Radio 4
Jane Edwardes
We all need a break from time to time, especially now given the grim state of the world. So it’s not surprising that comedy is making something of a comeback in the West End: Operation Mincemeat; The Unfriend seen recently at this theatre; The Play that Goes Wrong and all its offshoots; and now Bleak Expectations, an affectionate send-up of the various tropes of Charles Dickens.Initially, a popular Radio 4 comedy, this dramatised version premiered at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury in 2022. For fans of the radio show wondering whether to go, there’s the additional attraction of a different Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Here's a treat for those missing Dead Ringers (created by Bill Dare) as it takes a break on Radio 4. Dead Ringers Live has started a short season at Underbelly's London Wonderground, where live shows are being performed at its famous purple cow and big top, set within a family-friendly enclosure with fairground-style attractions, as well as food stalls and bars.Three of the radio show's cast – Jon Culshaw, Debra Stephenson and Duncan Wisbey – perform in the Big Top. A little cheekily, it is mostly an hour of their favourite recent sketches from the radio shows, but some are so good that Read more ...
David Nice
All happy families are alike, Tolstoy declares at the start of Anna Karenina, but this adaptation of War and Peace stresses how the surviving Rostovs and Bolkonskys went through various hells to get to that enviable state. In this one respect consummate mover and shaper Timberlake Wertenbaker steals a march on her author. Isn’t there a feeling of flatness when we find Natasha and Pierre sunk in seemingly trivial domestic bliss towards the end of the novel? By having them, and the equally contented married couple of Princess Marya and Natasha’s brother Nikolay, recollect with anything but Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In 2006 an elderly dancer died in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex. She was 88, and had once been one of Britain's most recognised ballerinas. Why did she die in obscurity? Why is the great ballet company that she ran now a forgotten name? This was what I set out to explore in a BBC Radio 4 documentary which aired yesterday. Inglesby's story has the improbability of an epic. As a very young woman she defied wartime conditions to launch a major ballet company, which introduced the British public en masse to grand ballet. She was also nothing less than the saviour of the most precious texts in all Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Like his most famous creation, Billy Elliot, Lee Hall left his native North East to pursue what turned out to be a glittering career in the arts. Although I can’t speak for the fictitious Billy, Hall has certainly never forgotten his working-class roots, which continue to inform and inspire his work. This week sees the West End opening of The Pitman Painters, his highly acclaimed play based on William Feaver’s book of the same name which, following the original production at Newcastle upon Tyne’s Live Theatre, has enjoyed two seasons at the National Theatre, two UK tours and a season on Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Nicholas Parsons has been an actor – he is most adamant that he is first and foremost an actor – for almost 70 years, so it’s not surprising, given the erratic nature of his profession, that he has been obliged to assume a number of alternative guises over the years from leading man to comedy sidekick to quiz master. Yet despite this, he is no chameleon. He has somehow managed to pull off the trick of being supremely adaptable whilst remaining resolutely true to himself – you’ll never catch Parsons dropping his aitches or wearing age-inappropriate clothing. Always dapper, slightly prim and a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis originally came to fame in the late 1980s as one half of the satirical sketch group The Mary Whitehouse Experience, with fellow Cambridge alumni David Baddiel and Rob Newman. Now, though, most people know them (as a double act, at least) as the lead performers in The Now Show on Radio 4.You may also know Dennis as an actor in Outnumbered on BBC One, and as one of the regulars on BBC Two’s Mock the Week, where Punt also works behind the scenes (those ad libs don’t write themselves, you know), and Dennis is now also the frontman of BBC Two’s new improv show, Fast Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The public works for free. That is the founding principal of modern broadcasting culture. It phones radio stations with its air-filling thoughts on this and that. It monopolises Saturday nights on primetime in singing and dancing and plate-spinning. Until recently, it would sit in a house for weeks on end while we (in decreasing numbers) watched. But the public as museum curators? That’s a new one.Or almost new. The undisputed radio triumph of the year has been Radio 4’s collaboration with the British Museum, A History of the World in 100 Objects. To leaven what might be perceived as Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Culture Minister Ed Vaizey joined BBC Radio 4 Call You and Yours to debate public arts funding, joining a panel and answering phonecalls and emails from the public. The government will be incorporating some of the public comments into its current decisions on arts funding. This is a simultaneously typed rough transcript of the programme.Julian Worricker, presenter (picture right): To what extent should arts be funded by the taxpayer? Do Government cutbacks fill you with worry or do you believe in public funding that will step in? On On the other side, it's argued that arts flourished in the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If you know David Mitchell and Robert Webb from Peep Show on Channel 4 (written by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain), in which Mitchell plays the insufferably self-important Mark and Webb the self-deluding idiot Jeremy, then you will easily recognise similar stock types being used in That Mitchell and Webb Look on BBC Two, which goes to show you should never mess with a winning formula.That’s not in any way to denigrate That Mitchell and Webb Look, which started its fourth series last night, because, as with the British and swearing, it’s both funny and clever. Mitchell and Webb, who met at Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sean Lock, as well as being an acclaimed stand-up for many years, has also written for other comics, including Bill Bailey, Lee Evans and Mark Lamarr, and his profile has risen hugely through his stints as team captain on 8 Out of 10 Cats on Channel 4 and regular guest appearances on other panel shows, including QI and Mock the Week. His fans, including me, recall with fondness his sitcom 15 Storeys High, which ran for two series on BBC TV (and which was developed from the equally funny Radio 4 show Sean Lock’s 15 Minutes of Misery).So it’s nice to see him back on tour with Lockipedia, which Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Next month a concert celebrating the unique career of Humphrey Lyttelton, the great jazzer, broadcaster and quizmaster, will take place at HMV Apollo in Hammersmith, west London. The show, which takes place on 25 April, has been constructed about Lyttelton’s twin talents: blowing a trumpet and giving people silly things to do. All proceeds will go to a new charity known as the Humph Trust. Its aim will be to help develop the careers of young jazz musicians. To give the Humph Trust’s efforts a focus, the Royal Academy of Music is introducing an annual gong known as the Humphrey Lyttelton Read more ...