The Fitzrovia Radio Hour

If nostalgia really is the new rock and roll—as the music press would have us believe—then The Fitzrovia Radio Hour should be primetime listening.

Set in the 1940s, this sketch show of radio plays is both loving tribute and soft-hearted pastiche of the kind of "live transmissions to the Empire" that were the stock in trade of Auntie Beeb’s early days. There’s faux adverts for "calming" Clipstone tea and lashings of smooth, mellifluous voices as the cast, Jon Edgley Bond, Alix Dunmore, Alex Ratcliffe, Phil Mulryne, Tom Mallaburn and Martin Pengelly, perform three short routines—a whodunnit, a horror and a thriller—in a rather farcical fashion that calls to mind a cross between ‘Allo ‘Allo and PG Woodhouse.

The performance is impressively slick–with colanders clanging, bread bins closing and watering cans tinkling as the actors frantically rush around the stage producing all the live sound effects. When a character is killed the front row are splattered with watermelon pulp, while squashed pink grapefruit accompanies an operation scene.

It’s amusing stuff—if more smug chuckle than open-mouthed guffaw—but after half an hour or so the enterprise starts to feel just a little samey. The plays are ridiculous enough—the final installment centres around a dastardly plot to inflate the price of tin by blowing up mines—but the writing is not quite up to scratch.

A pleasing—if shallow—distraction, The Fitzrovia Radio Hour is a bit too Tony Blackburn and not enough John Peel.