These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things – Part Five – Radio Comedy

On Sunday mornings when I was young, the radio in our house would be tuned to the BBC Light Programme, or Radio 2 as it became from 1967, for Two-Way Family Favourites. Presented by Cliff Michelmore and Jean Metcalfe, Family Favourites was a musical request programme that connected families at home in the UK with British Forces serving in West Germany and other countries overseas.

When Family Favourites ended there was an hour of comedy, with shows like The Clitheroe Kid, The Navy Lark, The Al Read Show, and Much Binding In The Marsh. 

The Much Binding cast: Left to right, Kenneth Horne, Dora Bryan, Richard Murdoch, Sam Costa, and Nicholas Parsons.

Not all of these were new shows, for instance Much Minding In The Marsh was last recorded in 1954, four years before I was even born. The Navy Lark showed remarkable longevity though, with the first episode being broadcast in March 1959, and the last in January 1976. But whether it was new or old, I lapped it up, even if some of it – and I’m particularly thinking about those Bona Performers, Julian and Sandy in Round The Horne – went completely over my rather young head.

Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams (Julian and Sandy)

At some point, my Dad ‘acquired’ a Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder (I wouldn’t say that it was hooky, but certain items he brought home were either ‘won’ or ‘liberated’ rather than being bought through more orthodox channels, and this was one of them), and having carefully positioned the microphone by the radio, I would record my favourite shows, complete with background noises and muffled conversations.

We had a machine like this. Laughably, it's called 'portable.'

During the mid-1960s we ditched the reel-to-reel monstrosity in favour of a more modern cassette recorder, which had only come on the market in 1963. One of the first cassette tapes we owned, and which was bought for me by my parents, was a recording of Hancock’s Half Hour. 

The first cassette tape of Tony Hancock that I owned.

The first episodes I heard were The Reunion Party and The Missing Page; I was immediately hooked and, like so many other fans of The Lad Himself, still frequently listen to old episodes, of which The Wild Man of The Woods, and Sunday Afternoon At Home are my absolute favourites.

It is probably fair to say that the 1940s and 1950s were the golden age of radio comedy. During the 1940s, programmes like It’s That Man Again were credited with bolstering war-time morale; through the 1950s, they did a similar job of keeping the country cheerful during post-war austerity. The coming of television, and especially commercial television, which began broadcasting in 1955, could have brought about the demise of radio comedy; fortunately, it didn’t. Today we have hundreds of TV channels, including some devoted entirely to comedy, and it would be easy to believe that radio comedy is on the decline. Far from it, radio comedy is as fresh, vibrant, and varied as ever.  It is also generally streets ahead of TV comedy in terms of originality.

Having neglected it for some time, my interest in radio comedy was rekindled just after I retired in 2012. A friend of ours mentioned that he regularly went to BBC Radio recordings at Broadcasting House, and so we started applying for tickets. We were unsuccessful early on, probably due to the fact that I was only applying for shows I’d heard of, namely the most popular ones. Adopting a ‘scatter-gun’ approach proved more successful, and the first show that Val and I saw recorded was What Does The K Stand For? written by, and starring Stephen K Amos. Since then we’ve seen hundreds of shows, including Clare In The Community, Reluctant Persuaders, Tom Wrigglesworth’s Hang Ups, Newsjack, The Now Show, Dead Ringers, and The Missing Hancocks to name but just a few, plus non-comedies like Brain Of Britain, Click, Word Book Club, and Counterpoint.

Radio comedy scores over TV comedy when it comes to seeing it recorded as well as when it’s broadcast. A typical evening in the Radio Theatre will see us watch two episodes of a radio sit-com being recorded back-to-back. Even with the inevitable re-takes (pickups), a half-an-hour show only takes about 45-50 minutes; a TV sit-com of similar length can run to two or three hours (or more).

Due to coronavirus, our visits to the BBC have been curtailed, but shows are still being recorded. One such is Ankle Tag, a show we have been to in the past. The third series has just begun broadcasting, and has clearly been recorded without a studio audience; the absence of laughter is quite marked.

I still regularly listen to old episodes of Hancock’s Half Hour, but of the more recent radio comedies that the BBC has broadcast, these are a few of my favourites.

Double Science – Ben Willbond and Justin Edwards star as Colin Jackson (‘no relation’) and Kenneth Farley-Pittman, chemistry teachers at a sixth-form college whose rather unorthodox approach to teaching is upset by the arrival of a new head of department, Alison Hatton, played by Rebecca Front. Sadly, only six episodes of this really rather excellent series were ever made.

Ben Willbond and Justin Edwards as their Double Science characters

Tom Wrigglesworth’s Hang Ups – Sheffield-born Tom now lives in London, but his parents still live in South Yorkshire and Hang Ups chronicles his weekly phone calls home. As with all of the best observational comedy, the humour here is just one slightly absurd step away from reality, so much so that on occasions (such as returning a faulty domestic appliance to the Ideal Home Show), Val and I have wondered if Tom Wrigglesworth hasn’t been observing us for material.

Welcome To Our Village, Please Invade Carefully – A small Buckinghamshire village is invaded by aliens who form the advance party of a planned invasion of the whole planet. Some of the villagers resist the invaders, some accept them, while Ulijabaan, the leader of the aliens, gradually becomes assimilated into English village life.

Clare In The Community – As someone who has worked in social services, Val found this series about the right-on, control freak social worker Clare Barker, played by Sally Phillips, especially funny. The strength of the series is the range of characters, with au pair Nali (Nina Conti) my favourite. In some episodes, Clare has an Australian team leader called Libby, played by Sarah Kendall, which brings me to…

Sarah Kendall’s Australian Trilogy – Val and I have been lucky enough to see all six episodes of this show being recorded (there have been two series). The very first episode – A Day In October, the story of the miracle of George Peach – is perhaps the finest, funniest, saddest, most moving show I have ever had the privilege of seeing; I would have paid good money to see it. All three episodes of the second series were recorded in a single Saturday evening at the Radio Theatre, throughout which we were absolutely spellbound. Sarah Kendall is not a household name; she really ought to be.

Ångström – “Adapted from the bestselling Ångström Trilogy by Martin English, writing as Bjorgen Swedenssonsson,” or so the trailer says. This absurd, surreal, hilarious parody of Scandi-noir stars Matthew Holness as Knut Ångström, a brooding, alcoholic, maverick Swedish detective trying to solve a baffling murder (in which no one may actually have died). Lots of snow, lots of brooding, lots of laughs.

The BBC may have its faults, but its comedy output is a joy, and the BBC Sounds app is chock full of it. I wouldn’t be without it.