Radio 4 orders free speech comedy show Unsafe Space, despite protests
- Radio 4 has commissioned Unsafe Space, a six-part stand-up and debate show that pledges to introduce more working-class voices to the station
- Recording of the show's pilot required additional security because protesters were threatening to blow airhorns says producer Jon Holmes
- "We'll invite the people who scream at each other on Twitter and put them in a room, a pub perhaps, that's convivial, where they can talk about these thing rather than just [tweet] 140 characters" he added
Radio 4 has commissioned a "provocative" comedy and debate show championing free speech and broader class representation, despite protesters allegedly threatening to shut it down by blowing airhorns during the recording.
Six episodes of Unsafe Space will air from January 12th in the 11pm slot, British Comedy Guide can exclusively reveal, featuring stand-up, sketches, character comedy, opinion segments and interviews from stalwarts of the channel, such as Simon Evans, plus Radio 4 newcomers, as the show seeks to offer greater diversity than the BBC's existing comedy output, "especially diversity of opinion across the socio-economic divide".
The commission comes after the corporation drafted in extra security for the pilot at the Backyard Comedy Club in London in January, creator Jon Holmes has claimed, because of threats to disrupt the recording based on the involvement of stand-up and Titania McGrath creator Andrew Doyle.
The GB News host will conduct a series of interviews over the course of the series, including one with left-wing journalist Owen Jones, and another with singer-songwriter Billy Bragg about the consequences of free speech.
Evans is not performing stand-up but will instead deliver an essay each episode, which others will then be afforded a right to reply to. The full line-up of comedians involved is expected to be announced in due course.
Holmes, creator of the award-winning, open source topical sketch show The Skewer on Radio 4 and a former mainstay of its flagship topical comedy The Now Show, is producing and directing Unsafe Space for his company Unusual Productions.
He objects to perceptions of Unsafe Space as "a right-wing thing", he told comedian Geoff Norcott on his What Most People Think podcast, recalling that "we got loads of flak [for the pilot]".
Featuring Doyle, plus Alice Marshall portraying his woke parody McGrath, as well as Tony Law, Leo Kearse, Mary Bourke, Nick Dixon, George Zach, Freddy Quinne, Jake Yapp and double act Larry & Paul, aka Larry Budd and Paul Dunphy, almost all of whom have performed at the Comedy Unleashed "free-speech" nights at the Backyard, the pilot also included Evans interviewing shadow foreign secretary David Lammy and #OscarsSoWhite activist April Reign.
There are "loads" of left-leaning comics in the series Holmes told Norcott. "It is literally a diverse line-up, in all senses of the word."
He criticised a section of the Left as "deluded" for trying to prevent the pilot recording.
"We had to get extra security in, on radio budgets, to stop the gig being disrupted because the moment they found out Andrew Doyle was involved ... we had to go to the BBC [and tell them] there are people threatening to turn up with airhorns that they'll blast throughout ... so this show can't possibly be recorded."
Protestors also threatened to block book the (free) tickets and not turn up he suggested. Or attend and simply sit in silence.
"That is insane, what are you trying to achieve? It's just some people doing jokes on a stage" Holmes said, exasperated. "All the jokes they said we were going to do didn't materialise because that's not going to happen. No-one's mocking trans people, no-one's having a go at people's rights ... Grown-up debate is literally shut down and stifled with airhorns in this case."
The BBC has committed to ensuring that 25% of its staff are from lower socio-economic backgrounds. But Holmes said that he pitched Unsafe Space to address the lack of working-class representation in Radio 4 comedy.
"Forty per cent of this country are working-class" he pointed out, adding that he hoped class would "be the next big issue that people start fighting for," recalling how, as someone from a poor background, he'd felt "out of my depth" in writers rooms that were otherwise full of Oxbridge graduates, receiving "script notes in Latin".
After the BBC's director general Tim Davie called for a wider range of viewpoints in the corporation's comedy output in 2020, "a multitude of flavours", Holmes said that he told Radio 4 it didn't have "diversity of thought" in comedy.
Norcott and Evans were exceptions to the political orthodoxy on Radio 4 he said. But "what you don't really have is working-class people in programmes much, you don't have anything that goes against the grain. These opinions that aren't fashionable amongst the Metropolitan Elite. The dissenting voices against the received narrative shall we say?
"So I said we should do a programme like that but it's Radio 4, so it'll be grown-up. What we'll do is we'll have some stand-up that you wouldn't normally have, that wouldn't come near Radio 4. You wouldn't even invite them on The Now Show probably ... Let's get debate in there and chat, we'll invite the people who scream at each other on Twitter and put them in a room, a pub perhaps, that's convivial, where they can talk about these thing rather than just [tweet] 140 characters."
The pilot "went really well, possibly because a Radio 4 audience were like, 'oh, finally, look at this, opinions that I agree with'."
Holmes also reflected on the "nightmare" he'd experienced in 2016, when a tweet he'd posted in the wake of he and Mitch Benn being sacked from The Now Show in the name of diversity, led to his family being doorstepped and him splashed across the front page of the Mail on Sunday as part of its ongoing culture war with the BBC.
"I'd got the very right-wing having a go at me, they were sending me death threats, naturally" he recalled. "And on the other hand, I'm 'a complete racist because I'm a white, privileged, something something'".
Addressing his critics directly, he stated: "I'm none of these things, I'm a nuanced person. I happen to think some things a bit right, I also think some things a bit left because I'm a human and absorb it all. I read all of the press ... Because I like to absorb all opinions and then form my own, you mad people!"
Born to a nurse and builder parents, the first of his family to go to university, Holmes jokingly further emphasised his working-class credentials by pointing out that he was adopted at four weeks old and is currently making a documentary about the historical abuse of unmarried mothers.
"In the late sixties, early seventies, when I was born, we were still taken off our mums because they were single" he reflected.
"This was a scandal. They were forced to give birth without painkillers to teach them a lesson. This was a recent as 1976. It's utterly insane."