Television Roger Lewis

parody Paul Morley on Bob Dylan was write down exactly what Morley said.

So much of life now being beyond parody, how do comedy writers manage? Stand-up comedians like Stewart Lee deal with it by deconstructing and dismantling their own humour. His Archive on 4 on unreliable narrators challenged us to believe anything anyone said, starting with Geoffrey of Monmouth. I was a bit baffled. My son explained, ‘Lee has no interest in winning over his audience. It’s the audience’s privilege to be in his company.’

I enjoyed the pacy podcast about Shergar the wonder horse – his mystery kidnapping was the great unsolved crime of 1983 – narrated by a rapper, Vanilla Ice. When did Radio 4 become deluged by rappers? We’ve had a Book of the Week by a rapper, Thought for the Day by a rapper and Pick of the Week by a rapper: ‘Rappers cover wimmin, spor’, music and mentoo’ healf,’ that one said. And I see Rag ’n’ Bone Man is top of the bill at this year’s Kenwood concerts.

I asked my sister, a horse-racing expert, for her view of the Shergar drama. She thought it fascinating, but added, ‘Narration by Vanilla Ice beyond irritating. Is this the BBC’s clunky idea of drawing in yoof?’

My favourite My Life in Music podcast was the last one, featuring oldsters: Marianne Faithfull at 74 (‘I don’t smoke any more!’ she croaked), unable to sing As Tears Go By; the folk singer Shirley Collins at 78; plus an old Welshman, Effie, from the Dunvant Male Choir. Music is my refuge from the spoken word – the clichéd, distorted, upwardly inflected, strangled, croaky, infuriating, wittering-on spoken word. On Times Radio, Stig Abell said to Danny Finkelstein, ‘So! We can all hug each other from today. What’s your strategy for hugging, Danny?’ Lord Finkelstein said, ‘Er – I can’t say I’ve spent much time planning the logistics of my first hugs, Stig…’

As I walk on Hampstead Heath, Radio 3’s Building a Library on Saturday morning is my favourite companion. It’s the quintessence of radio pleasure: expert voices who know everything about every recording of a certain piece of music, such as Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, so they can commend the best version, conducted by Riccardo Muti. One week it was Sibelius’s violin, and the tops was the late Ida Haendel – whose stick-thin figure I once saw and heard on Myra Hess Day in the National Gallery. Sublime.

Hooray! Ed Reardon is back, now receiving a state pension, installed in a former office block, in a 300-square-foot capsule living unit, Lifespace 4C. He heard a weatherman this morning applying the phrase ‘postcode lottery’ to today’s ‘scattered showers’. ‘So what’s your backstory?’ asks the annoying Jenna, who joins him at Prosecco o’clock. And the supermarket checkout robot says politely, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that.’ Ping’s squeaky voice says, ‘Byeee! Bye-bye-bye-bye-byeee!’ ‘Soz it didn’t work out this time but awesome to meet!’ runs a text from one of Ping’s clients.

Elgar the cat has the most unconvincing miaow – but at least, phew, Ed is back.

TELEVISION ROGER LEWIS

A watercolourist with bowel cancer tells me she’ll shortly be in St Mary’s, Paddington, ‘having a camera shoved up my arse’.

I suggested she sells the footage to Netflix or the ITV Hub, or any of the other channels, as it’ll be more interesting than much of the fare on offer – at a glance, Dragon’s Den, in which a father-and-daughter duo demonstrated their airbag safety equipment; Chris Packham reporting on the plight of Scottish puffins, on Springwatch; or Bradley Walsh being confidently informed by a contestant on The Chase that the language of Ancient Rome was Greek.

Otherwise, there was Innocent, in which the guilty party was easily identified by his possession of an over-groomed beard. Where Katherine Kelly’s Sally had been wrongfully imprisoned for five years, for seducing and murdering a sixteen-year-old boy, it was her husband (Jamie Bamber) who had been the villain all along – a secret paedo meeting partners in woodland and public lavatories, using the false alibi of being a probation officer off seeing clients.

There was what was meant to be a moving scene, where Sally said she’d suffered a miscarriage in prison. The look on her husband’s face reminded me of the story of the Hollywood celebrity hairdresser who was ordered by the studio to get married to Janet Gaynor. By some fluke, she managed to get pregnant, but lost the baby. Her husband was heard to say, ‘Oh, don’t tell me I have to go through all that again.’

The setting was the Lake District, where everyone behaved badly – slapping, spitting, glowering, telling lies, quick to judge. Don’t think of moving to Keswick was my conclusion. Shaun Dooley was the policeman, sorting out the excuses, which handily included alcoholism, post-traumatic stress syndrome (‘I did three tours in Kosovo and was not in a good place’), paternity tests, teenage self-harming and dementia, plus the homosexual denouement. Not that I heard much of what anyone said. I couldn’t get the subtitles to come on, and they might as well have been mumbling in Welsh.

Wales is where we were for The Pact – or as I mistakenly kept calling it The Pledge, which would have been about furniture polish. Going back to the Macbeths, it is axiomatic in drama that covering up a misdeed leads to any number of further misdeeds, as the characters lose control while hoping to gain control.

Thus The Pact, or The Pledge, set in a brewery beside a reservoir in what to my eye looked like Monmouthshire. There was an office party, during which the arrogant and well-fed new boss (Aneurin Barnard) rubbed everybody up the wrong way, snorted coke in the toilets, groped the new secretary, bit the old secretary in the neck, shouted down his mobile at his father (Eddie Marsan), shouted at his auntie (Eiry Thomas) and boasted about his flashy sports car. So when he passed out by the bins, a group of female employees, to teach the bastard a lesson, bundled him away to the forest. Within a few minutes, he was sitting on a log and turning blue. Next he was dead.

Instead of phoning the police, the silly women made a pledge, or pact, to remain silent, so as not to implicate themselves. Everything then went predictably wrong – blackmail, concealed additional motives, animosities and threats. There were too many episodes (six) and it was in danger of springing apart, with kleptomania, gambling debts, historical sex abuse and lesbianism each getting an airing.

But the performances were marvellous, particularly ringleader Julie

Innocent in Innocent. Katherine Kelly as the wrongfully imprisoned Sally