Radio review: Beautiful Dreamers

Beautiful Dreamers (Radio 4) isn't that devilish an idea (spoof documentary), but as an aural experience it is audaciously complicated. Its subject (this week – it's the first of a series) was Artur Mistek, founder of Musica Zoologika, the world's first animal orchestra. Minutes of radio go by – extracts from Mistek's letters, interviews with his daughter, an academic, a friend – that deviate in no way from the standard format of all Radio 4 documentaries. Sure, sure, there were alarm bells . . . the academic has an Oxford professorship endowed by Accenture, the composer's friend was 5% too amusing ("Let me tell you, he was no Rubenstein. He played the piano like he'd just caught it screwing his wife"). And also, radio actors are unmistakable, even when they are just breathing. But the absurdity builds fractionally, so that by the end the orchestra is undone when a cup of tea is spilt on the lead elk, and you cannot believe you ever thought it was serious. This is much more than a parody of Radio 4, not really at all a parody of experimental music, surprisingly, glancingly successful as a parody of Stalinism, brilliant, and very funny, in an anti-laugh-out-loud way – it will light the taper of a laugh that will then explode an hour or two later.