Comedy

‘Songs of joy and tears of laughter are all we need, to lift our hearts – Godfrey Elfwick’ I penned the above quote for an article in my university’s weekly student magazine ‘Wotz Woke?’ while trying to combat the negative effects of Trump and Brexit. Since then however, things have changed, and my outlook on ‘tears of laughter’ has altered drastically. When it comes to comedy these days, ‘tears of laughter’ has become merely tears. This week, a ‘stand up comedian’ by the name of Konstantin Kisin was handed a very reasonable contract by the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) in London, organized by university society Unicef on Campus.

How very odd of Radio 4 not only to release The Ratline as a podcast before broadcasting it on the schedule in the conventional manner, but also to give its network listeners an edited-down version. It’s as if the podcast of Philippe Sands’s programme, which investigates war crimes by the Nazis, fuelled by his own family history and what he discovered while writing his book East West Street, has been given priority, and anyone who listens in the old-fashioned, switch-of-a-button way is somehow second-best and doesn’t deserve the full monty. The first episode of the ten-part series was six minutes longer online than on-air. What’s in those missing minutes, I wondered? Not much. A bit of filling. Some extraneous detail.

For recovering teetotallers, like me, Thinking Drinkers is the perfect Edinburgh show. On stage, two sprucely dressed actors perform sketches about booze while a team of well-trained ushers race around plying the audience with strong liquor from plastic beakers. In under an hour, I swallowed a can of ale chased by vodka, gin, rum and Irish whiskey. It’s a decent show but, for obvious reasons, forgettable. Nina’s Got News is the first fringe play written by Frank Skinner. Nina has split up with her besotted boyfriend, Chris. When he answers a summons to her flat he’s hoping for a valedictory romp. But Nina has asked her best pal Vanessa over and the three chums engage in amusing wordplay as they try to place their friendship on a new footing. Then a shock announcement.

Much ado is being made of the latest listening figures, which have suggested that the percentage of those aged between 15 and 44 who turn on the radio at least once a week has fallen still further, down now to 13.8 million, or just 21 per cent of the population. Are we losing the listening habit? How worried should BBC Radio be, asked Roger Bolton on Radio 4’s Feedback (produced by Will Yates). He pointed out that while BBC Radio 5 Live is suffering a loss of audience, as is Radio 4’s flagship Today programme, other non-BBC talk-radio stations such as LBC are booming.

Edinburgh. Why do comics do it? We almost invariably lose money. Even if you don’t pay for your venue, the cost of accommodation is astronomical — I’ve met Edinburgh natives who pay their annual mortgage with the rent for August. You could conceptualise it as a loss-leader; but there are 1,333 comedy shows this year, and a loss-leader that can’t lead to anything is just a loss. Yet comics still go up. Partly because, for three weeks, there’s the thrill of having a real job: instead of travelling for gigs, you’re at the same place at the same time every day.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest series Who Is America? isn’t funny. But then, nor was his terrible 2016 movie The Brothers Grimsby. Nor was his rubbish 2012 film The Dictator. Nor, let’s be honest, were his classic original characters Borat, Brüno or even Ali G. Obviously, they had their moments: the ‘mankini’ — that bizarre, electric green, giant-thong-like swim wear worn by Borat; the classic late-Nineties catchphrase ‘Is it because I is black?’ And sure it must have taken some nerve — even in character — to explain to a clearly impatient and unimpressed Donald Trump his business plan for some anti-drip ice-cream gloves. But how often, even at his best, does Baron Cohen ever make you laugh?

‘I’m an amateur,’ Barry Humphries tells me. The Australian polymath uses the word in its older sense of ‘enthusiast’ rather than ‘bungler’ and he feels no need to point out the distinction. He’s in London to perform a three-week residency at the Barbican — Barry Humphries’ Weimar Cabaret — with his fellow Australian Melissa Madden Gray, who uses the stage name Meow Meow. The show was inspired by Humphries’ fascination with Germany’s culture during the interwar years. ‘It was the last song before the nation slid into moral squalor.

On Wednesday, BBC Four made an unexpectedly strong case that the human body is a bit rubbish. Our ill-designed spines, for example, guarantee that many of us will suffer from chronic back pain. Our joints wear out long before we do. Our skin even gets damaged by sunlight. So what can be done about it? Obviously the answer is not much — but that didn’t prevent Can Science Make Me Perfect? With Alice Roberts from pretending to give it a go. The premise was that Roberts would draw on other, less incompetently constructed life forms to create an improved version of herself — the way she’d be if evolution hadn’t cocked things up so badly. As befits someone whose name appears in programme titles, Roberts clearly relished her God-like role.

Because I’m a miserable old reactionary determined to see a sinister Guardianista plot in every BBC programme I watch, I sat stony-faced through much of Cunk On Britain (BBC2, Tuesdays). Philomena Cunk (played by Diane Morgan) is a spoof comedy character who used to appear on Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe and has now been given a full series. Though the character is amiable enough — a heroically thick Northern woman in a smart jacket who goes around Britain making stupid observations and asking celebrity historians dumb questions — I can’t quite work out what the point of the joke is. Is it a send-up of dumbed-down Britain? Is it designed to make TV history experts look pompous?

Two films about women this week. One, Funny Cow, is about a woman who daringly takes on men at their own game while the other, Let the Sunshine In, is dressed up in French art-house garb but basically has Juliette Binoche tirelessly running round Paris in thrall to every fella she encounters. I certainly know which I preferred. However, if you look at review aggregate sites, like Rotten Tomatoes, you’ll see Sunshine achieves the far higher score. But then most film critics are male and probably wouldn’t mind Juliette Binoche tirelessly chasing them round Paris, or anywhere else. (I have just asked a man if this is so and he has confirmed: ‘I wouldn’t mind at all. And it could be Bournemouth.

BBC2 has a new drama series for Friday nights. The main character is a world-weary middle-aged police inspector with an unshakeable commitment to smoking. His work partner is a feisty female officer in her twenties who combines salt-of-the-earth irreverence with being a damn good cop. Between them, they’re investigating the murder of an attractive young woman who their colleagues immediately assumed was a prostitute, and whose death reminds the inspector of a previous investigation that continues to haunt him — which is why his boss is constantly trying to take him off the case. But if this makes you think that The City & The City is yet another identikit crime drama, then you couldn’t be more wrong.

As Bob Shennan, the BBC’s director of radio and music admitted this week, there are almost two million podcast-only listeners in the UK who never tune into BBC Radio. They’re captivated by specialist music (Heart, Absolute, etc), specialist talks (mostly religious such as Premier Christian) or specialist news and current affairs (the Economist, Monocle). And they never feel the need to cross over into Auntie’s sphere of influence. The BBC’s response, says Shennan, must be to produce ‘a revitalised audio product’ to meet the needs, or rather demands, of these new audiences. ‘Audio product’ seems a long way from Music While You Work or Down Your Way.