Jeremy Hardy Speaks To The Nation

"Voice of Radio 4" Peter Donaldson dies aged 70

A familiar voice to listeners during the Christmas period and the announcer for Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation, Donaldson delivered his final bulletin at midnight on New Year's Eve 2012.

Radio Times review

I cannot offer an insight into the content of this returning series because it is recorded just two days before broadcast, but I have no qualms in recommending it to anyone who enjoys a fearless deconstruction of what lies behind social mores and accepted views on politics. Jeremy Hardy has yet to have his fighting spirit dampened.

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.

It's time comedians spoke to the nation besides lefties

Dominic Cavendish asks whether there are too few right-wing comedians out there and if so, does it matter?

The ninth series of Hardy's lectures - they started 20 years ago - is the first since 2010, when the coalition government was new and yet to provide much solid material.

That will have changed now. Hardy's viewpoint is unabashedly socialist, humanitarian, egalitarian - biased, if you like, although if these were just empty rants, even people who agree with him wouldn't have stuck around.

Hardy's barbs are thoughtful, tinged with personal experience and buttressed by his expertise in constructing jokes and set pieces.

Political and polemical do not always a great comedian make, but Jeremy Hardy keeps his revolutionary fist in an amusingly silky glove for Radio 4. This series of comic lectures - in which he is joined for mock interviews by guests such as Alison Steadman, Rebecca Front and, as is the case here, Gordon Kennedy - started back in 1993. Subjects covered down the years have helped the nation grow to the fulsome state of cultural, intellectual and spiritual awareness that we are blessed with today. None of this would have happened if Jeremy Hardy had not lectured us upon How to Argue Your Position, How to Improve Your Mind and the seminal How to Have Sex. Why was this man not in the Queen's Birthday Honours? Oh, yes. He's a socialist.

It is a sad fact of life that many people will not listen to Jeremy Hardy because they think that he is a smug, middle-class Trot. Actually, he is an astute social commentator as well, as this exposition on the politeness of Britons, and what men really mean when they say what they say, shows.

The man once described as resembling "an incendiary vicar" returns with four more blistering sermons. Those who know Hardy only from his rather lacklustre performances on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue (on The News Quiz he confines himself to trying to outshout Sandi Toksvig) will be delighted to find that, when he puts his mind to it, he can educate through laughter, not a gift given to many.

Radio Head: Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation

Rowland Rivron, Sandi Toksvig, Mark Steel, Mark Thomas, Jo Brand, Graham Fellowes, Russell Brand . . . the list of modern comedians that divides the nation is a surprisingly lengthy one. And it will be only part of the listening public that will be rearranging its life to be in front of the wireless when the latest series of the sociopolitical lecture Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation kicks off next Tuesday (Radio 4, 6.30pm).

Ofcom dismissed 70 complaints about a programme on BBC Radio 4 in which comic Jeremy Hardy said members of the BNP should be "shot in the back of the head".

The BBC apologised for the comments in the satirical show, Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation, saying they were not acceptable, and Ofcom said it would not take any action.