BBC Radio Comedy Audiobooks

Radio comedy in Britain has an institutional home, and this is it. The BBC’s comedy department has spent decades commissioning, recording and broadcasting the panel games, sketch shows and sitcoms that arrive on Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra, then keeping them in circulation long after the week they went out.

The house style is unmistakable once you have heard a few series. A studio audience, a chairman with a straight face, teams of comedians and journalists working from a script that leaves room to collapse, and jokes built to land on the ear alone with no visual assistance whatsoever. It is a discipline rather than a shortcut. Radio comedy cannot fall back on a reaction shot, so timing, wordplay and voice carry the whole load.

Longevity is the other signature. I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, the self-styled antidote to panel games, has been running on Radio 4 since the early 1970s, and The News Quiz has been taking apart the week’s headlines since the late 1970s. Both have outlived several generations of their own panellists.

Our shelf gathers these programmes as series compilations rather than single episodes, which is the sensible way to take them: a run of shows in one sitting, the topical references settling into a portrait of their year.

The News Quiz 2012 is the substantial one, twelve hours and eighteen minutes drawn from a particularly busy news year, with Michael Buerk on the credit. I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue 2025 is the lighter, quicker option at five and a half hours, Jack Dee in the chair and the usual flat refusal to take the format seriously.

Newcomers should start with Clue, where no knowledge of the year’s headlines is required, then move to The News Quiz when they want satire with teeth. Both collections are below.