The Stage

Radio review - light programme

Published Monday 24 November 2008 at 12:15 by Lisa Martland

BBC Radio executives, especially those remaining at Radio 2, have had little to celebrate lately, the Brand/Ross saga has made sure of that. Still, at least listeners have had a laugh with Radio 4 offering three of the funniest comedy half hours to be aired in a long time.

The best of the trio was Danny Robins’ Music Therapy, a new show described as a sort of Top of the Tops meets Trisha. Here was an opportunity for Robins, along with guests Isy Suttie and beatbox champion Beardyman, to solve both listener and world problems through the therapeutic qualities of music. “Think of me as a melodic Jeremy Kyle,” suggested Robins, but without “the latent sense of evil”.

Some of the most amusing sections in this, the first of four programmes, occurred when Robins went out and about hoping to administer his particular style of musical medicine to hard done by members of the community. These included abused traffic wardens and fishmongers feeling the effect of the credit crunch - for the latter, Robins set himself up as an in-store DJ presenting Radio Fish Shop. Suttie’s clever song 50 Ways to Sack Your Cleaner, aimed at middle-class housewives who could not bring themselves to let the ‘help’ go, was another highlight.

Robins’ personable style and natural comic talent, paired with a good script, created some genuine laugh out loud moments. There were slightly less of these in the return of Another Case of Milton Jones - now in its seventh series - but the witty wordplay and bizarre storylines made up for that.

For this particular instalment, Jones found himself casing the catwalk as a professional photographer at a Milan fashion shoot. Despite being pretty lousy at the job - his only relevant experience was taking pictures of animals - he still ended up jetting off to South America to snap an eccentric and often angry Miss Venezuela.

To attempt to explain what happened next would be far too ambitious, let’s just say that Jones’ adventure featured encounters with Big Foot and a tribe of eco terrorists, and that was after he discovered what going for a Brazilian really meant.

The joy of the programme was in the writing, particularly the running gags, and the way it was performed by Jones and the cast, which included Tom Goodman-Hill, Dan Tetsell, Ingrid Oliver and Ben Willbond.

In these hi-tech modern times you now, of course, have the added opportunity of catching up with radio programmes you have missed or want to listen to again via the stations’ websites. With so much on offer, Listen Against’s Alice Arnold and Jon Holmes decided the copious amounts of material could do with a bit of drastic editing - in other words, they hoped to present all the right snippets but not necessarily in the right order.

Thanks to some clever editing, there were some funny news items from the previous week’s radio, not least the contestant taking part in Ken Bruce’s Radio 2 Popmaster quiz, who had an interminable list of people he wanted to say hello to and the light entertainment meltdown when a laptop containing the subjects for the next 10,000 episodes of Just a Minute was lost.

Meltdown is one word which could be attributed to the recent events at Radio 2 and the jobs and reputations that have been lost since Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross’ lewd telephone messages to actor Andrew Sachs were aired. Their actions can, of course, not be excused, however, it does seem a shame that just as the British public love an underdog (John Sergeant being a recent example), there is also an element of society that cannot wait to put the knife into someone who is well paid and successful. Strange that only three or four complaints were registered when the Brand/Ross show was originally aired and yet as soon as word got round that their heads were on the block, the number rose to thousands.

Ross deserves to be taught a lesson and has too often acted more like a schoolboy than a grown man. But he still remains a talented broadcaster and Friday nights and Saturday nights would be a poorer place without him.

DETAILS

Danny Robins’ Music Therapy - R4, Tuesday, November 18

Another Case of Milton Jones - R4, Monday, November 17

Listen Against - R4, Tuesday, November 18