Radio Review: Real radio laughter is irresistibly infectious. Take, for example, Five Live Drive (BBC Radio 5 Live, Monday to Friday), where recently a studio full of personalities and pundits was discussing a new book on beer and reading out listeners' e-mails and texts. These, on the presenters' instructions, consisted of favourite "man walks into a bar" jokes, and the chuckles rippled lightly across the airwaves.
Then they'd get a particularly, stupidly good one, and the spontaneous group laughter, as much as the joke itself, bounced happily, contagiously, into cars, homes and offices, ready to be transmitted like a summer sniffle to the next person you met.
Barman: "You've got a steering wheel down your trousers!" Man: "I know, it's driving me nuts."
Then there's fake radio laughter, which is ineffably sad. There was plenty of that this week, as baffled and bemused presenters across these isles pretended to find hilarity in the audio-archive clips of Bob Hope. The weak chortles generally conformed to those deadliest of adjectives, "strained" and "polite", the sort you might force out if a president - or, I guess, a president's golf partner - essayed a witticism in your presence. It was the brave woman or man who noted how badly the jokes had dated, or even wondered if they had ever been funny in a way that transcended Hope's accepted status as celebrity yuckster.
To accompany the news item about his death, the RTÉ Radio 1 newsroom picked a short joke-clip that was bafflingly unfunny, and reminded me of the widely-unmentioned fact that was once a cultural and counter-cultural truism: among the US troops in Indo-China, a high percentage (yes, I use the word "high" advisedly) despised Hope and his war boosterism.
"This is my ninth trip to Vietnam, and my last," said Hope via RTÉ. "It has to be the chicken with my blood type died."
It's a pretty lousy joke, but to get any good out of it at all you should be familiar with the danger and pseudo-danger associated with the Hope USO shows, and also with the cowardly caricature that was part of his schtick going back to the Bing movies. Since RTÉ didn't provide any such context (just a newsreader's murmuring chortle), the hacks there evidently thought we'd be old enough to know that stuff, requiring only this one wee joke to unlock the knowledge. Either that, or the effort required to find a Hope joke that stands the test of time was well beyond them.
Humour, even topical humour, needn't date so desperately. Radio 4's Book of the Week (BBC Radio 4, Monday to Friday) was Just William at Large - not to my knowledge a book at all, but a label of convenience for this assembly of five Richmal Crompton short stories - and one of the tales, The Weak Spot, was a satire on the enthusiasm for Bolshevism among middling-class youth in the wake of the Russian Revolution.
Yep, in a kids' story, and as read by Martin Jarvis, it was laugh-out-loud funny, without the slightest recourse to nostalgia once you'd got the jazz-age piano out of the way.
Jarvis has read quite a lot of "Just William" before, and he's got the 11-year-old's careless resentments down to a tee. In The Weak Spot, the boy listens, transfixed, to the hard truths being laid down in his big brother Robert's bedroom, at a meeting of the teenage "Society of Reformed Bolshevists".
Eventually, as big brothers do, Robert kicks William out, despite the younger boy's pleas that he is devoted to the egalitarian cause: "But I believe all you do . . . 'bout wantin' people's money and thinkin' we oughtn't to work."
For nearly half of the 20th century, from shortly after the time William started delighting children in England to shortly before the time Bob Hope stopped boring troops in Vietnam, men were drawing anthracite out of the the Deer Park coal mine in Castlecomer, Co Kilkenny. Michael Carolan's documentary, In the Shadow of the Mines (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday), featured the rough voices of former miners, and the sad voices of their families, telling stories that could teach even a gut-socialist like William a thing or two about the nature of capitalism.
Miners are rarely short of such knowledge, as they count the tons of coal they shift, count their wages, and add up the profit their bosses make on their labour. Those facts, and the literally nightmarish working conditions that lay behind them, weren't a bit funny, but there was some humour in the high status miners felt they enjoyed in a largely rural community. Think of it as "industrial chic": one miner remembered that, going to dances, he and his mates regarded the black under their nails and eyes as marks of honour, to impress the girls. Which of course they were - but still, you've got to laugh.