Listen and laugh
Radio/podcast comedy I’m enjoying right now
Goooooooooooood morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you might happen to be!
As I mentioned in this post last November, I am not a podcast person—at least, I don’t think I am. But over the last few years, I’ve discovered that I absolutely love radio comedy, even though it’s not the cultural phenomenon it once was. When Scott Dikkers posted this the other week with the headline ‘A Medium Almost No One Uses for Comedy’, I didn’t have to read any further to know he was talking about radio (though of course I did read further, eventually!).
There is just something so utterly magical about how radio comedy works. A great script, a few great actors, and some well-judged sound effects, and BAM. And good comedy writing really shines in radio.
Radio comedy used to be huge. One of the most fascinating interviews included in Poking a Dead Frog (Mike Sacks) is with the great Peg Lynch (1916-2015), creator of such radio comedy hits as Ethel and Albert and the person once labelled by the BBC as ‘the woman who invented sitcom’. She talked her way into working at her local radio station, interviewed celebrities, wrote 3-minute ‘filler’ episodes that eventually evolved into the hit Ethel and Albert, for which she would ultimately end up writing more than twenty thousand scripts. PHEW.
Though I primarily write short satire or humorous personal essays, for a long time I’ve wanted to write radio comedy. When I recently entered the competition to be chosen for the Erma Bombeck Humorist-in-Residence program, it was to use that time to write the pilot script for a radio comedy about a bunch of highly inept members of Oxford’s smallest and poorest (fictional) college, St. Swithun’s. I’m not going to give up on that dream (and if anybody knows someone who’d be interested in producing a project like this, please let me know!!!), but since I’m tackling a couple of other dreams right now, I’m settling for listening to other people’s fabulous comedy.
Here are a few of the radio comedy series I’m listening to now—they all happen to be BBC classics, and are just scratching the surface of what’s out there:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978, 1980, 2004, 2005): An absolute classic. I’ve already read the books, but now that I’m on a radio comedy journey I’m devouring these. You can listen to old episodes for free here.
Cabin Pressure (2008-2014): I cannot stop recommending this to people. A four-hander about a tiny private airline (or ‘air dot’, since there’s only one jet!), it’s written by the comedy genius John Finnemore, who also stars in the series alongside Roger Allam, Stephanie Cole, and Benedict Cumberbatch (yes, that one). The title of Finnemore’s newsletter (‘Love, the Airport’) is taken from a line his character utters in the episode ‘Uskerty’).
Hut 33 (2007-2009): This is a recent discovery, but I quite enjoyed it! Written by James Cary (whose newsletter ‘The Situation Room’ is filled with great advice for aspiring sitcom writers), it’s about a group of Bletchley Park code-breakers trying to survive both WWII and each other, and stars Tom Goodman-Hill, Robert Bathurst, Fergus Craig, Alex Macqueen, Lil Roughley, and Olivia Colman (yes, that one).
Do YOU have a favourite radio comedy you like to listen to? We’d like to hear about it! Drop a recommendation into the comments below.
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VB,
M