PERHAPS the best thing to say about Fred MacAulay’s new comedy stand-up show on Radio 4 late on Thursday night, Fred at the Stand, was that it was so lovely to hear a live audience once more. I’ve started to notice them on radio again in these learning-to-live-alongside-Covid times. The laughter and applause add a thrilling texture to the sound of a radio broadcast. A reminder that we don’t live by Zoom calls alone.
There was another audience to be heard on Radio 3 on Monday night. Recorded at the Trades Club in Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire, Northern Drift, presented by Elizabeth Alker, was a mash-up of poetry from Bradford-born poet Kate Fox and music as played by Orcadian musician and composer Erland Cooper.
As the title suggests, it was a programme invested in the idea of northern-ness. But to be honest it was a very Anglocentric notion of the north. Which rather missed a trick in the circumstances given that one of the guests was from Orkney. It would have been fun to have interrogated our/their ideas of northern-ness with someone who could say he was properly northern in a way even us central belters can’t dispute.
But Cooper was there to play his music which was beautifully ethereal and said plenty in its own quietly perfect way.
Sorry, I have digressed. I was talking about Fred MacAulay, wasn’t I? Now he’s no longer on Radio Scotland most days, you’re more likely to hear him on Radio 4. Fred at the Stand saw him in front of a Newcastle audience telling some rather groan-inducing jokes. But he wasn’t the only one. Nearly all the guests veered between groan-inducing and near-the-knuckle on this stand-up show.
“I woke up to find my girlfriend using her vibrator in complete silence,” began comedian Mark Simmons. “And I thought ‘That is not on.’” You can admire the construction of that at least.
The audience certainly did. Their enjoyment was a bubbling thrill on its own. And, yes, I laughed along.
Not that you need an audience. Jarvis Cocker returned to Radio 4 on Monday night with a new series of Wireless Nights, the first episode of which found him investigating the life of bats. Cue the Batman theme. Bela Lugosi’s Dead (Bauhaus) and Release the Bats (The Birthday Party) were also given a run-out.
Cocker has the perfect voice for radio. He always sounds as if he’s confiding in you even when he’s just telling you that the French word(s) for bat is “chauve souris”, which means “bald mouse” he told us.
“Bats have had a bad press over the last couple of years for obvious reasons we don’t really need to go into, thank you Covid," Cocker said at one point. But this was a programme full of people who loved bats.
People like Gail Armstrong who nursed injured bats back to health in Lancashire and ecologist John Altringham who we find waiting for a gathering of bats called a lek. “In essence,” he explained, “this is clubbing for bats.
“It’s a disco. It’s a club. The males have to invest a huge amount of energy flying miles and miles just to get to these places just to strut around and hope they attract females.”
I guess even bats like an audience now and then.
Listen Out For: Screenshot, Radio 4, Friday, 7.15pm. The replacement for The Film Programme begins with a discussion of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. Rita Moreno, who appears in both the 1961 version and the new one, is a guest.
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