The path from performance poet to author and star of your own radio comedy series is perilous. Last Tuesday night and for the next three weeks, John Hegley attempts to negotiate it. His four episodes are written in different styles, with the first in normal dialogue, another almost entirely in verse, a third narrated in the third person, and a fourth with rhyming interludes.
John and Tony are two chaps in search of a holiday, which always begins with weak teas in their favourite caff, manned by Harry, the kind of fellow you ask about his children (he hasn't got any). Starring himself as John, Hegley has recruited as Tony the excellent Simon Munnery, the man who confected the gorgeously accurate Trotskyist Alan Parker Urban Warrior, and the brilliantly original League Against Tedium.
Their first foray is to a campsite run by the eccentric Major Robbins, a military man who confiscates their speaking dog, Herman Hessian (even though he's made of hessian) because the rules mandate it (even though he wrote them himself).
In its opening moments, Hegley's piece promises to be an exceptional work for radio - fast, quirky, and deeply individual. Alas, the first episode couldn't keep it up. For some of the time it lapsed into the familiar tricks - signposted bathos, laboured jokes, and arch repartee - that we've come to expect of Graham Shuttleworth.
But there was still plenty to enjoy, and touches of genuine inventive wit. Such as Major Robbins' Wife (as she insists on being called), who delivers a manifesto about being a separate person from her husband, and wants to cosy up to John's sleeping-bag. When John wonders what her husband would think of this, she phones him on her mobile to find out. The major, she reports, considers John obsessed with ownership. Hardly surprising, since the major has made off with a couple of John and Tony's bicycle wheels, which he immediately flogs to a nearby bicycle shop.
Hegley splendidly guys the whole mythology of camping, campsites, and scouting (their tent is a pair of blankets joined by safety-pins), down to the lights-out reminiscence of an abortive adolescent kiss, all nicely underscored by Nigel Piper's organ-grinder music. Hegley and Munnery turn in strikingly underplayed, chatty performances, which at times sound improvised. It will be interesting to see how he develops this pair of baffled, bemused tenters without overplaying the bloke thing.
Faux-naif jokes and surreal whimsy are two a penny today. But when Hegley isn't straining after easy, fey laughs, his quizzical questioning about the way things are is endearing.
