London Wonderground
Don’t expect the shock of the new from the BBC Radio 4 stalwart, but audience suggestions and music really lift the second half
Is it a live show – or an impersonation of a live show? BBC Radio 4 favourite Dead Ringers takes up residency at the London Wonderground, with a compendium of sketches to tickle their fans. Many have already been broadcast; all are recited script-in-hand. Within those parameters, Duncan Wisbey, Debra Stephenson and Jon Culshaw deliver a likable hour of mimicry, in which the voices are always enjoyable, even when the jokes are uninspired.
Of course, we don’t expect the shock of the new from this 20-year-old institution. If we did, Culshaw’s dress sense – he’s wearing a smoking jacket – would soon disabuse us. Give or take a barbed remark from Wisbey, this is genteel satire-lite that couldn’t be more “Radio 4 comedy” (unreflective, a little pleased with itself, blandly non-partisan) if it tried. The opening stages, parodying the Today programme, are full of predictable news-based gags, making sport of sex-mad Johnson, abnormal Gove and policy-free Starmer. Elsewhere, there’s an off-putting fixation on the idea that Andy Murray is dominated by his mum.
