Caroline Raphael, commissioning editor for comedy and fiction at Radio 4 (and 4 Extra’s commissioning ed too), leaves the BBC this month after three pioneering decades. As she dips her toes into the River Freelance, here are a few reasons why she will be missed.
■ TV should be very grateful for her talent-spotting skills. Raphael commissioned Little Britain, On the Town With the League of Gentlemen, Count Arthur Strong’s Radio Show, That Mitchell and Webb Sound, Dead Ringers, Sarah Millican’s Support Group and Miranda Hart’s Joke Shop. “I really don’t mind getting ideas that somebody at some point wants to take to television,” she said in 2009. “And equally I don’t mind getting ideas that have been rejected for television.” As long as, she argued, “it’s brilliant radio.”
■ She provided a bridge between the old BBC model of a commissioner inviting a comedian into his office and saying, “I say, old man, fancy making a radio show? Off you go then,” and the much-scrutinised, corporate-corporation approach of today. She asked producers and comedians to pitch the programme they wanted to make, rather than the one they thought Radio 4 would like. “She would say: ‘Push things, surprise people,’” says Steve Doherty, who runs independent production company Giddy Goat Productions.
■ She helped to come up with the current Radio 4 schedule, with its comedy slots of 11.30am (cup of tea and biscuit cosiness), 6.30pm (big names, contemporary themes) and 11pm (out-there, experimental, newbie stuff).
■ Her job became much more difficult in 2007, when the BBC established the Safeguarding Trust (which drew the line “between legitimate media artifice and unacceptable audience deception”) and immensely detailed compliance rules, and tougher still after Sachsgate in 2008. “It must have been like landing the job to run Disneyland and then realising that actually you’re the manager of Tesco,” says David Quantick, a comedy writer/performer whom Raphael championed. Raphael herself wondered if Radio 4’s spoof phone-in show Down the Line would have made it on air if it hadn’t been commissioned before that time: “I’d like to say we’d have tried.”
■ Her job was difficult anyway. “The thing about comedy is that no one will ever agree on what is funny,” says Steve Doherty. “And the Radio 4 audience is more diverse than you’d think. It’s both totally conservative and totally liberal.”
■ Raphael’s done a lot for women in comedy. Not only by commissioning female comedians to make their own shows – Bridget Christie won a Rose d’Or for her 2013 programme about feminism, Bridget Christie Minds the Gap – but also by gradually changing the nature of long-standing comedy shows like The News Quiz. Once, it was a programme for clever Oxbridge chaps who’d read the papers. Now, it’s a show for snarky women taking the mick.
■ Little known Caroline Raphael fact: her brother is Nick Manasseh, long-time reggae producer/artist/DJ, currently signed to Tiger Lily records.
