On Monday Radio 1 kindly condensed the Live Earth and T in the Park craziness of the weekend into a five-hour package. The highlight was Madonna bullying the watching billions: “If you wanna save the planet, jump up and down.” And it worked. The weather on Sunday was lovely.
Tuesday brought a new series of About a Dog (Radio 4, 6.30pm). The observations of human behaviour by a dog called Jack, voiced by Alan Davies, were first heard in 2004. They were as twee as you would expect, but at the time it would have been impolitic to say so because, while the scripts had been written by Graeme Garden, the idea had been suggested by Debbie Barham, who had died the previous year of heart failure brought on by anorexia. And criticising her would have been like attacking what Karen Carpenter did to Ticket to Ride.
But now it’s three years on, and About a Dog has returned for six more episodes. And? Well . . . don’t get me wrong, it’s funny, in that sitcom-by-numbers way gnarled veterans such as Garden can toss off in their sleep. A couple of times I even laughed out loud, such as when one of the humans said “Sorry about the wait” and another said “Oh, it doesn’t show”, because she was a bit on the porky side.
But the characterisation is feeble – Jack has to be called “dog” frequently, to remind us he is one – and the plot potless. It seems to have been written to be listened to by people who really like dogs and will accept any old-fashioned pap as long as one of the characters is one. Actually, there are millions of them, so Garden is probably showing a foxlike cunning here.
The same day (Radio 4, 11pm) the first 15 minutes of a new sitcom set in a shopping mall, Edge Falls, promised much for the future. Yes, there were familiar elements – the electronics salesman who threw a migraine when a customer asked a technical question à la Basil Fawlty and his war wound, the Python-esque restaurant with everything on the menu and nothing in the kitchen – but there was a cheerful cynicism about it all that boded well, not to mention Sarah Lancashire finally showing that she can do comedy grotesques almost as well as Sally Phillips in Clare in the Community.
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Then the writers, Paul Barnhill and Neil Warhurst, blew it. A small child went missing, lured away by a grisly voiced stranger. Much hilarity ensued. No it didn’t.