Radio Drama · Old Time Radio · Comedy
What's Funny About
- Networks
- BBC (as its archives name them)
- Heard
- 2020
- Episodes
- 18
- Language
- English
TV veterans Peter Fincham and Jon Plowman talk to the writers, producers, and performers behind Britain’s biggest TV comedy hits, and hear the inside story of how they brought their programmes to the screen.
More about it
The TV comedies covered are:
The Vicar of Dibley
The Thick Of It
Absolutely Fabulous
Blackadder
Goodness Gracious Me
W1A
The Office
Have I Got News For You
Smack The Pony
Not The Nine O'Clock News
Fawlty Towers
The Good Life
Catastrophe
The Fast Show
One Foot in the Grave
Green Wing
Derry Girls
Alas Smith and Jones
With Peter and Jon as our guides, they take the opportunity to ask quite how our guests went about making a great bit of TV comedy. Who came up with it? How did it get written? They talk about the commissioning, the casting, and the reception the show received when it first aired.
They do their very best to winkle out some backstage secrets straight from the horse’s mouth, as we hear the unvarnished truth from the people who were there, and who put these iconic shows on TV.
Producer: Owen Braben
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra in March 2020
Episodes, in broadcast order
Where it comes from 1
The archive items its episodes are played from, best first, with each one’s rights as its archive states them. An episode two sets both hold is played from the first.
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What's Funny About ...
the Internet Archive states no licence or rights for it.
From the Old Time Radio collection at the Internet Archive, uploaded by the collector named.
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Radio drama, old-time radio and historic broadcasts from the Internet Archive (its Old Time Radio collection with the Old Time Radio Researchers' sets, WWII Era Audio Recordings, the Pacifica Radio Archives, the Radio Haiti Archive, German radio plays and listeners' uploads), Wikimedia Commons (with the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision's broadcasts) and the Library of Congress. Every episode plays from its archive, which this site does not copy; rights are as each archive states them. Nothing here is called public domain on this site's say-so. In the United States, sound recordings first fixed before 15 February 1972 have federal protection under the Music Modernization Act of 2018, for most until 2067 at the latest, so most American radio of the 1930s to the 1950s is not in the public domain there. Each set shows the licence, mark or statement its archive gives, and says whose it is. Horror, crime, war and westerns are for teenage and adult profiles, racist caricature for adults only, and children’s profiles hear what was made for children. More about these archives.