I’m supposed to have grown up with radio comedy, you know. More specifically, I’m supposed to have grown up with a radio underneath my bedclothes. Ideally listening to Blue Jam, if I had been particularly with it.
I wasn’t, so I didn’t. Oh, I just about managed a Hitchhiker’s repeat, at some point in the 90s. Beyond that, there was a whole world out there which I just didn’t bother with. If the best pictures were from radio, I wasn’t really interested in them.
The obvious question is why, and I think the answer is one of love, rather than hate. I didn’t hate radio comedy; I simply didn’t listen to it. No, my love was for the telly. I distinctly remember recording every single episode of the nineties repeats of Fawlty Towers off-air; perhaps that was the start of my love of archive television, but it didn’t feel like archive television back then. It was just TV. And I loved TV. Especially sitcoms, sketch shows, and game shows.
But surely, even if I didn’t listen to radio comedy, I at least listened to the Top 40 and stuff? Not really. The radio was on at various points, but it wasn’t really my thing. My things were obvious and comfortable: when it wasn’t television, it was my computer, a BBC Master.1 Endless time spent playing games, or programming, or writing silly things on it.
I think, when I was younger, I needed visuals. That’s how I interacted with the world. Something to look at. I watched and loved The Day Today; it wasn’t that I hated On The Hour, it just wasn’t on my radar.
So when, in the early 2000s, I found a forum online, and saw everyone talking about radio comedy… I was slightly nonplussed. That’s what I was supposed to have been doing?
Nonplussed, and inadequate. I wasn’t a proper comedy fan. Damn.
* * *
Fast-forward to some undetermined day in the 2010s. I’m watching the bonus features on the Series 1 DVD of That Mitchell and Webb Look. And in the Making Of documentary, David Mitchell suddenly says the following:
“We’d always wanted to be on TV, ‘cos that’s where I got into comedy really, watching TV. Growing up, watching Blackadder, and Monty Python, and that kind of thing. So yeah, I’d like to say I grew up listening to Radio 4 and The Goon Show and that kind of thing, and I did have a few tapes of The Goon Show, but basically it was TV, so I’ve always wanted to be on TV. That in my own head, is where successful comedians are.”2
I grin. Because that’s me. I wasn’t stupid after all. Somebody who is very, very, very funny felt exactly the same as I had.
And that’s how a heterosexual white male can still experience that unexpected rush of feeling represented.
Better than a BBC Micro. ↩
It’s worth paying attention to exactly what Mitchell says there. He doesn’t say that successful comedians are on television rather than radio; he clearly says “in my own head”. It’s not actually true, and he knows it. He’s talking about feelings, not facts, and carefully flags it as such. ↩
6 comments
Billy Smart on 18 January 2024 @ 4pm
Although, ironically, almost every sketch on That Mitchell & Webb look was better achieved on the original radio version…
Ever since television became widely available, speech radio (with the possible exception of news) has been a niche minority taste, albeit a fairly substantial minority. [Music is a different case, as it wasn’t continually on television until MTV and other cable channels, so if you wanted to hear some music you just put the radio on.] You aren’t alone in feeling this gap. I read David Stubbs’ recent ‘Different Times: A History Of British Comedy’, and its very apparent that Stubbs hasn’t grown up with radio comedy in the same way that he did with TV. Indeed, there’s a very relatable passage where he worries about how to write about The Goons when he finds them incomprehensibly unfunny.
John J. Hoare on 18 January 2024 @ 5pm
That Mitchell and Webb Sound is a case in point; I’ve certainly listened to some of it, and enjoyed what I’ve heard, but I haven’t thrown myself into it in the same way that I have even with the weaker TV episodes. (I’m not a complete ignoramus; yes, the cash register sketch is VERY funny.)
Radio Active and KYTV is another great example. It’s a rare person you’ll find who thinks KYTV is the better work, but for all that I love KYTV to bits, I just can’t find the energy to throw myself into Radio Active in any kind of comprehensive fashion. Not right now, anyway.
I do think part of this these days is that I really, really like watching comedy with my partner. We feed off each other’s laughs. It always feels slightly strange to sit down and listen to the radio together. Maybe it shouldn’t!
christopher on 18 January 2024 @ 5pm
I grew up on my Dad’s tapes of *old* radio from here in the US (Jack Benny, Bob and Ray) and I think they made me interested in comedy – I still think Bob and Ray’s shows haven’t aged a day. But I was never able to quite get into anything modern from here or in the UK, where proper radio is still made.
I’ve always found modern radio comedy to be a little broad, even more so than in the 1940’s. The performances are pitched very high – Chris Morris avoided this by removing the audience from all of his projects. I can’t believe I’m saying TV allows for more subtlety but I think I am!
(If you haven’t heard Bob and Ray’s stuff, I think you might like them if you’re in the mood for the driest comedy ever made).
Leigh Graham on 18 January 2024 @ 7pm
In the late 1960’s I remember listening to “World-Wide Family Favourites” and “The Clitheroe Kid” on the radio on Sunday lunchtimes.
* * *
No, that was it. That’s all I remember.
I might have changed a person, but nowadays – at least – I need the visuals. I have tried listening to non-music radio – comedy, politics, drama – and I quickly loose interest. Podcasts to not engage me. I do have the radio on, for music – as background, and it helps supress tinnitus. I don’t think that makes me a bad media consumer, it just isn’t to my taste – like Marmite, well, sort-of …
Scurra on 18 January 2024 @ 9pm
Whereas I’m a radio comedy person through-and-through (my most traumatic experience was losing almost my entire archive of ‘painstakingly recorded off air’ tapes at a fire at my student halls-of-residence in the mid 80s and feeling that I was unlikely ever to get any of it back (now, of course, I have reconstructed much of it thanks to downloads and Radio 7/4 Extra…) I reckon I could still probably do quite a lot of RadioActive from memory.
These days, BBC radio seems to have shied away from adventurous comedy somewhat. Radio 4 has settled into a decent vein of half-hour stand-up shows and fairly unchallenging sitcoms, but every so often it is still willing to let, e.g. Jon Holmes loose and you get The Skewer. But the days when other BBC stations would do things seem to be long gone. I imagine that there’s good stuff being done on podcasts, but I am too hidebound to make that leap properly (and a lot of comedy isn’t suited to a mainly ad-driven platform anyway.)
And I certainly watched a lot of telly stuff. But no, I would always prefer the radio. I wonder if it’s just the way different people’s brains work? My memory space is not really visual at all.
John J. Hoare on 19 January 2024 @ 8am
I do think a lot of it is this. I’m a very visually-orientated person, in a way a lot of people aren’t. A good example is with music: I often used to struggle with it unless it was married to visuals in some way.
These days, I’m better, but it still rears its head every so often. I’m expanding my tastes – see also how I’ve really got into film recently – but a lot of people were already there when they were eight!
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