Oddly enough, a huge number of people really thought that the utterly hilarious show Down the Line (see here), airing on Tuesdays at 11:00pm on the BBC’s Radio 4, was actually a real phone-in! Rather than seeing it as a wonderful spoof, parody, and commentary (which it clearly is), they thought it was a crass attempt by Radio 4 to broaden the scope of its programming. Angry of Tunbridge Wells got out the pen and paper to write a letter……
For a full discussion, see this lovely Guardian article [update: and this from their blog]. Don’t forget to listen to the episode I posted about.
-cvj
(Thanks Samantha, donncha.)
May 12th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
I admit I caught on right away it was a spoof. BBC comedy is always very good at this sort of thing though. Not surprised either that it was written by the brilliant Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson of “The Fast Show”, one of my favourite comedy shows from the 90s. Incidently, for a bad image of a scientist check out one of the show’s characters “Professor Denzil Dexter” of the University of Southern California:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/fastshow/characters/denzil_dexter.shtml
For some reason his voice also sounds like Ed Witten.
Anyway, I will check out the future radio shows. Good stuff!
May 12th, 2006 at 5:45 pm
Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse created what is, in my opinion, the best moment of comedy ever in one of the episodes of the Fast Show. It’s the one where Lord Ralph Mayhew has to break some rather bad news to Ted in the pub:
“Tomato – Ted – aubergine – your – potato – wife’s – turnip – dead.”
Absolute genius.
May 13th, 2006 at 4:28 am
I’m afraid I was one of the gullible…
May 14th, 2006 at 6:10 pm
PK -
I have to say that I only knew because Clifford had indicated it was in his post. Had I just stumbled across the programme, I am pretty sure I would have been taken it. The sequence of perfect British stereotypes most likely would not have tipped me off, rather I think it would have exasperated me.
So… any thoughts as to why the Denzil Dexter is at USC? I can’t help suspecting that the writers thought they were making the name up. They could have done a lot better than “Denzil Dexter” if they were looking for a representive SoCal name.