A Short History of British Radio Comedy
To summarise: wartime Britain kept its spirits up by listening to entertaining and uplifting radio from the BBC. After the war the morale raising Home Service was joined by the Light Programme. Together they pioneered a brand of light-hearted and often highly innovative radio entertainment. Shows like Round the Horne, Hancock’s Half Hour and The Goons are still funny (and still pretty radical) fifty years on (you can hear a lot of this stuff via the Listen Again pages at BBC 7, the corporation’s comedy and drama station).
At the end of the Sixties the BBC top brass realised that the old pre-war stations with their starched collars and cut glass accents were losing touch with the emerging youth culture. So they rearranged the whole of BBC radio into four new national networks (plus a bunch of local and regional stations). They were imaginatively named Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 3 and Radio 4.
Radio 1 was for young people - a group previously catered for only by chirpy (and seasick) pirate radio DJs. Radio 2 was for ‘light entertainment’ and music for the oldies (emphasis on big bands, Alma Cogan and Wurlitzer organs). Radio 3 was (and is) for the highbrows, the big-brains - inheriting The post-war Third Programme’s vanishingly small audience of Wagner and Verdi fans that, in any rational system, would have been totally ignored. This is Britain, though, so they got their own radio station (there’s a bit of ’serious’ jazz in there too plus some grown-up drama and very serious speech).
Radio 4 pretty soon turned out to be the jewel in the crown: an almost perfect blend of serious speech radio, quality drama, influential news and current affairs and groundbreaking comedy. Radio 4 became a permanent, day-long fixture in millions of middle class homes. Programmes and voices assumed the status of national treasures. Even the station’s soap, which is a frankly weird ‘everyday story of farming folk‘ originally planned as a way to promote understanding of agriculture is now on the protected list.
Meanwhile, Radio 4’s comedy commissioners - some of the Beeb’s best and most influential managers over four decades - brought in and nurtured hundreds of young comedians and writers, many of whom went on to create and star in important national and international TV shows and movies. Radio 4’s arrival caused BBC’s comedy output to be divided sharply down the middle: the old-fashioned, broad, belly laugh stuff from the music hall tradition (what Americans would call ‘Vaudeville’) stayed on Radio 2 - and it’s still there.
The new stuff, which came from university revues (the Cambridge Footlights was a particularly rich source), big city cabarets (there weren’t any comedy clubs in Britain back then) and from the inside pages of newspapers and satirical magazines, went out on Radio 4. Surreal sketch shows, political satire, funny quiz shows and sitcoms made their home here. Sketch shows like Monty Python, The Goodies, Little Britain, The League of Gentlemen, The Mighty Boosh; oddly uncompetitive panel shows like Just a Minute and the unparalleled I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue; dozens of stand-ups and writers - from Ivor Cutler and Chris Morris to Douglas Adams to Armando Iannucci all got their start there. It’s easier, in fact, to count the British comics who didn’t get their start on Radio 4: the only recent exception I can think of is Ricky Gervais, creator of The Office - now a global hit. He started on commercial radio: very unusual, that.
The orthodoxy now, though, is that Radio 4 has lost it. Comics and writers don’t need radio at all any more because of the explosion of TV outlets for comedy since the multichannel era got its belated start in the UK ten years ago. In Radio 4’s heyday TV was an impossible dream for all but the very best of comedians. Now there’s such a hunger for cheap content in the badlands of late night cable and satellite that comedians routinely score TV shows before they’ve even toured.
So Radio 4 may not be the natural nursery for mainstream comedy any more, no longer an essential rung on the ladder to fame and cocaine addiction, but there’s still plenty of funny stuff there. From the current crop I’d select sitcoms Ed Reardon’s Week and Fags, Mags and Bags, ‘quiz’ show Genius, loopy stand-up Mark Watson and topical surrealism from Armando Iannucci. The variety is still enormous and the wonders of the Internet mean you can actually hear this stuff. Spend an hour or two in BBC 7’s archive and you’ll be a British comedy bore before you know it… And while I’m about it, I’m going to squeeze in a plug for my own site Speechification, which selects and reviews Radio 4 programmes (as well as good speech radio from around the world) - subscribe to the podcast for an unending stream of good stuff from the best speech station in the world.
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