poetry" (or his widow Antonia Fraser's extreme reverence for it) seriously is performing an important service.

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.

Craig Brown: The Lost Diaries

How do you out-snob Virginia Woolf, out-raunch DH Lawrence and out-rant Germaine Greer? Craig Brown explains the parodist's art.