Radio Active at Edinburgh festival review – Angus Deayton's mild media mockery (original) (raw)

Inspired by the staging of old Hancock’s Half Hour scripts on the Fringe last year, Angus Deayton is now doing the same with Radio Active, his commercial-broadcasting spoof, co-written with the late Geoffrey Perkins, that ran for seven years in the 1980s on Radio 4. As per the Hancock revival, a sizeable slice of its appeal will be to those who were there first time around, and seek a trip down memory lane with the original cast and characters including host Mike Channel and fatally imprecise cookery pundit Anna Daptor. For the rest of us, it’s a jolly hour of media mickey-takery, albeit one that seems tame 30 years on and may indeed have seemed fairly tame in the first place.

There’s no new material: the show is presented in the form of two half-hour episodes comprising sketches, songs and on-air blather culled from the original series. The running joke in the first episode is that we’re forever on the brink of hearing a radio dramatisation of Charles Dickens’s David Chuzzlenut. But it keeps being delayed by the same brand of unprofessionalism that afflicts cripplingly shy DJ Martin Brown (Michael Fenton Stevens, unable to keep pace with the Top 10 countdown) and sees posh thesps commissioned to read out letters from Geordie factory workers.

Still active … clockwise from left: Angus Deayton, Philip Pope, Michael Fenton Stevens and Helen Atkinson-Wood. Photograph: Steve Ullathorne

Commercial radio was a relatively new phenomenon in the UK when Deayton and co, then members of the Oxford Revue, launched this parody in 1979. That must have given a frisson to their faux vox pops and phone-ins, jingles and ads that we can’t recover today. But if some jokes feel dated – including a spoof advert for that 1980s novelty, disposable nappies – others have lost none of their relevance. The inanity of Deayton’s discussion host, for example, compulsively burbling “is that fair?” in lieu of intelligent conversation. Elsewhere, Deayton comperes a pleasingly twisty audience quiz whose contestants are left floundering by quickfire trick questions.

When we do get to the Dickens drama, it’s a standard-issue am-dram pisstake, all wooden actors wrestling with inappropriate sound effects and a poorly typed script. “’Tis almost lo! Oh, sorry, ’tis almost 10,” etc. Which is funny in the most familiar way, and perfectly palatable, thanks to a cast who seem to be enjoying this blast from their past. Fenton Stevens particularly savours the Status Quo spoof Boring Song, throwing rock’n’roll shapes that would nowadays snap Francis Rossi in two.

The exception is Deayton, who might as well be performing in a recording studio for all the relish he brings to the live arena. They’re his scripts, the revival is his initiative, but Deayton is businesslike bordering on taciturn, lacking the sparkle and openness with the audience of co-stars Stevens, Philip Pope and Helen Atkinson-Wood. That slightly undercuts an enterprise that’s partly about four comics sharing the pleasure of revisiting their youth. What remains is a diverting hour of affectionate media satire, from an era when Alan Partridge and TV Burp were but a twinkle in their commissioning editors’ eyes.