Start the Week

Original version

BBC Radio 4 FM

BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

BBC Radio 4

Radio 4

Radio 4 (FM)

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Weekly discussion programme, setting the cultural agenda every Monday

BBC Radio 4 LW

Start the Week: Laughter

Laughter

BBC Radio 4 - Start the Week, Laughter

Andrew Marr with Sindhu Vee, John Mullan and Jonathan Silvertown.

Sindhu Vee, John Mullan and Jonathan Silvertown explore what’s funny and why we laugh, with Andrew Marr.

Why do we laugh? This is the question the evolutionary ecologist Jonathan Silvertown sets out to answer in his latest book, The Comedy of Error. He looks back at laughter’s evolutionary origins, and to the similarities and differences in humour across cultures.

The sell-out comic Sindhu Vee swapped a career in investment banking for one in comedy. She is an expert at exploiting cultural differences in her jokes, having been born in India, lived and studied in the Philippines and the US, before settling in the UK.  

John Mullan holds up Charles Dickens as a master novelist who could switch with ease from tragedy to comedy in a sentence. In The Artful Dickens he explores the tricks and ploys the writer used and how his humour has stood the test of time.

Producer: Katy Hickman
Photograph by Matt Crockett

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Start the Week

Laughter

Genres

Brand

BBC Radio 4 FM

About BBC Radio 4