Giles Wemmbley-Hogg: Goes Off, Series 2

*****
Pure Comedy Gold 20 Mar 2008

Marcus Brigestocke is a many of a great many talents, but they all seem to be united in two greater gifts: the first is to make people laugh (a great deal), and the second is to identify and expose the (frequently wilful) short-sightedness which characterises so much of human behaviour. Many will know him from The Now Show on Radio 4, where his angry young man rants against policies and practices that destroy the environment have made him a personal favourite of mine.

But it was in the guise of the delightfully idiotic Giles Wemmbley-Hogg (two m's, two g's, from Budley Salterton) that I first encountered his art, and it remains one of my favourite comedy series for radio. For those who don't know, Wemmbley-Hogg is a rather dim young man, only recently out of Charterhouse, off on his travels around the world. For anyone who has ever "travelled" abroad (and I use the word advisedly: this is not tourism, but rather the backpacking, earnest and frankly impossibly annoying habit of young people on gap years (before, after or during university) who wish to experience a country on an "authentic" level, away from the corrupting influence of modern tourism and western culture. Except that these people largely deserve nothing but contempt: their world view consists largely of vacuous platitudes about how profoundly they have been changed by the poverty/landscape/injustices/local culture that surround them in any given location, and their entire source of knowledge is the Lonely Planet to whichever country is unfortunate enough to have merited their arrival, much like a plague of locusts, this year. These are people who will scoff at anyone who deigns to pay a premium to a rickshaw driver who lives in his vehicle and for whom foreign tourists offer at least a brief respite from the appalling conditions of his existence. These people strut around, deriving almost pornographic pleasure from the poverty of the poor individuals who surround them, and yet whose understanding of local economic or political conditions could be written on the back of a fag packet.) Having written that, I find myself rather liking Giles. He is, frankly, too stupid to hold any of the views which so irritate me, and his bumbling innocence throws light on the more self-serving habits of the "gap-year generation" which he inhabits.

I'm not sure if this is a review, really, but to gesture in that direction, I will say that this is a very, very funny audiobook, and if you enjoyed the first series, you'll love this.