highly recommended on radio this week: splendidly riotous episode of just a minute, not the usual thursday reruns, but as a selection on ulrika's comedy gold on bbc7. this is about two and a half hours into the program. julian clary, tony hawks, paul merton and clement freud star. you've never heard so many wild tactics, challenges and defences before. clement got away with at least 10 seconds of speaking in french! (paul: i don't the french for hesitation.) julian clary was wonderfully sweet and apologetic and disapproving. (julian: caravans are what common people use to go on holiday with. they're very unsightly and goodness knows what conversation goes on inside them. no i'm sorry, they're very vulgar.) tony hawks did the derek nimmo trick and strung his subjects together (the clouds opened! and everyone said, the petits pois will get wet! and then my favourite teacher came in!) and of course paul, who was a little more subdued than usual and went only on one surreal flight (i had a labrador, it was 15 years old, and i taught it to play the trumpet. what a fantastic noise it got out of this instrument, you wouldn’t think it possible. it was the humphrey lyttelton of the canine world! no sooner would it walk into a room than an excited visitor would say “give us a tune, arnold!”) but made up for it by interrupting all the time. (julian: petits pois are little peas ripped from their mothers' breasts - paul: deviation, peas don't have breasts!)

on same program was delve's special with stephen fry on MI5 double agents (this is truly brilliant - beautifully scripted and performed - half hour in.) moderately fun were old harry's game (satan lets them make a movie in hell,) whose life is it anyway (if you want to hear stephen fry telling a story about a visit to the dentist in the style of homer in the original greek that would be the first half hour of the program) and dead ringers.