14-05-2025
At last, BBC radio comedy feels free to offend everyone
If John Morton's BBC spoof W1A is anywhere near as accurate as everyone at the Beeb tells me it is, you can imagine the meetings that must have been held to discuss Four Gammons and a Unicorn (Radio 4, Tuesday). Katie Sayer's satirical comedy-drama bravely plunged its hands into a bag chock-full of thorny issues – notably gender identity and transgender rights – in a manner that must have had execs reaching for the smelling salts. 'We're going to represent GB News as a channel full of lecherous blow-hards, moral bankruptcy and reactionary morons?' Yes, but… 'Oh, we're going to represent left-wing activists as hypocritical, vicious and thick as two short planks? Wonderful! We'll offend everyone!'
In Sayer's slightly lurid tale, a student at a prestigious university, Imogen (Alyth Ross), is 'cancelled' when her attempts to secure training space for her women's hockey team is interpreted as a rallying cry for booting transgender women out of female sport. The university newspaper spins it out of all recognition and eventually – shock, horror – the Daily Telegraph is running stories headlined 'Student slams trans inclusion in sport'. In an attempt to save face, Imogen accepts an interview slot on right-wing station 'Channel Albion', which only leads to her front door being graffiti-ed and urinated on, as well as an escalation of online threats ('Suck my d--k, you stupid b----h, we know where you live').
The humour is derived from Sayer's lampooning of middle-class student ideology. Imogen herself is as right-on as they come, chastising her father for describing a black woman as handsome ('It's unconscious bias, you wouldn't call a white girl 'handsome'') and then for using the word black ('It's BIPOC. You really shouldn't need me to educate you on this, it's embarrassing'). When Imogen sympathises with a friend whose door was also graffiti-ed for sticking up for her, he shoots back: 'Affected minorities are entitled to enact any form of resistance they see fit.'
Throughout, social media bloops and bleeps in the background, ploughing a 'holier than thou' furrow – someone recommends Caroline Criado-Perez's feminist book, Invisible Women, only to be upbraided for ableism: 'Not everyone is able to read for pleasure.' The right-wing is giving a kicking too, via Channel Albion, which debates subjects such as banning halal meat in schools and whether obese people should pay more tax. Rufus Jones has a ball as the 'gammon' breakfast presenter (take your pick as to who Jones is channeling), while Daniel Mays is nicely slippery as the channel's guest booker.
However, while Sayer makes some neat points about the hypocrisy and malleability of the reactionary orthodoxy on both sides, and does so very wittily, Four Gammons and a Unicorn overplays its satirical hand. Almost no one in the drama is a normal person – everyone is either dim or vile or both. It's a world in which the very worst five to 10 per cent of Britain is held up as exemplars of the whole nation. Imogen's overnight 180 from JK Rowling -hating, vegan 'woke warrior' to Katie Hopkins -esque right-wing loudmouth is also jarring. Those attacked and cancelled by the Left can often find solace elsewhere, but not this quickly, surely.
However, bravo to Sayer and Radio 4 for taking all this on, something aided by the gradual sea-change in British public opinion on pussyfooting around hyper-woke ideology and, indeed, anti-woke ideology.
The increasingly unpopular Labour government and Keir Starmer have also proved a boon for Radio 4 comedy – finally, the joke writers of W1A can thrash both sides with impunity. The News Quiz (Radio 4, Friday) did its usual job of ribbing Reform and Kemi Badenoch, but saved its most acidic attacks for Labour. 'When I come on shows like this,' said the self-styled conservative comedian Geoff Norcott, 'I'm the one defending Labour's policies. That's how right-wing they've got.'
On the surreal sketch show Michael Spicer: No Room (Radio 4, Wednesday), a government team was tasked with selling the idea of private prisons to the public. One thought was, rather than stopping any rioting in prisons, simply 'changing the definition of what a riot is', a dig that would have landed nicely with anyone fed up with the government's rhetoric. Certainly fed up was Jonathan Pie, the spoof left-wing political phone-in host, who ended the second and final series of his Call Jonathan Pie (BBC Sounds) with a furious rant: 'This government has been f---ing awful. What is your moral mission? Something to put a little blood in my crotch.' And that was written long before Starmer's speech on immigration.
You get a sense that the Labour government has put a little blood back in the crotch of Radio 4 comedy, with everyone able to cut loose across the political and ideological spectrum. BBC balance has never been seized upon quite so hungrily.
