Programme Index

Discover 11,128,835 listings and 279,802 playable programmes from the BBC

The Best Laid Plans

Caution: Angel At Work

Duration: 30 minutes

First broadcast: on BBC Radio 4 FMLatest broadcast: on BBC Radio 4 Extra

Smallbone gets a job in a supermarket and tries his hand at customer service.

But when a fully automated, super-brain self-service checkout system threatens the workers' jobs, Smallbone finds himself leading the protest against the store.

Ardal O'Hanlon plays Smallbone - an idiot angel who's sent to earth to fix his mistakes - in Mark Daydy's sitcom.

In 1885, God (Geoff McGivern) nodded off. In 2015, he awoke to discover that his idiot servant, the angel Smallbone, had accidentally handed out God's plans for the next millennium when he was only meant to hand out plans for the next century. A thousand years of leisurely human progression has been crammed into the last 130. No wonder we're all so stressed. We weren't even meant to have pocket calculators until 2550.

Not only that, but God's blueprints should have run out in the mid-eighties – but we kept going. Humans are now inventing things God never even dreamed of - mobile phones, wireless internet and Made in Chelsea.

Smallbone is cast down to Earth in human form by God, tasked with the dauntingly vague mission of 'reversing the last thirteen decades of human progression'. The problem is that Smallbone is the world's biggest fan - he loves modern technology and his new human body, and he becomes distracted by everything that he's meant to destroy. Especially escalators.

Smallbone.......Ardal O'Hanlon
God.................Geoff McGivern
Tanya..............Esther Smith
Toby................Mike Wozniak
Susan..............Ruth Bratt
Supporting Roles: Duncan Wisbey and Ruth Bratt

Written by Mark Daydy

Produced by Ben Worsfield.
A Lucky Giant production for BBC Radio 4 first broadcast in 2015. Show less

About this data

This data is drawn from the data stream that informs BBC's iPlayer and Sounds. The information shows what was scheduled to be broadcast, meaning it was/is subject to change and may not be accurate. More