Radio Review: 28 March

No apologies for mentioning John Sparkes twice within a year. Any broadcast by the Welsh wonder, best known for his work on the superb Channel 4 comedy series Absolutely, is an event worth marking. He’s just started a run on BBC Radio Wales on Friday nights in the guise of Siadwel, the shy, socially awkward poet he portrayed so memorably in the 1980s, in BBC Two show Naked Video.

I was fortunate enough to attend one of the recordings for the series, which took place in the club bar at the BBC studios in Cardiff. The last time Sparkes worked for BBC Wales was as the vile and hilarious Frank Hovis, in a TV series called Pub Quiz. Due to the show’s high filth quotient, certain editions were banned from being repeated by timorous controllers. ‘I’m amazed I’ve been allowed back,’ he admits.

Sparkes is on very fine form right now. Derogatory references to the North Wales coastal resort of Rhyl are a leitmotif in all of Sparkes’s comedy, and they’re present here. Siadwel is equal parts warm, surreal and vulgar, in a mode of which Dylan Thomas would have approved.

He relates that his nan ‘married an older man because she didn’t want children, but she did want grandchildren’, makes graphic references to his hideous girlfriend, Gravel, and remains overshadowed by ex-school bully Gary Price – ‘A very hard person to avoid, but it’s always worth making the effort’.

In Naked Video, Siadwel was a more than slightly tragic figure. A quarter of a century on, he comes across more as someone to be celebrated, who got on with the business of being themselves, no matter how strange. Listening to these shows is like catching up with an old friend. No, it’s not like that. It is exactly that.

Siadwel, BBC Radio Wales, Fridays, 6.30pm; available via digital satellite or online.

Louis on Twitter: @LFBarfe or email: wireless@cheeseford.net