Is there a curse of Radio 4? It is certainly beginning to seem as if wits who fizz elsewhere go flat as soon as they hit the network. Rory Bremner recently bombed there, and now Alexei Sayle, in his first radio comedy series, seems set to join him.
Perhaps the fault lies with the assumption that there is a free market in humour, and comics necessarily travel easily between media. Sayle's new venture belies it, and the morning after its debut, its title seems awfully apt.
Julie, a radical, middle-class lawyer, is stepping out with Andy, a proletarian cafe worker. Throw in contrasting individual characteristics - he is obsessively tidy, she is irredeemably messy - and presumably Sayle anticipated a seam of jokes about class, gender and personal differences.
In the event all he comes up with are class caricatures. Her friends are Oxbridge City-types, more interested in Mercs than Marx. Are we really expected to believe that radical lawyers hang out with such company? Her clients are mainly asylum seekers, but even here Sayle manages to produce comic stereotypes of refugees. Overall he does not just strain probability, he tears it up and shreds it in the Magimix. Indeed, his central couple make such an unlikely pair that they even comment on it themselves. Why on earth didn't Sayle listen to them?
Again and again he sets up unbelievable situations for the sake of punchlines. Neither party has a home of their own - he lives with his Dad, she is a lodger - so they rent a hotel room, which happens to be next door to that occupied by one of the refugees she represents. The real reason for this contrived situation is obvious: it enables the refugee to make loud jokey asides about Andy's sexual performance.
Even at his zenith, relationship jokes were never Sayle's forte. These days he should leave them to Ben Elton. There are signs of Sayle's old political sharpness, in digs at the length of wait for a British visa, and lawyers who will only bop at parties for torture victims.
But there is something depressingly 80s about many of Sayle's targets, which include Californian New Age cults and, God help us, estate agents. Even his more contemporary rants - at British contempt for Americans' lack of irony, and the dividing up of industrial warehouses into overpriced, trendy dwelling "units" - sound as if they have been stitched into the dialogue, and would be happier unpicked and returned to a place they can call home: Sayle's own stand-up routines.
On the evidence of programme one, Sayle's series demonstrates the shortcomings of drafting in to major radio slots stars without experience of writing for the medium. Radio comedy still requires the old five-letter c-word. Craft.
