One of the best TV sitcoms of the past two decades makes for a joyfully oddball audio experience

The Radio 4 series What’s Funny About… takes a nostalgic look under the bonnet of successful bygone comedies to work out what made them tick. Last year, in the third series, it was the turn of Green Wing. Victoria Pile, who created it, and Tamsin Greig, one of its many stars, recalled making the remarkably weird hospital-based cult hit that popped up on Channel 4 two decades ago.

It was such a clever self-contained thing, and its cast has gone on to enjoy such considerable stardom, that the idea of a reboot seemed inconceivable. Their fees, and clogged diaries, would surely both prove insurmountable. And yet Green Wing is back, this time as an audio entity as Green Wing: Resuscitated (Audible), which being cheaper and quicker to record was perhaps the only way it could happen.

Nothing, apart from some characters going down or up in the world (with one in prison), has changed. The comedy remains a confluence of puerile workplace banter, grotesque power-playing and psycho-sexual obsession. Some characters still feel almost human – Julian Rhind-Tutt and Greig as formerly married surgeons Mac and Caroline Todd, Olivia Colman as dogsbody Harriet Schulenberg. Others are wildly overripe gargoyles – Stephen Mangan as the thin-skinned narcissist Guy Secretan, Mark Heap as mad radiologist Alan Statham, Michelle Gomez as Sue White, who is something in HR and psychotic.

To anyone who hasn’t seen it, the six reunion scripts will be profoundly incomprehensible. Yet somehow it doesn’t matter that you can no longer see their faces. Pile and her team have even managed to replicate, in wacky sound loops, the TV version’s witty visual effects. If it hasn’t dated, that’s because nothing in the last 20 years rivals its joyful oddness.

Mangan was in another drama this week. The Genius of Joy (Classic FM) told of the vexed gestation and rapturous reception of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The premiere was 200 years ago, and to mark the bicentenary a station not known for its dramatic output decided to push the boat out.

It is a powerful story of course, to tell which the script relied on a familiar combination of epistolary quotation, imagined dialogue and sober narration from Richard Armitage. The cast consisted of Classic FM presenters, some of whom act for a living. Others don’t. On no account give up the day job, Dan Walker and Myleene Klass. Alan Titchmarsh hammed it up as the composer’s patron Count Pálffy, though not as much as Alexander Armstrong who, giving us his Ludwig Van, channelled his inner Brian Blessed. Mangan, as Beethoven’s confidant, Ferdinand Ries, channelled his inner Mangan.

The cheap and cheerful tone was boundlessly out of keeping with the symphony itself. Things grew less Blackadderish as the story reached the premiere. The actors stopped acting and the music started playing, and we were left with the moving image of the oblivious composer turning to see the audience flapping their handkerchiefs to semaphore their frantic appreciation.

Odes to Joy (Radio 3) argued that, in the two centuries since, the choral symphony’s celebration of universal brotherhood has proved infinitely malleable. The EU adopted it as its inclusive anthem, but so did white supremacist Rhodesia. Furtwängler conducted the symphony at Hitler’s birthday in 1942. After the fall of the Wall, Bernstein conducted it on Christmas Day in Berlin.

A song of protest – against Pinochet, against the Chinese Communist Party – has also become an anthem of mourning, performed inter alia at the Last Night of the Proms after 9/11. And if you don’t know Schiller’s words, there’s always Rowan Atkinson’s bewildered baritone, improvising when he discovers he’s missing half the sheet music: “Schweinhund, dummkopf, ein bier bitte / Jürgen Klinsmann ist kaputt.”

Odes to Joy was an enchanting essay in sound and speech that mused on the last movement. Among the voices heard, identified only at the end, one said Ode to Joy should be thought of as “music of superhuman power, immense faith and unbounded genius”. Another saw it as a catchy drinking song.

It would have been good to hear from Iván Fischer, the ludic conductor of the Budapest Festival Orchestra. He once reintroduced the element of surprise by concealing his choir in the audience. “If you sit next to a tenor,” he said when I interviewed him in 2022, “you feel that you could be also one of the people who jump up because it’s us, the people, who say those wonderful lines.”

Compare and contrast with the surprise sprung by 29 Brexit Party MEPs in 2019, turning their backs on the European Parliament when the EU’s anthem sounded. Depending on which way you swing, the gesture was either defiant or petulant, the cause of huge pride or bitter shame.

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