Strangers On Trains

New Statesman Review

These late-night stories echo the bleak humour of Chris Morris.

You spot the gag pretty quickly in Strangers On Trains (Radio 4), a new spoof in which presenter Nat Segnit shares the apparent results of a year spent recording conversations with men on trains. It's all entirely made up, but for the first few seconds, it feels real enough.

We have a middle-class, self-regarding presenter in Segnit, and he does dishevelled posh well, sounding like Jeremy Paxman crossed with Boris Johnson. Arh, he barked, I'm travelling around on trains all over the country, talking to strangers essentially. That 'essentially' was marvellously done.

In the next sentence, the spoof was revealed. From then, this became a patchy comedy, with some glistening moments - such as a Welsh postman who gets rather carried away with his community role - and some dull interludes, even in its brief 15-minute format.

Best of all was Segnit's narration, saying nothing much in pompous, ridiculous soundbites. There's something in particular about men on trains, he opined. Perhaps it's that sensation we get, staring out of the window. There is a wicked, funny spoof of radio features to be made. This wasn't it, but bits of this were horribly, brilliantly familiar to anyone who listens to a lot of Radio 4.

Nat Segnit looks like an anagram but he is, in fact, a comedy writer and performer. This new series purports to be a set of interviews with strange men, recorded by Nat over the course of a year on British trains, but is, in fact, an entirely fictional set of conversations, conceived by Segnit and then developed in improvisation with actor Stewart Wright.

Like The Mighty Boosh or The League of Gentlemen, Strangers on Trains is not easily taken in or fully comprehended on first encounter. Having listened to all six parts, I am impressed - Wright turns in convincing accents and his out-there stories are perfectly counterbalanced by Segnit's grounded 'interview technique'. This opening episode features train-based encounters with a poetic postman from Wales and a lifeguard who patrols a river using his own complex grid system. It's worth sticking with - this could be a first-class comedy.

It seems unlikely, at first blush - a writer, Nat Segnit, spent a year travelling on various train routes accosting strange men and recording their stories, then cobbled together enough of them to put together a series of unadorned and interlocking interviews. And, as it turns out, it's all make-believe. Of course it is. Nobody who travels by train and isn't either a bore or a psychopath talks to anyone else.

Reality forestalled, though, how does it work as fiction? Very well. All human life is here, in all its pathos, humour and tragedy, in the 'interviews' Segnit 'conducts' with, in this first episode of six, a passionate Welsh postie, a driven South African rower and a swimming pool attendant (possibly Jamaican, it's hard to tell) - all played by Stewart Wright.

There's a philosophical Welsh poet who turns out to be a postman, a white South African who's well hard, a dodgy, randy businessman who's seldom off the phone and a dreamy Rasta, and they're all telling their stories to Nat Segnit who's met them on British trains.

Or, to tell the truth, each of them is a brainchild of Segnit and the actor Stewart Wright who have put them together into a pretend feature that's quite like the real thing, only it's funnier.

So don't stop talking to strangers on trains but do listen to this for quite a few unexpected laughs.