Comedians' Comedians R2
Purple Reign - The Story of Prince R2
The Dark Origins of Britain R4
Someone Somewhere World Service
Say cheese and you have to smile. Say cheese shop and if you're a Monty Python fan it will make you smile, chortle and generally fall about in the same way as mention of dead parrots, lumberjacks or the four Yorkshiremen comparing how poor they were. 'Corridor? We used to dream of living in a corridor - it would have been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us.'
I had forgotten the cheese-shop routine until Angus Deayton in Comedians' Comedians asked professional funnymen like Eddie Izzard and Mark Steel for their favourite Python passages. The consensus was that while 70 per cent of Monty Python is rubbish, the remaining 30 per cent is pure genius, the template from which the best modern comedy has sprung.
These days, the emphasis is on performance rather than script. Pull a funny face, walk a funny walk and people will laugh. The clever thing about Monty Python was that clever people wrote it. Much as I love The Shuttleworths, 15 minutes is about my limit whereas I'd happily take Life of Brian or the Holy Grail to my desert island along with songs like the one about the philosophers. How does it go? 'Immanuel Kant was a real piss-ant/ who was very rarely stable/ Heidegger, Heidegger was boozy beggar/ who could think you under the table/ David Hume could out-consume/ Schopenhauer and Hegel/ And Wittgenstein was a beery swine/ who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.'
Listening to Radio 2 last week, it was easy to see why its controller, Jim Moir, keeps winning awards. No other station covers such a variety of music in such depths. There were new series about bhangra music, the jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden, and the artist formerly known as Prince - Purple Reign - who, apparently is fed up with being just a logo and says we can call him Prince again.
Anyone who thought Radio 2 was for wrinklies in slippers drinking Horlicks should listen to the Prince programmes and think again. Don't be misled by presenter Mica Paris's, pseudo-academic commentary: 'The mainly white rock audiences,' she advised, 'were simply not ready for someone whose uncompromising lyrics and ambiguous sexuality challenged their most fundamental beliefs.' What's ambiguous about pretending to hump a guitar which has been specially made to spew a milky substance all over the audience?
Dr Fink, who played keyboards for Prince, remembered a performance at the Coliseum in LA where the audience hurled food on stage. He got a bag of chicken in his face and I can't say I'm surprised. And no other station does history better than Radio 4. Life without Sue Cook's Making History wouldn't be worth the candle. I still dine out on the story of the cavalryman who survived the charge of the Light Brigade by retreating through the carnage carrying his saddle. The Russians thought he had looted it.
Two minutes into the mournful opening music and the minstrel's lament and you know that the search for The Dark Origins of Britain is going to be atmospheric as well as academic. Did the Saxons invade and ethnically cleanse the ancient Britons or did they arrive peacefully and insinuate their language and customs on an impressionable populace? Listen and find out.
As for Someone Somewhere, the drama documentary about a couple whose 22-year-old daughter, Jessie, went missing, it was almost too heartwrenching. This is every parent's worst nightmare and to translate it into entertainment took nerve as well as skill but it paid off.
