According to its new comedy commissioner, this is all perfect for a Radio 4 audience in need of something a bit spicier. The show has been on BBC Sounds since June, where it has been confusingly praised as an answer to the country’s search for a new Alan Partridge. This comparison doesn’t make sense, but also gets to the heart of why Pie isn’t funny.

Steve Coogan’s clown is driven by his desire to be a national treasure. Pie, on the other hand, betrays no such vulnerabilities. Behind the guise of the absurdist jester sending up both sides, there are the hallmarks of a surprisingly overt worldview for a comedy character: that Brexit destroyed the country, Gary Lineker deserves the money he’s paid, and that Jeremy Corbyn was a proper Labour leader.

Pie isn’t successful without good reason. He attempts to distil the best of his comic era and the one that preceded it, yet in this same process risks becoming a confused creation. There is the anarchic energy of Rik Mayall and the dismal chaos of The Thick of It, but also the more recent comic proselytising pioneered across the Atlantic by Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. Lurking behind the blusterous fucks and twats is the inescapable politics. 

But why not? In an age in which no one reads newspapers and young people don’t vote, perhaps the best conduit for a political worldview was always the angry faux-comedy of a pub rant. Pie toys with the public’s unspent frustration through a confusing mix of nihilism and sincerity. This “you’ve been conned by them” narrative arc curiously places him in the same metaphysical category as Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson. 

Institutionalised on BBC 4 Radio, however, the act’s innovation reveals itself as an illusion. Listening to Pie’s latest, there is a strange sense of déjà vu in relation to the famously dire comedy of Radio 4: the nasally anger, the slightly flat jokes. All this creates a thin comic veil over the smug, pious anger about the stupidity of call-in guests, of the media, of politicians, of everybody. 

The BBC is mocked too, naturally, but just around the corner are the generous lashings of scorn towards the usual targets of Brexit, Nigel Farage, The Sun et al, all via characters drawn less from people encountered in his own life than the grotesque caricatures of Twitter and the media Pie is supposed to hate so vehemently.

In this sense, Radio 4 viewers are being conned. Pie is merely an unplugged, cruder version of a stale comic sentiment that has reigned supreme at the corporation over the last few decades. This is a cerebral curation of creative swearing and a political worldview unchanged since university, whose practitioners club together to form the cockwomble generation. 

Walker has survived as a clever contortionist, a meteorologist attuned to the fickle vagaries of social media rage. This has helped add an extra dimension to his act: of revelation, of speaking truth to power. Effective though this act has proven to be, it offers the BBC neither a reappraisal of its comedy greats nor fresh ground for a new audience.

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Fred Skulthorp is a writer living in England. His Substack is Bad Apocalypse 

Skulthorp

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