'Racist, sexist and abhorrent to any rational Radio 4 listener': how Down The Line fooled the nation
Back in 2006, Down the Line – Radio 4’s first venture into the populist phone-in format – attracted many listener complaints. “This is not the standard we expect from the BBC,” said one. “It was racist, sexist and completely abhorrent to any rational Radio 4 listener,” quibbled another; “The nutters that phoned up were worse than those on bloody LBC,” said a particularly bewildered forum post.
But on a show that debated the many, many topics guaranteed to rile up Great British phone-in callers – freedom of speech, drink and drugs, gay marriage, consumer rights, education, sexuality, ghosts, good manners, TV chefs, parking restrictions, and why we don’t hate the French as much as we used to – such blustery outrage would have been perfect fodder for its host, the award-winning journalist Gary Bellamy.
Tonight (May 14), Down the Line returns with a one-off special for the most topical of topics – the Covid-19 lockdown – on Radio 4 at 11pm. A second episode will be available exclusively on BBC Sounds.
Down the Line is, of course, a spoof – created by The Fast Show’s Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse – and Gary Bellamy is Rhys Thomas, one-time apprentice to Swiss Toni and now an Emmy-winning filmmaker and comedy writer/director.
Over five series and multiple specials – including tonight’s all-new episodes – the cast of callers include Simon Day, Lucy Montgomery, Amelia Bullmore, Adil Ray, Robert Popper, Harry Enfield, and the late, great Felix Dexter. The show also transitioned to TV for the underrated Bellamy’s People in 2010.
Producing a topical comedy about lockdown has proved a challenge (“The rules change every day!” laughs Paul Whitehouse). But it’s an appropriate time to resurrect Down the Line. In Brexit era Britain, the kind of furious, ill-informed voices shouting over each other on phone-ins and Question Time are louder and more ridiculous than ever.
Down the Line wasn’t created to make a political point – it was intended as an under-the-radar reunion of The Fast Show team, six years after the sketch show had ended.
“Paul and I wanted to try something and develop some new characters,” says Charlie Higson. “We wanted it to be quick and simple and not a huge TV thing with huge fanfare.”
“I’m not going to claim all the credit for Down the Line, but I’m definitely claiming the idea,” laughs Paul Whitehouse. “I’d been quite ill and in recovery I thought, ‘I can’t really do a TV series’, because I wasn’t well enough – so I had this idea for a spoof radio phone-in show. It seems quite obvious really, doesn’t it? But nobody had ever done it.”
The concept is innovative: Higson and Whitehouse come up with loose topics beforehand and – along with cast members such as Simon Day, Lucy Montgomery, and Felix Dexter – call into Rhys Thomas, who's stuck in a booth as "the award-winning journalist Gary Bellamy" (as Bellamy always describes himself). The calls and responses are improvised on-the-spot and in-character.
“I sit there and I don’t know who’s coming next,” says Rhys Thomas. “When we first did it, I wouldn’t even see anyone – I’d just hear the phones coming through.”
“The best calls are where neither of you knows which way it’s going to go,” says Higson. “Or you get two or three calls bouncing off each other.”
While Thomas’s role began as a way to mediate the calls and feed lines, the award-winning journalist Gary Bellamy developed into a comedy character in his own right: thick on the outside but much sharper than he realises.
Wavering between naivety, faux outrage, and simple-minded ignorance, he’s got a knack for those big, dramatic, purposely inflammatory questions – the kind of thing Jeremy Vine has been using to wind-up middle England for years.
On the elderly: “Do we actually need so many old people?”
On sport: “We’re hosting the Olympics in 2012 but we won’t be winning anything, so what do you think about sport? Ring in and let us know!”
On sexuality: “Are you ringing in as a slag or a tart?”
And on bad manners: “Are our schools to blame? Are GCSEs too easy these days? Is it because of modern liberal parenting? Should we ban violent computer games? Or should we just bring back hanging?”
“He is basically me,” laughs Thomas about Bellamy. “He’s someone who thinks he knows a lot more than he does. The funniest stuff is when he’s out of his depth. He’s a bit thick but he’s doing his job.”
“Rhys is very good at being patient, not upstaging the characters, and teasing the best out of us,” says Higson. “What we figured out was we couldn’t have a hard-hitting James O’Brien-type host who’s going to tell people to shut up and cut them off when they’re being idiots. Because we’re going to be idiots – each call would only last five seconds.”
“We’d stick him in this little booth for about 10 hours and bombard him with calls from different characters,” says Whitehouse. “We’d say, ‘Just react! No, not like that… like that! More, more, more!’ I wouldn’t put up with it, but he never whinges for a second.”
Notable callers include the bed-bound Graham Downs (Whitehouse), morbidly obese and hooked on Sugar Puffs; Mr Khan (Adil Ray), who went on to become sitcom star Citizen Khan; Early D (Felix Dexter), who would confuse Bellamy with his fast-talking patois and street slang (“Large up yourself…the countryside is stush!”); Samson, an evangelical Christian whose answer to every problem – even the credit crunch – is an unwavering love of God; and Humphrey Milner (Higson), a doddery and forgetful old fellow.
“I know it sounds stupid but I sort of got to know the characters,” says Rhys Thomas. “You forget who you’re taking to and it feels quite real.”
Some episodes would also see Bellamy joined in the studio by a guest, such as a consumer rights expert (played by Simon Day) who advises callers to not bother asking for refunds or taking the legal route.
“I advocate direct action,” he says. “Physical and violent abuse.” His answer to one caller's ongoing feud with a neighbour is to swing their dog round by the tail.
Never directly political, Down the Line is what both Higson and White describe as “social satire” – a continuation of The Fast Show’s tradition for astute mimicry. Never falling on either side of the debate, Down the Line’s shrewdest trick is to accentuate British voices and opinion with skin-crawling accuracy.
Anyone who’s ever been irritated by a radio phone-in will immediate recognise how close-to-the-bone it comes when Bellamy drops clangers like: “As a gay man did Stephen Fry have the right to tell us what he thought about anything?”; “If I was French or Italian I’d be disappointed with myself”; and “It would be great to hear from someone from the black community to get their views on that, or, in fact, to get their views on anything. So come on – ring in if you're black!”
Bolstered by a cast of characters who are multi-ethnic, old and young, male and female, it confronts real issues head on – usually by way of Bellamy’s ignorance. “The format gave us the opportunity to do comedy without any real limits,” says Whitehouse. “It legitimised any topic really.”
Ahead of the debut episode in May 2006, they decided it would be fun to play it straight and promote the show as a legitimate phone-in. “We didn’t want a big fanfare like, ‘Hey guys, here’s the new comedy show from The Fast Show!’” says Higson. “We never stepped outside the box. We wanted it to sound as close to a real phone-in show as possible.”
A fake bio for Gary Bellamy was put on the BBC website and a press release sent to radio reviewers. A phone number was even advertised and set-up, which was always "busy" but took messages if people called. One week they received 97 calls about religion. Listeners and journalists alike were upset .
“Some people got really angry about,” says Whitehouse. “I thought actors were meant to be precious and luvvie… not journalists, surely!” Amusingly, here at the Telegraph, it was previewed as “not a comedy show pretending to be a phone-in.”
“We didn’t do the Radio 4 thing of going, ‘Now here’s a satirical sketch!’” says Higson. “A lot of Radio 4 listeners were mystified because there wasn’t anyone there to tell them.”
The gang came clean during its second week. But listeners who had their wits about them would have spotted it. Even Paul Whitehouse’s 10-year-old daughter twigged in a couple of minutes. “I remember I'd taken my daughter and a friend of hers away,” he recalls. “I played them a little bit from the first episode. I could see them being faintly amused and also slightly intrigued. Then my daughter went, ‘That’s not real is it?’”
The problem for precious listeners and critics, perhaps – other that being caught out – was the effrontery of a populist, loudmouth format dragging down Radio 4's usually impeccable standards.
It does stand out: as a comedy, Down the Line is much edgier than the station’s usual output. “I did always sit very differently to all the other Radio 4 comedies,” says Higson. “It sounded different and it has different voices. That did upset some listeners. There’s a certain style and sound.”
In 2010, Down the Line headed to television for Bellamy’s People, a spoof travelogue show. Bellamy meets a range of characters across the country to find out what it means to be British.
Like the phone-in on radio, Bellamy’s People tapped into a prominent TV trend. “At the time a lot of people were doing these travel shows,” recalls Thomas. “There was Andrew Marr’s Britain from Above. Martin Clunes’ Islands. There were a lot of those kinds of programmes.”
If Down the Line felt loud and edgy compared to other Radio 4 comedies, Bellamy’s People was much gentler than the brash, rapid-fire pace of most sketch shows. But it absolutely is a sketch show – a smart reinvention at a time when character comedy was being largely replaced by cheaper-to-produce panel shows.
Among the best characters are Early D (Dexter), one of several characters to make the jump with Gary from the radio to TV; Martin Hole (Whitehouse), a painter and decorator who thinks nothing’s been the same since the Seventies; the Combe sisters (Lucie Montgomery and Rose Cavaliero), elderly aristocrats divided by their politics – one a communist, the other a Nazi; and the reformed (but still terrifying) criminal Tony Beckton, a continuation of Simon Day’s ultra-masculine series-stealing characters from The Fast Show – Dave Angel, Monkfish, Billy Bleach.
Watched now, Bellamy's People is very funny – but the show didn’t connect with viewers at the time. “I think people expected it to be more of a Fast Show type thing with catchphrases," says Thomas. "The first two episodes got high viewing figures and week-by-week it went down. But if you look back at the figures we were getting then, it would be good now. It was well received but people were changing the way they watched television.”
Most of a second series was filmed but never made it to air. “The BBC didn’t take that risk at the time,” says Higson. “We were moving into the era of comedy where social media was making a bigger impact. If it didn’t hit it straight off the bat and grab your audience, you’ve sort of lost.”
Down the Line returned to radio, with the last episode broadcast in December 2013. The team discussed reuniting for a Brexit special but came to the same conclusion as many other comedians. “What more can be said about it?” laughs Higson.
They were also hesitant after the loss of Felix Dexter, who died in October 2013 of multiple myeloma, aged just 52. “We were thrown by Felix’s death,” says Whitehouse. “It was a shocking event for us. And he was so closely linked to Down the Line. Felix always added this surge of power but with a legitimate black voice. We all felt shaken by it.”
Down the Line seems to hold a special place for the team (“It’s one of the things I’m proudest of in my career,” says Whitehouse. “I always loved it”) and it's no easy feat sending up the big topics. The voices that Down the Line spoofs are certainly more ridiculous than ever. But so is life in modern Britain.
As Rhys Thomas says: “You think to yourself, is there any satire left?”
