Ayckbourn 70

Next Sunday(Easter Day) Alan Ayckbourn turns 70, and radio is throwing a bit of a do for the great man. This Saturday we get his play Man of the Moment (Radio 4), and the following day A Small Family Business (Radio 3). The same day Radio 7 begins its broadcast of the three plays that make up The Norman Conquests, the subject of a Night Waves: Landmarks special (Radio 4) the following night. But last Thursday we heard from Ayckbourn himself, as he presented With Great Pleasure (Radio 4).

Ayckbourn set out his stall right at the beginning of this Desert Island Discs without the discs and with extra books. “A serious writer,” he said, “often turns out to have been a serious child, with serious parents.” By that reckoning Ayckbourn must have been one of those happy, gurgly sprogs who laugh at everything from a dirty nappy downwards. Hilaire Beloc, Evelyn Waugh, even Ayckbourn's one-time director and mentor Harold Pinter, to whom he paid touching tribute, all got their laughs from the theatre audience, some more than others. Without seeing him you could imagine Ayckbourn sitting, waiting for the laugh to come, and perhaps cringing when it didn't.

But it wasn't the excerpts that made the programme, it was Ayckbourn's introduction of them. He spoke of meeting P.G. Wodehouse “in the final pages of his life - a bit vague, slightly dotty and selectively deaf. He and his wife Enid were living in Long Island, New York, and next door to their house they had opened the Bide-a-Wee Home for Cats and Dogs.” After that even the excerpt from The Great Sermon Handicap wasn't quite as funny.