Listen Against back on Radio 4 Nov 3rd

Some people on Twitter are asking "What the hell's Listen Against?" so I thought I'd post some reviews of previous 'seasons' (as a git might call them) as explaining it in 140 characters could be tricky....

New series starts Thursday November 3rd St 6.30pm on BBC Radio 4.

If the real world becomes too much, try Listen Against (Radio 4, Tuesdays at 6.30pm). It is so funny it will rearrange everything. Last week the pipe carrying BBC Three exploded, polluting all programmes around it; the BBC expanded into pizza delivery ("We can't leave it to the private sector..."); Gaby Roslin and Ed Stourton channelled to the centre of the Earth for Children in Need; the Dimblebys become News Brothers, a musical. Alice Arnold, Jon Holmes and company on Listen Against will brighten even the darkest evening.
Gillian Reynolds, The Daily Telegraph, 21st September 2010

Were the Monty Python team starting out today, they might conceivably come up with something like the utterly fabulous Listen Against, supposedly a news round-up with Alice Arnold in the studio and Jon Holmes reporting. It's a glorious mixture of cannibalised cut-ups from the BBC's current affairs output and segments featuring Beeb figures playing themselves (Ed Stourton and Gaby Roslin, for example, on a Children in Need expedition to the centre of the Earth).

Much of it is directed at the BBC itself, and the triumphant stand-out last week was a rolling report from the scene of what Arnold called a "broadcastastrophe". "The pipe that pumps bad TV into the nation's digiboxes" had burst, and "gallons of terrible programmes" were spilling out, contaminating all the decent stuff with BBC3 output. "Awful programmes are threatening wildlife," said Holmes. "I saw a man trying to clean James Corden off a guillemot."

The emergency services were throwing episodes of Dad's Army down the shaft to try to stem the flow. And how much was escaping, Arnold inquired? "It's estimated at up to 3,000 scraped barrels a day," said Holmes.
Chris Maume, The Independent, 19th September 2010

Radio review: Listen Against
The Radio 4 spoof comedy returns to take a well-aimed satirical swoop at radio and television.
Written by Elisabeth Mahoney. The Guardian, 8th September 2010

What clever little sausages that Jon Holmes and his cutting crew are. Back for a third series of the show that cuts and re-edits radio and TV to great satirical effect, they turn their scatter guns on a range of targets, from David Mitchell and his takeover of all broadcasting to 24-hour rolling news coverage of a Jeremy Paxman on the rampage, randomly firing questions at passers-by. Joining in the joke and enjoying having the mickey taken out of them are John Humphrys, Jenni Murray and Richard Bacon. It's like Feedback, but with more blood and guts!
Frances Lass, Radio Times, 7th September 2010

Very funny (and rather rude) pretend radio show, real extracts from actual broadcasts mashed up into fantasy fictional contexts (Jeremy Paxman running amok and being chased by the police, for example). Jenni Murray, Richard Bacon and John Humphrys appear as themselves but others (David Mitchell, Evan Davies, Steve Wright) are edited into parodies of themselves. Excellent cast, tight production, sharp scripts and a glorious capacity to make telling fun of radio's daily excesses. The Robert Peston competition is a wow. Alice Arnold presents, perfectly.
Gillian Reynolds, The Daily Telegraph, 7th September 2010
R4's Listen Against scripted flights of lunacy recalled the best of The Day Today. For the first time, a Satanist occupied the Today programme's Thought for the Day slot, recalling the time he sacrificed a goat and drank its blood ('That should give us all something to think about,' he concluded), while Compton Pauncefoot, controller of BBC Animal Entertainment, was questioned about offensive messages left on John Cleese's messaging service by the stars of Radio 2's The Monkey and the Parrot Show. He told presenter Alice Arnold: "As a result of this outrage, Radio 2 is to be bulldozed to the ground and in its place we're creating a spring meadow of quiet contemplation."
Nick Smurthwaite, The Stage, 8th December 2008
In these hi-tech modern times you now, of course, have the added opportunity of catching up with radio programmes you have missed or want to listen to again via the stations' websites. With so much on offer, Listen Against's Alice Arnold and Jon Holmes decided the copious amounts of material could do with a bit of drastic editing - in other words, they hoped to present all the right snippets but not necessarily in the right order.

Thanks to some clever editing, there were some funny news items from the previous week's radio, not least the contestant taking part in Ken Bruce's Radio 2 Popmaster quiz, who had an interminable list of people he wanted to say hello to and the light entertainment meltdown when a laptop containing the subjects for the next 10,000 episodes of Just A Minute was lost.
Lisa Martland, The Stage, 24th November 2008

A second run for the deadpan comedy that's like Feedback from a warped alternative universe. The show manages to mangle radio formats into unusual shapes before presenting them in an almost credible fashion, and as co-presenter Jon Holmes tells Radio Times, series two boasts: 'Today introducing controversial waterboarding torture techniques to grill politicians; a gritty HBO remake of Gardeners' Question Time in the style of The Wire; a fan convention for The Archers in Las Vegas; and Oliver Stone's new radio drama Peston." And tonight, after David Miliband's successful 'appearances' in series one, an equally peculiar Ed Balls sounds off, while John Humphrys is replaced by a real pit bull. Newsreader and voice of gravitas Alice Arnold once again has the task of announcing all this with a straight face.
David Brown, The Radio Times, 18th November 2008