Living the high life with the wonderful St Joan
I have now listened to Martin Wolf ’s Radio 4 programme How Low Can Rates Go? three times, the first being before the broadcast. The BBC has a press preview website, indispensable to writers of previews, and when I heard it there I thought it very timely and so recommended it highly to Telegraph readers, in Review, the Sunday Telegraph and the daily paper.
Then, because events can overtake such programmes and they may have had last-minute changes made, I listened again to it on transmission last Thursday morning. Its analysis of why the world may be heading towards financial disaster came across even more strongly.
There have been, as Wolf pointed out, record low interest rates for eight years now. In the past, low interest rates have made borrowing easier and so made economies grow. Before 2007 we had never had a bank interest rate lower than two per cent. Since 2008, it has sunk to 0.5 per cent, the lowest, yet there is still no growth. “So here we are again,” Wolf said, “staring into the abyss.” Would the next step, he asked, be negative rates of interest, when banks require depositors to pay?
Listening early yesterday to Radio 5 Live’s Wake Up to Money I learned that this is now happening. NatWest is warning business customers it may charge them, other banks might soon follow suit. It may not yet affect retail clients but the effect on pensions will be dramatic and immediate. So I turned to the BBC iPlayer and listened to Martin Wolf again. Sure enough, it was all there, even scarier than the first time. One of his experts said we are living in an Alice in Wonderland world, where everything is the opposite, thus, if we save, we lose. There are radical options to get us out of this mess, said Wolf, but each comes with risk. My head was spinning by the time Andy Haldane of the Bank of England began explaining “digital cash”. Meanwhile, the global political dangers (rise of nationalism, revolts against the elite) are obvious. “Uncomfortable,” said Martin Wolf, making me suddenly grasp that word’s literal meaning, “and set to last.”
Still, we can always makes jokes. For some good ones about what eight years of deflation have done to employment try Radio 4’s Wednesday late-night comedy, Expenses Only, about internships. Alex Lynch, a new young writer, clearly knows the rivalries and exploitations that these days go into proving yourself worthy of a paying job. Tonight, his work-hungry rivals Tim and Miranda try the world of politics. After those of advertising and design it should be a doddle. Cheer yourself up even more with, as recommended below right, Joan Collins: a Life in Lipstick on Radio 2. Last week’s episode was a belter, racing between her childhood (first stage appearance, aged nine, as a boy in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House) through her days as a Rank studios starlet to her contract being sold (“like a pound of Brussels sprouts,” she said) to 20th Century Fox and Hollywood where “they made a star of one”. She was just 20 and watched “mouth open in awe” at everything, Ava Gardner storming out on a beau, Joan noting for future use the drama Ava put into donning her mink stole. She learned from Bette Davis to be kind (as Bette wasn’t) to young actresses. She discovered, on The Road to Hong Kong, why the film crew hated Bing Crosby but loved Bob Hope. She lived with Robert Beatty and dated Robert Wagner until the night he introduced her to Anthony Newley and, said Wagner, “that was that”. She married Newley, had two daughters and, at 28, found herself “washed up”. Not our Joan, as you’ll discover tonight. These two shows move like lightning, tunes and quotes and scraps of dialogue popping up like non-stop slices of delicious toast. Economics, it ain’t. Life, it is. Did you hear Stephanie Cole’s With Great Pleasure (Radio 4, Monday afternoon)? I hope so. It was crammed with wonderful poems (from Michael Longley, Louis MacNeice among others) and fine writers (Miles Kington, for one) presented with such joy that it felt as if we were all there with her in the cool of the BBC Radio Theatre and not struggling at home to get yet another stuck window open.
If you heard Monday night’s Prom on Radio 3, the Glyndebourne Barber of Seville, we may have winced together as The Politics of Shaving came under discussion in the interval. Seldom have two experts (Kathryn Hughes and Alun Withey) and a chairperson (Shahidha Bari) tried harder to amuse to so little effect. Three dogs a-barking, more like.