Radio Head: 4 Stands Up

This season I must protest about 4 Stands Up, a show in which Radio 4 has selected, apparently at random, some stand-up comedians and just wheeled them out. You can tell things are bad when the announcer gives you, "4 Stands Up, compered by the Welsh comedian Rhod Gilbert". That's all you've got, a postcode? He has nothing else going for him? He's never won, or done, anything? He has impinged upon our consciousness in no way? Can't you even call him a newcomer? I don't even know how bad the jokes were, because it was audience-participation heavy and they hadn't even mic-ed the audience! All I could hear was a kind of scuffle.

Variety - in the old-fashioned sense of different acts operating coming on and doing different things - makes a comeback on Radio 4's new four-part drive-time show.

No preview disc was available, so all we know going in is that the host is the Welsh comic Rhod Gilbert, a frequent voice on radio and face on TV.

The show itself consists of an opening act from a young up-and-comer (not Rhod Gilbert, somebody else), a performance by a double act, a sketch, or a musical number, and then on comes the headliner, a 'name' act who, unfortunately at this moment in time and for obvious reasons, cannot be named.