Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation (no spam)

[fable]

The latest episode of this incredibly funny, manic and literate British comic on BBC Radio 7 can be heard here. The subject is ostensibly sex, though it typically ranges through a series of wonderful targets.

[Minerva]

Jeremy Hardy is brilliant.

I regularly listen to Radio 4 (Listen Again facility is really useful) and Radio 7 for his contribution.
The News Quiz is another program I strongly recommend. He is one of the regular panel there, and also other panels and Simon Hoggart, the chairman, are really good, too.

[Robnark]

hell yes, Jeremy Hardy is The Man.

I'm not always too keen on the scripts Simon Hoggart has as the chairman, but his parliamentary sketches can be fantastic. (you can find the most recent archived here )

[fable]

Hardy sounds to me like a combination of Robert Benchley's whimsy and James Thurber's literary fancy. There's also a nice sense of moral outrage that peeks through repeatedly: nothing gets a good comic going so well, provided they don't fall over (as Berke Breathed has) into sententiousness. I love Hardy's throwaway lines. On one show a couple of weeks ago he was passing from one issue to another with the sentence, "Or course, rock music was the sound of its age. It began as a mixture of black R&B and white plagiarism..." and I just broke up, in part (I admit) because I've been repeating the same thing for years, but also because it was said so deftly. He really can wield a wicked rapier.