Radio Review: 7 November

Radio 4 has been going big on comedy history of late, which is no bad thing. First things first, The Frequency Of Laughter is an oral history of radio comedy picking up roughly where Laughter In The Air left off back in the 1970s.

I approached it with some trepidation, having never taken to presenter Grace Dent, whose only qualification seemed to be sharing a surname with the lead character in the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. However, I’m big enough to admit that she did a perfectly decent job, with Graeme Garden and John Lloyd as her main interviewees, and that a lot of ground was covered.

Lloyd joined radio light entertainment in the early 1970s when many producers were still men who’d had a ‘good war’. He remembered one being visited regularly by his vintner to take orders for his sherry. Suddenly, young chaps like Lloyd, Simon Brett, Griff Rhys Jones and Jimmy Mulville came crashing in, with a fresh vintage of radio laughter.

Then there are The Missing Hancocks, reconstructions of lost episodes of Hancock’s Half Hour, selected by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. To some this will be sacrilege, but the scripts deserve to be heard again. Kevin McNally captures the spirit of Hancock superbly, while not necessarily impersonating him. I suspect some will find fault with Simon Greenall’s Sid, which sounds to me more like Nigel Planer’s Ralph Filthy in Filthy, Rich & Catflap. Personally, I think it works.

Are the scripts still funny? Of course they are. They deal with the universal themes of cowardice, failure and delusion, and nobody nailed those themes better than Galton and Simpson.

Find these and other Hancockrelated programmes on BBC iPlayer. 

Louis on Twitter: @LFBarfe or email: wireless@cheeseford.net