Radio review: How to get an A-Star

How To get An A-Star (Radio 4) got a B+ for effort, but that's about it. Imogen Stubbs (below) – whose daughter is awaiting her A-level results this week – set out to explore the meaning and practicalities of the new grade, talking to examiners, teachers and pupils. That layer was fine, though I found her grand and emphatic delivery ("a show of panache!") too big for radio. It all went a bit awry, though, when she wheeled in her two guinea pigs to sit an A-level question on Shakespeare: Adam Long, of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, and her husband Trevor Nunn. This felt gimmicky, and quite removed from the programme's core question, as posed by Stubbs: "What's that extra thing that's going to get an A*?" Funnily enough, Nunn and Long couldn't get an A* after decades out of education, and Long, as a Californian, had no idea what an A-level was. There was one unintentionally amusing bit, when Nunn argued doggedly that the question was duff ("it is a peripheral notion in the bigger scheme of the play") after he got a mid-band B for his answer, but this test was plain irrelevant. Far better to have focused on current students or sample answers to fathom what an A* might be, rather than the efforts of A-list theatre stars.