Radio Active Radio Show 07 01 It Was Twenty Years Ago Last Tuesday

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• published: 17 Jun 2016
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Radio Active was a radio comedy programme, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 during the 1980s. The series grew out of a 1979 Edinburgh Festival Fringe show presented by The Oxford Revue and starred Angus Deayton, Geoffrey Perkins, Michael Fenton Stevens, Helen Atkinson-Wood and Philip Pope. The first episode was broadcast in 1980, and it ran for seven series. The show was based on a fictional radio station (described as "Britain's first national local radio station") and the programmes that it might transmit. Initially the radio station concept was used simply as a loose framing device for otherwise unlinked sketches and songs, but as the show developed, the episodes became more thematically focused, each one lampooning a different broadcasting genre and sometimes even a specific programme such as Down Your Way (parodied as "Round Your Parts"), In at the Deep End ("Out of Your Depth"), Ultra Quiz ("Gigantaquiz"), The Radio Programme ("The Radio Radio Programme") and Crimewatch ("Stop That Crime UK"). The programmes often pitch the "modern-media" regular characters against older stereotypes of foreigners and "establishment types" such as generals and politicians, though the programme rarely strays into the "alternative comedy" vogue of contemporary political comment. However some episodes in the final series made reference to real-life events: "Probe Round the Back" was a parody of investigative journalism which revolved around the Cambridge Five and contained allusions to Spycatcher and the Zircon affair, and "The Flu Special" satirised the then-current HIV/AIDS public awareness campaigns. Most of the original characters on the show were named after pieces of sound equipment, including: rising star Mike Flex (Perkins), aged fading star Mike Channel (Deayton), "children's favourite" "Uncle" Mike Stand (Stevens) the food-obsessed Anna Daptor (Atkinson-Wood) Also on the station's staff were: the incomprehensible and accident-prone Nigel Pry (Pope) the incompetent hospital-radio trained Martin Brown (Stevens) the carefully enunciated "oh-so-daring" Mike Hunt (Pope), whose daredevil stunts invariably turned out not to be as spectacular as he claimed brusque owner Sir Norman Tonsil (Deayton) Norwegian correspondent Oivind Vinstra (Perkins), whose command of English was negligible Head of Religious Affairs The Right Reverend Reverend Wright (Deayton), who had a mail-order bride Other recurring characters included: unsympathetic agony aunt Anna Rabies (known as 'Joanna Jaundice' in series one, and 'Claire Rabies' in series three) (Atkinson-Wood) singing doctor Philip Percygo (Pope) Luscivia, who ran the Radio Active gift shop (Atkinson-Wood)