Alex Riley

have had my say at length re Mr Riley on an earlier thread so will confine myself to saying how heartily I agree with the instigator of this current thread. Will there ever be a formal response from BBC 7? Can all these disgruntled listeners be wrong? Do we have to endure him every single week? Pity there isn't a BBC 7 version of Feedback. Did the subject of Riley ever come up on BBC 7's Serious About Comedy discussion programme?

I know I should leave it but can't resist a further observation. There is no indication that anyone will ever act on the Riley Problem so this limited relief is all that is possible.

In the 1990s I was on holiday in Malta. One of the "treats" organised for us holidaymakers in the evening was a talk on the buses of Malta. Unfortunately the man giving the talk had clearly given it week in, week out for years and his interest had wandered elsewhere: having a captive audience he had obviously decided this was a perfect opportunity to confirm his belief in his potential as an ace standup comedian. Unfortunately Malta is a bit behind on British music and comedy (sixties and seventies pop is still very big on the radio there) and the busman was locked into a seventies mindset; Johnny Hamp would have signed him up for The Comedians, had it still been running, but I recall the barely suppressed shock and surprise on the audience's faces as he trotted through well-worn jokes about the Irish etc. But the speaker had absolutely no self-knowledge: you could tell that he thought he was going down a storm. With a great deal of time taken up with the witless jokes he then rattled through the slide show of buses - not my favourite subject anyway, but a disservice to those who might care and an abuse of his position. Riley may not yet have abridged the shows to allow more of his "wit" to be heard but the real point, as I have said in earlier postings, is that Riley's presentational style, and those loathsome trails, do a disservice to the material he's meant to be promoting. But if he doesn't mind shingle beaches, I'm sure there are openings in Malta for his particular brand of comedy.