Daring to be different

At last a late-night ‘comedy’ show on Radio Four that sounds a bit different. Bill Dare and his team of writers have been taking us on Tuesdays at 11 into their Secret World (Radio Four). It’s a universe in which you might find Peter Mandelson believing that he can fly (‘He may not be barking, but he’s on the A13 going east’), Tony Blair in therapy with Sir Alan Sugar, or Bob Geldof trying to explain to his daughter Pixie what charity actually means. On paper, in black and white, it’s going to sound really silly, but at the end of a long day, when you’re too tired to read but you just need something to take your mind off all the things, major and minor, that have gone wrong, it’s a sharp, slick half-hour of pure radio, leading the imagination by the ear.

The cast of famous characters are jumbled up in weirdly different combinations or have their idiosyncrasies blown up to absurd proportions. John Humphrys gets worked up over a banana, Jools Holland is kidnapped by an obsessive compulsive taxi driver, Arthur Scargill has given up politics and is running a massage parlour where Ronnie Corbett turns up for a reiki. Bad move, Corbett. Scargill is still on the warpath. He’s mad as hell because we’ve all forgotten him while all those TV stars of the 1980s such as Corbett and Ken Dodd, Rolf Harris and Bruce Forsyth, with whom he once shared prime-time ratings, are still at the top of their game.

Life in the Secret World is incredibly simple: we follow just one day from first thing in the morning to last thing at night. An announcer tells us what time it is and where we are, which could be anywhere from the bowels of Broadcasting House overhearing a Today programme production meeting (Humphrys still going on about bananas) to a beach in Barbados, from where the film director Mike Leigh is phoning the Hollywood actors he has fixed up with real awful jobs to provide them with improvising ‘experience’ (Keira Knightley has been on the deli counter of a WalMart for months while Robert De Niro has spent two years waffle-packing). The trick is to make us believe we are actually listening to these people, and to rein in the temptation to go over the top.

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