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Knowing Me, Knowing You - Alan Partridge (Audio CD)
by Jake Speed
Out of all the various incarnations of Alan Partridge I think I still like the original radio series the best. The first television series of Partridge (where he's living in the travel tavern) was brilliant and the second series (where he's living in a caravan and has a Russian girlfriend) was pretty awful at times but the radio series ... was consistently funny and inventive and worked wonderfully in the audio medium. The radio series (Knowing Me Knowing You) was first broadcast in 1992 and featured six episodes. There are only the last two on this disc (both are 30 minutes or so long) but you can buy a disc with all six on it and that's probably the one to go for if you find a good deal. The basic premise/joke of Knowing Me Knowing You is that East Anglian local sports presenter Alan Partridge has been given his own national radio chat show but he is (of course) the last person in the world who should be hosting one. He's tactless, arrogant, dim, bombastic, patronising, politically incorrect and usually ends up insulting his guests. Partridge is though always oblivious to how awful his show is. In his mind he probably thinks he's Jeremy Paxman. Steve Coogan is brilliant here as Partridge and the radio series contains some of his best moments I think. It's quite good fun trying to work out how many real presenters there are in Alan Partridge. There's a bit of Richard Madeley, a bit of Terry Wogan, a bit of Adrian Mills and several others besides. I should mention too the regular supporting cast in the series (Patrick Marber, Doon MacKichan, Rebecca Front and David Schneider) who play the various guests. Marber in particular is very funny with some of his characters.
Although you only get two episodes here it does contain probably my favourite out of all of them. Each episode features Alan interviewing three guests and the one here where he interviews Tony Hayers (Commissioning Director of BBC Television and his great arch nemesis), fashion designer Yvonne Boyd, and the cantankerous peer Lord Morgan of Glossop, is brilliant. It's the last episode of the series and Alan doesn't know if he has a second series yet but he's confident and even thinks a move to television could be on the cards. 'In this business people get hot. And when a property gets hot you handle it with kid gloves... and, er, oven gloves outside the kid gloves...' It just so happens that his first guest is Tony Hayers (Schneider) - the man who will decide is Alan has a second series. Hayers is there to take telephone calls about the BBC but Partridge is of course is obsessed with buttering his guest up and even has a plant call from someone who goes into great detail about how Pear Tree Productions (Alan's company) could move to television with a minimum of fuss. There is a lot of great stuff in this one. Alan praises the BBC for high quality drama like Inspector Morse and The Darling Buds of May and when Hayers tells him those are ITV programmes he scrabbles around for a BBC show to praise and can only think of Noel Edmonds' House Party. 'Yes, that us,' sighs Hayers.
There's a great call too from a woman who pleads with Hayers not to let Partridge on television, explaining that in her view Knowing Me Knowing You is the most offensive show she's ever heard and that Partridge is rude, patronising to his female guests and once hit a child prodigy on air! 'Listen love,' says Partridge. 'In the cut and thrust of a chat show, people are going to get hit!' Alan's interview with fashion designer Yvonne Boyd (played by MacKichan and an obvious riff on Vivienne Westwood) is less funny but still fun as Alan, inevitably, ends up falling out with her. Boyd designs 'clown type' costumes' and asks why Alan's bank manager couldn't wear them when he says they are not suitable for everyday use. 'Because he'd look ridiculous!' replies Alan. 'He'd look like a CLOWN!' The best is saved for last though when Alan interviews the irascible no nonsense elderly peer Lord Morgan of Glossop (Marber). 'He once reduced David Frost to tears, ' goes Alan's introduction. 'In a televised debate with feminist Andrea Dworkin he caused outrage when he told her to shut up and shave!' This has perhaps my favourite set-piece in the entire series when Lord Morgan dies (his wheezing death throes clearly audible) but Alan doesn't notice because he's too busy talking about what his entry in Who's Who would be! When he does finally realise his guest has died he organises a minutes silence but then keeps interrupting it by listing motorway service stations drivers might like to pull over at to observe the silence!
It's a slight shame that the other episode here is a departure from the others and doesn't work quite as well. It's a 'Live from Las Vegas' special where Alan is in America (of course he's not really) and lumbered with American co-host Sally Hoff (Rebecca Front). Alan doesn't take took kindly to having a co-host and continually undermines her and cuts her off to maintain control. This is fun but none of the guest characters are that memorable. Marber is Sally's husband Conrad Knight - a British actor (with a voice clearly taken from Roger Moore) and keeps plugging his range of socks. David Schneider fares much better as a Jewish comedian called Bernie Rosen who bombs and tells a load of awful jokes that bewilder Alan. Little Englander Alan is astonished when he hears that Rosen has never heard of Tommy Cooper and tells his own 'Jewish joke' which of course backfires in the usual Partridge way. It's quite good fun here though when Alan is asked what his favourite sitcom is and talks about his great love for Robin's Nest with Richard O'Sullivan! The last guest is Jack 'the Black Cat' Calson (played by Marber) and this doesn't go anywhere terribly funny. Alan ends up gambling with his guest and his wife's car ends up being put on the line.
This is great fun on the whole and contains arguably the best episode but if you are interested you might as well look for the disc than contains all six episodes. At the time of writing you can buy this two episode disc used for under a fiver.
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Why Bother? - Peter Cook and Chris Morris (Audio CD)
by Jake Speed
Why Bother? was a BBC Radio 3 series consisting of five ten minute programmes that featured Chris Morris interviewing Peter Cook as Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling. Streeb-Greebling was a character Cook invented in the sixties and basically an upper class twit type who always goes down a number of surreal and silly avenues as he talks about ... his life and times. The series aired in 1993 and this 50 minute audio CD was released in 1999. Peter Cook's television sketch stuff is always a bit hit and miss for me when I encounter it but I've always been interested in his career (which was fairly extraordinary early on and then fizzled out when he wasn't very old at all) and he was by all accounts an incredibly funny man in real life. Why Bother? was improvised by Cook and Morris and it produces some great flourishes and flights of fancy by Cook - who was clearly very good at coming up with funny and clever nonsense off the top of his head. Those Derek & Clive tapes, for example, contain a lot of rubbish but they also contain some absolutely brilliant ramblings and lines by Cook. Dudley Moore obviously didn't stand a chance of competing at all in that studio.
The structure of Why Bother? is Morris asking Streeb-Greebling obtuse questions about his life and things that have happened to him, sparking Cook into some silly and often inspired responses. Among the topics up for discussion are Streeb-Greebling's experiments on eels, his finding the remains of Christ, his time in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during World War 2 and his experiences of the Los Angeles riots in the wake of the Rodney King affair! Asked about the Rodney King aftermath and if he feels any pride in his participation in the riots (Streeb-Greebling 'mowed down' as many people as possible regardless of race), Cook is on good form with his replies. "I feel nothing but pride. That's all I do feel. An empty pride... a hopeless vanity... a dreadful arrogance... a stupefying futile conceit... but at least it's something to hang onto." Morris takes Cook down some bizarre avenues with his questions and they work very well together, Morris probably being one of the few people who stood even a remote chance of keeping up with Cook in this improvised and often surreal format.
The collection contains a lot of parodic autobiographical material about Streeb-Greebling and much of this is great fun and allows Cook to improvise and flesh out a character he'd been doing on and off for a number of decades. Streeb-Greebling explains that it was a tough childhood and he once spent a "year and a quarter" standing on a frozen Lake Ontario with only bears for company. "It was a learning experience to be a child in my father's household, or whichever household he put me in. He felt the best education I could possibly have was to be put in prison and raised by hardened murderers. We were awoken at dawn by the sound of hanging." Cook's ramblings are often very amusing as we learn, amongst other things, that Streeb-Greebling has a history of strangling his business partners!
The hit rate is fairly high here as I gather that Morris recorded a lot of material with Cook and then edited it down for each ten minute programme, dispensing with the stuff that didn't work and keeping Cook's more memorable flourishes as Streeb-Greebling. Street-Greebling has many tall tales about his life, including cloning the remains of Christ (and trying to "fax" his DNA) and his many travels. One bit that is quite interesting for anyone who has read Cook biographies and is interested in his life and career is that Streeb-Greebling talks about working with Joan Rivers on a chat show and finding her to be "a pain in the arse". In real life, Cook had been a co-host on a Joan Rivers chat show in the eighties (I think) where he basically sat on the sofa looking bored and occasionally added a few comments when prompted. Clearly, it wasn't something Cook looked back on with the fondest affection!
While not everything here is laugh out loud funny there is some great stuff from Cook and I'd imagine this must have been one of the last things he ever did. I think it provides Cook with the type of improvised format he was best at, just talking nonsense off the top of his head (Cook never really worked very well in feature films because he couldn't act to save his life) and being silly. It's quite interesting that shortly before he died he did this and a Clive Anderson chat show where he played four different characters and was absolutely brilliant, the two projects, especially his turn on Clive Anderson, providing a last hurrah and a reminder of a what a funny man Peter Cook was. It's always been regarded as ironic that in the sixties Cook was the handsome, suave and brilliant one and yet it was the diminutive Dudley Moore (who was more or less Cook's straight man) who became a Hollywood star while Cook frittered his career away and battled alcoholism. Personally though, I would happily pulp most of the films Dudley Moore made in Hollywood to save just ten minutes of Peter Cook rambling on in inspired form in things like this.
Why Bother? is good fun on the whole and worth a listen if you are a Peter Cook fan (or even a Chris Morris one for that matter) and interested in his career. The two comedians work well together and both provide some enjoyable moments of obtuse silliness over the fifty or so minutes that this runs to. This is an amusing little twilight reminder of what a naturally funny man Peter Cook was and not bad at all as far as these radio comedy vehicles go.
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Hancock: The Lost Radio Episodes - Ray Galton (Audio CD)
by BlackSwan
Tony Hancock's days in radio were definitely his best. This doesn't take anything away from his physical comedy, but everything just seemed to gel with Hancock and his supporting stars when they were on radio. Therefore, having purchased two "lost" TV episodes preserved in a dodgy audio format, I was delighted to see some radio ... episodes had also been unearthed. There are two radio CDs available, although seeing as all previous Hancock radio tapes and CDs contained four episodes I don't see why they all couldn't be contained in a double-pack. Sadly the sound quality, like that of the recovered TV soundtrack, isn't very good, but somehow more forgivable.
The episodes contained here, "Sid's Dad" and "The Diet", come from the fourth and third series respectively. This is coming into an era most beloved of the majority of Hancock fans. Unfortunately Hattie Jacques hadn't come into the picture yet, but Hancock, Sid James and Bill Kerr had established their characters and relationships, and Kenneth Williams were set as the resident character actor. We see Williams here playing the part of Sid James's apparently oblivious father who comes to stay with Hancock, as his son covers his regular court appearances with the lie that he is judge. As you can imagine, it's a fun exercise with Hancock and Bill doing their best to cover for Sid only to discover that the apple might have not fallen that far from the tree.
"The Diet" is an interesting inclusion, as it seems to have been partly recycled in the fifth season for "The Publicity Photograph", an episode that was released with the BBC's first 10 Hancock audio tapes. Here Hancock desperately tries to lose weight to get the part in a movie whilst his rival, Bill Kerr, is told to put it on. Meanwhile Sid James, in his normal fashion, takes advantage of the hapless too with his revolutionary diet plan. Often when I listen to Hancock (and future Steptoe and Son) writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson's wry observations of the fads of their times - and we're talking the mid-50s here - it is amazing to see how little human society has changed. Fad diets were a focus of a book I read this year "Fads and Fallacies" by Martin Gardner, again written in the 1950s, and its astounding to see the same unscientific nonsense is still be trawled out in women's magazines and so-called health books. Galton and Simpson were very aware of the quackery going on and Sid James has routinely been used as a vehicle to send it all up.
As I previously mentioned, the sound quality is pretty poor, which is only highlighted by the much superior quality of the inserted theme, incidental and link music. This obvious later insertion was done with the re-release and later release of the original 10 Hancock tapes and CDs, but the process was far less noticeable. However, as annoying as it is I am just grateful that these episodes have been recovered and they now reside in my collection. Although these aren't the best episodes, they're still very good and better than the TV recordings. If you can put up with the bad sound quality by cranking your volume up to the max, then I would say it is a worthwhile buy.
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