With Nobbs On

The delightful David Nobbs proved in With Nobbs On what his friends and colleagues had known for years - that he is has perfect comic timing, both as writer and performer. In the first of a three-part audio autobiography he recalled his days as a cub reporter in Sheffield and London and how, while covering Hampstead Magistrates' Court, he got the call from That Was The Week That Was (TW3) to join its team of scriptwriters. It was to be some years before he conjured up Reginald Perrin but the combined enthusiasm of David Frost and Ned Sherrin, presenter and producer of TW3 respectively, was what elevated him from humble hack to satirical sketch writer.

With Nobbs On is a three-part series in which comedy writer David Nobbs, most famous as the creator of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, talks about his writing career.

The first episode covers his earliest years, before Perrin, dealing with his schooldays, his National Service, his "career" in journalism and finally getting some material on television by writing for That Was The Week That Was.

I found With Nobbs On to be an entertaining, amusing, and interesting programme. Here and there, there's a brief glimpse at some silly event from his life; such as when he was doing his National Service and how he was told not to go to the local brothel, complete with directions on how to get there; to his time at the Sheffield Star and his feeble attempts to get vox pops from the locals on international affairs.

Then there are his first novels such as The Itinerate Lodger, in which the eponymous character gets a job as a postman and decides to deliver 6.5 letters to each address, and his first TW3 material, which included a parody of the coverage at Cowes that instead covered darts.

However, the most important thing you can learn from David Nobbs appears to be: Time your sexual references. I agree. And anyone who doesn't is a tit.

David Nobbs is a funny man. Not only did he create one of the greatest comic characters in Reggie Perrin but he also has a funny name, ripe for comic exploitation - something he's not shy of in this hugely entertaining talk on his life and career.

He wryly covers everything from his ten-year-old self's attempts to write books, which only stretched to the titles, to the moment he first got a sketch - or a line from a sketch - on That Was the Week That Was. There are also readings of excerpts from his first staged work, an extract from his first book and the revelation that, like Reggie Perrin, he likes ravioli. He lived off tins of it while in lodgings.

David Nobbs, wonderfully comic writer whether on radio, TV or in print, begins a three-part series talking to an audience about his work and some people he's worked with over the years. As he's written for Frankie Howerd, David Frost and The Two Ronnies, invented such TV comedies as A Bit of a Do, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and (for Radio 4) The Maltby Collection, it's a rich field. Mia Soteriou and Martin Trenaman are the readers, Andrew McGibbon produces for independents Curtains for Radio.