Chris Campling
Win 100 iconic DVD's
Hut 33
Radio 4, 11.30am
Before the first series of Hut 33, the sitcom set in Bletchley Park in 1941, was broadcast last year there were those who wondered whether it was a wartime-based comedy series too far. What humour could the writer James Cary glean from the activities of codebreaking folk? Quite a lot, as it happened, as Cary tacitly admitted that the Enigma machine was not in itself a laugh riot, and that a few broadly delineated comic characters were what was wanted. As a result Hut 33 could be set anywhere, at any time, and still be just as funny. You've got your dithering commander Joshua, to whom the fact that Britain is even at war comes as a surprise, your lascivious landlady Mrs Best, your psychotic Polish refugee Minka, all of whom get their fair share of laughs. Plus, this morning, an extremely gay member of the Royal Family - extraordinarily gay for elevenses listening, in fact. The cast includes Cold Feet's Robert Bathurst, Tom Goodman-Hill, Olivia Colman, Alex MacQueen, Lill Roughley and Fergus Craig.
Quote... Unquote
Radio 4, 1.30pm
A tricky one, this. Practically everyone you talk to who has heard it says that Nigel Rees and his floating cast of literati get so far up their nose that surgery is required to enable them to lead a normal life, and yet this is the 42nd series of it. Either this means that we tune into this melange of middlebrow erudition only to be annoyed by it (I know I do; wouldn't miss a show if I could help it), or there is a vast, silent audience untouched by the smugness of it all. Is a puzzlement (a quote from The King and I. Two points to me, verily and forsooth).
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