In fact, a 'received opinion' isn't actually an opinion at all - it's simply a convenient substitute for original, individual thought. A popular, cosy, much-used soundbite which then gets passed off as one's own outlook in general "I think we're all agreed..."-style conversation.

The actual outlook expressed within a received opinion is never objectively 'wrong', but if enough people repeat it unthinkingly then it naturally gets perceived as 'fact', and as such becomes rather difficult to argue against.

Heresy is a Radio 4 panel series which attempts to do just that. Chaired by David Baddiel, it sets out to isolate what it perceives as the most popular, safe, un-argued-against received opinions - or 'ROs' as Baddiel has dubbed them. With the help of a panel of journalists and performers, it attempts to question them, dissect them, and generally 'give them a hard time'.

This is of course a fantastic idea, and its genesis can be traced back 15 years to a sketch on Radio 1's The Mary Whitehouse Experience where Baddiel argued that one of the hallmarks of stupidity is "passing off completely received opinions under the pretence that you arrived at them yourself". Baddiel noted that you can tell when people are doing this because they start their sentence with "'Ah, but what they don't tell you...' - a phrase which actually means 'what Woodrow Wyatt has told me'."

After piloting on New Year's Eve 2003, Heresy began a four-week run on 2 December 2004. Initially, it was a bit disappointing, for a variety of reasons. The main problem seemed to be how clued-up the panellists were able to allow themselves to be. The trouble, after all, with isolating ROs is pretty much one of timing - yesterday's 'original point well made' could well become tomorrow's stale cliche if enough people latch onto and regurgitate it in the interim period. You need to stay one step ahead of the game, constantly updating as you go. Defending an against-the-grain view can be hard work.

In the main, even allowing for a certain amount of 'devil's advocate' on their part, many of the contributors seemed simply to be replacing received opinion with media received opinion. An entirely different beast, driven as it is by a faint sense of self-preservation. The overall shortcomings of this became apparent in Show 3 when one particular round, 'Reality TV is destroying television standards', allowed the panellists (Michael Bywater, Zoe Williams, Peter Bradshaw and Vicky Coren) a chance to deliver a torrent of equally received inverted snobbery, using all the usual well-worn hackspeak - including the perennial favourite of enlikening something lowbrow with something historically lauded, ie Vicky Coren's far from original assertion that 'watching Jason and Victor plotting on Big Brother was like watching a Shakespearean play unfold'. Aw, fuck off!

A more up-to-date RO would of course be 'You have to admit that Reality TV is great television', the pack howl of the aspiring journalist who doesn't relish being a grumpy old man just yet.

By Show 4, however, everything had started to settle down a bit and the balance was a bit more interesting. The rounds broadcast were 'People should be encouraged to pursue their dreams', 'Organic food is better' and 'Christmas is too commercialised these days'. OK, pretty safe ground there. However there was an extra debate recorded at the session which should make the re-edited summer 2005 repeat in place of the Christmas round: 'Sitcoms are classier without a laugh track'.

Having been annoyed at the sort of toss and twaddle eminating from the gaseous mouths of Mark Lawson and Stephen Armstrong on this subject (see Sit Trag, etc), we were interested to see whether Baddiel and that week's panelists (Armando Iannucci, Victoria Coren, Zoe Williams and John O'Farrell) could really offer up a genuinely alternative stance on the subject.

Did they? Well, again, it depends on exactly how clued-up you are. Some of the arguments presented that night may well be seen as 'heresy' within the cosier snugs of the big media pub. But regular SOTCAA readers might just find them a little more familiar.

You'll have to wait for the repeat to actually hear it, but until then here's a transcript of our own little field recording of the debate. Hope you enjoy their opinions as much as we did four years ago...

	UPDATE NOTE: The debate didn't feature in the repeat broadcast after all. The recordings for Series 2 were advertised as potentially featuring such a round but if they ever returned to it then it was also overlooked for broadcast. Heresy is currently being developed for TV.

	A CLIP OF 'THE GOOD LIFE' - MARGO COMPLAINING THAT "CHRISTMAS HAS NOT BEEN DELIVERED..." BADDIEL Yes, The Good Life there, and I'm talking about sitcoms of course, as much part of the Yuletide staple as turkey, mistletoe and barely-concealed family resentment. But there's been a recent trend in our appreciation of sitcom which I think was summed up by Mark Lawson who said that 'surely, 21st Century sit-com has to dispense with this patronising nudge to viewers to find shows funny'. The 'patronising nudge' he was talking about was the presence of studio laughter and, post-The Office, critics are very keen on this one - very keen to tell you that the silly old-fashioned BBC foisted an intrusive and damaging laughter-track onto the second series of The League of Gentlemen; that the 'greatness' of The Royle Family, Spaced, Brass Eye and all the other hip funny shows is intrinsically linked to their lack of what used to be known as 'boffo woofs'; in short, that sit-coms are classier without a laugh track, an idea which 76% of tonight's audience agreed with. Now, you've written sit-coms, John O'Farrell, what do you think? O'FARRELL Er, I have written, er, audience shows, er, with laughter; I've written shows without audiences; I've written audience shows which didn't get any laughter at all! Er, er, I think that... it's a tricky one because you've used the word 'classier'. Now... BADDIEL Yes, that's 'cause I was trying to get a big vote... O'FARRELL Yes, I think, er... I think it's, er... to do with... er... BADDIEL Is it that tricky? O'FARRELL No, I think it's to do with, er, laugh-tracks that you noticed because the show wasn't funny enough. So, in the old days we'd be annoyed by the laugh track on shows that weren't that funny, er, because we'd think 'well they're all laughing aren't they'. I mean, The Pink Panther cartoon - loads of laughs! It's like, why are they all laughing? BADDIEL I laughed at that... O'FARRELL That was a terrible one, but, er, something like Fawlty Towers or Yes Minister, those were fantastic, sort of, orgasmic laughs that you joined in with, and I think those shows reached a higher comedic peak than shows like, er, The Office or Curb Your Enthusiasm or... y'know, Rob Bryden - these shows that are, sort of, gently funny. I love The Office and I think that what The Office... The Office does what it does fantastically... but I don't think it's as funny as Fawlty Towers or Porridge or Yes Minister. The thing is... BADDIEL I don't actually want to do discrimi... I mean, I'm not bo... I think The Office is brilliant and I don't think... er, I'm talking... well, I don't think this subject is about 'which shows are funny and which shows aren't', it's about the fact that there's a sort of 'critical consensus' now, that any shows that actively look for laughs are sort of getting them by dramatic sleight-of-hand, you know it's kind of 'vulgar' - even 'big' and 'slapstick' and 'visual comedy' is kind of frowned upon, and I think that led to a sort of starvation, which... which led to... Little Britain actually, which is... people were dying for a show... a big Dick Emery-style show where 'big' characters actually said 'We Are Funny'- we're not 'Drama', we're not 'Dark' - we're just being straightforwardly funny! And that became very frowned upon by critics. I'm not entirely sure why. O'FARRELL I've written, sort of, at the fag-end of that, the sitcom that, er, I did was called The Peter Principle and, er, we didn't have a laugh track - we had a 'crying track'! It sounded... Er, er, it was one of those shows where we sort of set out to, er, do the next Fawlty Towers and realised that we were twenty years out of date. We weren't as funny as Fawlty Towers - it had some good moments in it but it was like... we s... y'know, we saw the, er, er, pilot of The Office where we were working. It was like being the Polish Cavalry - we were the best Polish Cavalry in the world, and then seeing the Luftwaffe! And, er, er, we, er, we were sort of... stuck with that. Things... trying to make the audience laugh, and work with six cameras in a tiny studio and out by ten o'clock, it was, er, it was a nightmare. It was the reason I left television! BADDIEL Was it? O'FARRELL And, erm... to try and do a sit-com... BADDIEL This is not therapy for you, John! O'FARRELL ...it was, er, it was... to try and do a standard comedy... BADDIEL Um, Armando, can I bring Armando in. Now Armando, you didn't really want to talk about this subject because you've talked about it endlessly I know... IANNUCCI Well I... BADDIEL ...but you are the producer, or were the producer, of the Alan Partridge series, I'm Alan Partridge... er, a really really funny programme in my opinion, erm, and it actually became a news story when the second series of I'm Alan Partridge had a laugh track, which was post-The Office, and so many critics were sort of up in arms about this, er, without realising of course that it always had a laugh-track... IANNUCCI Yeah. BADDIEL ...er, that it was studio laughter, and that it wasn't The Office anyway! IANNUCCI Yeah. A lot of people said that we didn't have a laughter track. We... we went through this bizarre ritual of saying "But it did!" And they would say "No it didn't!" And we'd say "Well it did!" BADDIEL Did either of you actually say 'well you can fucking bugger off!' IANNUCCI Yes. And, and, what it... what it opened my eyes to was the fact... see, I don't mind about the public having a view about comedy. What I... what I am nervous of is this thing which you call 'the critical consensus'... BADDIEL Mm. IANNUCCI ...that's forming about comedy, because comedy is such a strange, er, mysterious thing, and something which - er, we're demonstrating it tonight - when you talk about it, it actually... stops being funny! The fact that... BADDIEL This is a hybrid show. It's supposed to be dull - this is the clever bit! IANNUCCI Yes, I know, I know... No no no, no no no... This is the serious part of the show. We had the funny stuff earlier BADDIEL There might be some funny stuff later, who knows! IANNUCCI Who knows. Er, but this... this is the serious, er, 'Newsnight-y' bit about comedy! Er, and... and the fact that more and more... (SPITS THE WORD) journalists who, er - a... and when you meet them you realise they haven't got a funny bone in their body - feel that they can talk about, y'know, the 'critical opinion' about comedy and I always... I always find... that strange. And the other disturbing thing about it is that comedy is becoming more and more 'cool' now, you know... BADDIEL Yeah. IANNUCCI ...it's... it's... it's adopting trends, and the whole point I always imagined when I started to do comedy, was comedy really was for the 'uncool' people, the people who didn't join the school rock band and, and who didn't have any sense of rhythm or were no good at sports, but who somehow made jokes about teachers and got away with it... BADDIEL Mmm. IANNUCCI ...and, er, managed to avoid, um, y'know, six or seven years of intense bullying by, er, by being able to make jokes... BADDIEL Well there is... I think there's a very strong thing about people who now think comedy should be 'art'... IANNUCCI Yes! BADDIEL ...er, and, and, it's, er, er, this... the thing I refered to before about, like, it's good if it's 'Dark'... IANNUCCI Yes! BADDIEL I hate that! I really... I mean this is just my personal bugbear, but I hate that. Dark is easy! Funny is hard. IANNUCCI Yes! IANNUCCI It's good if it's 'Dark'... and funny! BADDIEL Yeah, it's good if it's 'Dark' and funny. Dark without funny - Samuel Beckett's done that! Vicky Coren, do have an opinion about this? COREN I do, absolutely. It's all very well for modern critics to say it's patronising to tell the audience when to laugh - I'm grateful for it! If The Vicar Of Dibley didn't have a laughtrack I'd think it was a 'Tragedy'! But, er... It's all very well for you two comedy 'pros' to blame the critics for this and the 'critical consensus' on the parts of journalists. I would infer that it was at the feet of the performers. I think the problem is that they want to be cool - they go into comedy, they're 'comedians' and then they suddenly find it's a bit embarrassing to do comedy, it's a bit unsexy, a bit silly, and they want to be serious actors, I mean, really wonderful comics, whether it's Ricky Gervais or Steve Coogan or anybody else, and they're great comics, they could, they... they... start wanting to do serious plays and serious programmes and act in serious things and then you get a thing where comedy starts to bend over. A comedy show... people sort of want to make it look a bit like a drama, they think it's a bit naff to really admit that it's a comedy, so they say "well, we won't put the track on there, we'll choose a 'Drama style'..." and the individual performers feel a bit less like clowns at cocktail parties... IANNUCCI That's because there is a sort of a pressure - a sort of... I think we got it recently because of the 'media consensus' or whatever... for people to feel there's... somehow something not quite as good about stuff which is outwardly 'funny'... BADDIEL Well, that's what I'm saying. COREN Well even... even... even Woody Allen once said 'doing comedy is like sitting at the children's table'... BADDIEL Mm, yeah. COREN ...as if this were a bad thing! I mean, Woody Allen's serious movies are dreadful, and his comedies are great, and I personally think that comedy is the best of... WILLIAMS Yes, he really likes children! BADDIEL Woody Allen would love to sit at the children's table! COREN Well, even Woody Allen, who's a great great comic talent, thought there was something a little bit demeaning, a little bit embarrassing about working in this 'trivial medium'. IANNUCCI At... at the risk of sounding like I'm really trying to out-trump you, but... as I was saying to Woody on Saturday... HUGE LAUGH IANNUCCI Er, er... BADDIEL Were you really? IANNUCCI Yes. BADDIEL Aw, you... IANNUCCI It's a long story! But, er, I asked... I asked him if he felt that, er, y'know, comedy was less of an artform than, er, serious stuff, and he answered, he did say 'I've changed my view'. BADDIEL How did he say it? Can you do the impression? IANNUCCI I can't do the impression! BADDIEL Ah, shit. Ah, I was really looking forward to you just going into the impression then. I can't do it. COREN This relates very physically to the question that we're... that is being asked; what I'm saying is it's time for a renaissance where we should stop being ashamed of comedy, they should value it for the very great thing that it is. Put the laughter on the shows. Have the laughter track. Be proud to say you do comedy because there isn't anything better! BADDIEL I agree with that, but don't agree that comedians are embarrassed - I think that there is a consensus which makes that very difficult. I think if you have a 'big' show with 'big' laughs, people say it's 'old-fashioned'. It doesn't count with American shows - somehow Seinfeld, Frasier - which critics love - well they've forgotten that they have laugh tracks - they say "filmed in front of a live audience"! Sorry, Zoe, what do... what do you think? WILLIAMS Yeah, you've completely swizzled me here. I thought it was literally about whether... the 'noise' going on - that laughing noise going on behind these programmes and whether it was far too annoy... and now you're talking about the nature of comedy! BADDIEL Yeah. WILLIAMS I find everything funny! BADDIEL Do you? WILLIAMS I find adverts funny. That one with the Pedig... with the men pretending to be dogs! BADDIEL Which one is that? WILLIAMS It's these two little men! No, no, no, it's Pedigree Chum. These two little men, and they're... they're chasing this woman and they're pretending to be dogs and they're going "We're starving, we're starving, where have you been?" It's hilarious. If that had a laugh track I'd really like it! Anyway... The thing is, you see, if you... if you laugh out loud at a programme, which you don't actually very often, but if you... say you do, and there isn't a laugh track, you feel like a freak. Especially if you're sitting on your own, laughing, it's actually a bit frightening, you kind of hear your own voice, like "hahahah". You sound a bit psychotic... BADDIEL Like a murderer or something... or a villain in a pantomime. WILLIAMS ...and it really bugs me in novels, especially rubbish novels, but all novels when, y'know, somebody says a line and the next line says 'so and so snickered' - they never laugh in books. They just 'snicker'. Or 'titter'. And that really irritates me because I think you really can afford to let us be the judge. But with telly... because it... it is derived from the theatre really, and theatre - people went to see things together because it was more fun to watch them together. BADDIEL Well, very very quickly, following on that, we've actually got some laughs here that I got our producer... er, as Terry Wogan would say, to go to 'the vaults of Auntie Beeb' or something to find, 'cause I, y'know, I don't know what 'canned laughter' is myself, and all the shows that people say have got canned laughter it's just actually a live audience, so, let's hear what canned laughter actually sounds like. Here's your 'bread and butter laugh'. A QUICK BURST OF CANNED LAUGHTER BADDIEL Yeah, and here's your 'bread and butter laugh with applause' SHORT BURST OF CANNED LAUGHTER WITH CLAPPING BADDIEL Now, here's your... here's your 'little laugh'. I think of this as maybe when one of the politicans on Question Time comes up with a terrible pun. Like "David Blunkett? David Bonk-It more like!" ACTUAL AUDIENCE LAUGHS BADDIEL Well, I was wondering, does that joke actually become funnier if we give it a bigger laugh, okay? Well, let's listen - "David Blunkett? David Bonk-It more like!" HUGE BURST OF CANNED LAUGHTER BADDIEL No... Never mind. Okay... O'FARRELL Can I just point out to the people listening at home, there isn't... BADDIEL I don't think anyone will be listening to this bit! BADDIEL ...there isn't an audience in this room. All the laughter you've heard so far has been played in by the producer. (AUDIENCE LAUGHS) Even that one! IANNUCCI There is a studio audience for Newsnight. But it doesn't... O'FARRELL It nods, it nods! It goes 'Good point', stroke of chin... BADDIEL There is one particular laugh... I was on Room 101 once and I... put this in but they... they... they cut it out, um... and er... O'FARRELL Let it go, Dave! BADDIEL It's a particular laugh that really grates on me, which is... in a show like Keeping Up Appearences, where, er, there... someone, like, someone appears in their pants, the old ladies in the audience all start shrieking at how saucy it is... COREN DOES AN IMPRESSION OF AN OLD LADY LAUGHING ...and I think we've got an example of it now. Listen... listen to this. SHORT BURST OF CANNED LAUGHTER WITH SQUAWKING OLD WOMAN BADDIEL And they often... WILLIAMS They do it on purpose. They actually make somebody do that! BADDIEL No! What, by tickling them? That is the sound of 'old lady laughing' at seeing 'Richard' with nothing on except his boxer shorts. John, have you got... O'FARRELL I feel that er... er... er... that there is a law... a law of comedy that a joke is funnier if you hear other people laughing at it at the same time. 'Askey's Law', we should call it. And, er... BADDIEL Askey? O'FARRELL 'Askey's Law' after the great Arthur Askey ...er, no... if you... I was listening the other day to... er, erm, I'm Sorry..., er, I Haven't A Clue... BADDIEL What, you were actually listening to it or you've forgotten what you were listening to!? O'FARRELL ...er, and, erm it was from Hull, it was out of London, the audience were loving it and it was like being in a warm bath - every joke was really funny... BADDIEL Yeah, but... well you say that but I've listened to I'm Sorry... - I've never heard an audience laugh as much as they do at fucking I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue! "What are you laughing at?" GENERAL CONSTERNATION FROM THE PANEL O'FARRELL I... I really enjoyed it much more than... all others, sitting there and... BADDIEL I like... I like the sound of the laugh... I didn't know... I just... I've never heard them laugh as much as they do on that show. It's incredible. IANNUCCI It can also... I've done it sort of er, quietly on my own portable equipment, which is, if you put a laughter track on Eastenders... Pick out the... the really intense scenes... fists are flying... (CAST DO VARIOUS EASTENDERS VOICES) I've just... I've just played about with a titter here, a guffaw there... an ironic... It's hilarious! And then when one of them leaves, crying, go (SINGS) "diddle-da-dit-da-dooo'... BADDIEL It's time to move on... Heresy (unbroadcast round recorded: 20/12/04) Series 1, Show 4, 23/12/04, BBC Radio 4

'Heresy' - Show 4; Recording Date: 20/12/04; Recording Venue: The Cricketers Club of London. 71 Blandford Street, London W1U 8AB; TX: BBC Radio 4, 23/12/04 (Thur 6:30pm); Chairman: David Baddiel; Panellists: Armando Iannucci, Victoria Coren, Zoe Williams, John O'Farrell; Warm-up: Stan Stanley; Producer: Brian King. An Avalon Production for BBC Radio 4

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