Last night, I went to the recording of a new radio sitcom called Hut 33 at the recently refurbished (and very art deco) Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House. Despite having been in the audience for a few TV shows, it was my first time at a radio recording.

The show itself was pretty good, in a fairly run-of-the-mill Radio 4 sitcom kind of way. It’s set in a codebreaking hut in Bletchley Park in 1941 – with hilarious consequences. They recorded two episodes yesterday, the first of which is being broadcast this morning at 11.30am on Radio 4. It’s worth a listen if you fancy a mid-morning chuckle.

It’s got a pretty cast, including:

• Robert Bathurst, mostly of Cold Feet and My Dad’s the Prime Minister fame although I know him from Joking Apart and recently saw him on stage in Whipping it Up (he is very tall)
• Tom Goodman-Hill off of the sketch show Spoons and the film Festival
• Olivia Colman off of pretty much every comedy going at the moment, and in particular Peep Show, That Mitchell and Webb Look/Sound, Green Wing and Confetti
• Lill Roughley off of Victoria Wood
• and Fergus Craig of comedy duo Colin & Fergus who I’ve failed to see every year at the Edinburgh Fringe

If you miss today’s broadcast, you can almost certainly Listen Again (or, rather, for the first time) on the BBC Radio 4 website.

I listen to about half an hour of Today as I’m getting ready each morning. Occasionally, as yesterday morning, I end up shouting at the radio. In this case, it followed a report on whether or not Nottingham is the crime capital of the UK.

After some discussion about the statistics and where towns figured in the crime table*, John Humphrys asked (from memory): “But the Government say that crime is going down, don’t they?” What did that have to do with anything, I demanded from the stereo. The relative levels of crime in different places in a snapshot of time bears no relation at all to the change of crime frequency over time. The fact that you can produce a report calculating likelihood of being a victim of crime in different geographic locations says absolutely nothing at all about the overall crime rate apart from that there is some crime. Grr.

*The word “table” appears to be the 100,000th word on this blog. Woo.