Nothing grim about Melvyn Bragg’s Northern odyssey
Melvyn Bragg, that Northern powerhouse of popular scholarship, is on a 10-part exploration of lands east and west between Dumfriesshire and Derbyshire. In The Matter of the
North (Radio 4, daily) he rebuilds the old kingdom of Northumbria, celebrating its landscape, people, invasions and achievements from after the Romans left to now.
He does it with confidence, talking to experts, walking the landscape through drizzle and mist, wind occasionally rattling his microphone. He conjured images of wolf and wild boar territory in the Monday’s episode and of monks and miracles yesterday. His enthusiasm for discovering the “why” of everything, from variations in dialect to the power of bishops, is contagious. His gift for unlocking tricky significance (such as the Synod of Whitby’s seventh-century decision to bow to Rome’s authority on the dating of Easter) is remarkable.
Given that most of the documentary evidence we have for this time is, actually, pretty much ecclesiastical spin doctoring, it’s impossible not to admire the thrust and sweep of this series. If it inspires someone to go and see the magnificent Bewcastle and Ruthwell crosses either side of what is now the Scottish border, or to gaze at the Lindisfarne Gospels in the British Library, or take the Metro from Newcastle to Jarrow and see how Bede’s monastic chapel has been serenely enfolded into the working church of St Peter’s, so much the better.
It’s almost enough to blot out Bragg’s tendency to ask his visiting scholars questions whose answers affirm his grasp of their subject. “That’s right,” they usually reply, or “very much so.” Long-standing fans may also remember, back in the days before he was a peer and did Radio 4’s
Start the Week, how ruffled he can get if a guest ventures to disagree. I see that Joan Bakewell, once one such, (and now herself ennobled) is to be on The Matter of the North. Good to know hatchets can be buried. So onward, this week and next, to dialect, poetry, engineering and the Northern competitive spirit, with congratulations to producer Faith Lawrence, to Radio 4 for backing such an ambitious series and, of course, to the great questing Bragg.
Miriam Margolyes’ Adventures in Radio (Radio 4 Extra, Saturday) was simply magnificent. A friend phoned to ask how MM was going to fill three hours. “Just listen,” I said. I hadn’t heard a preview so perhaps this was rather bold. That person rang the next day and said she’d not only been enthralled, she’d listened again to the repeat that night. “Not just because Margolyes was so marvellous,” she said, “but because her love of radio shone through so many wonderful programmes.”
All true. If you didn’t hear it, you still can via the iPlayer, but here are some of the reasons why you should: Margolyes is an actress of almost infinite variety; she can make you laugh, cry, think and, above all, put a glisten on any script; she was born in 1941 and, as she said in this programme, is therefore of the last generation brought up solely on radio; and ITMA,
Toytown, Marjorie Westbury as Steve in every Paul Temple mystery, all imprinted on her. After Margolyes joined the BBC Repertory Company in 1965, she learned how the real Marjorie Westbury (short, fat and rather horrid to Margolyes) was unlike the fictional Steve, but how all that melted away when Westbury acted Steve. On radio, if you’re good at it, you can be anyone the script asks you to be.
This compilation began with a documentary, her Sentimental Journey from 1999, when she went to Belarus in the company of Arthur Smith, talking about her family, finding out where they had come from, what had happened to those who didn’t manage to escape. There came Perry Pontac’s witty, adventurous comedy After Albert with Margoyles playing a widowed Queen Victoria in besotted pursuit of Disraeli (suave Peter Jeffrey). Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I followed, made in 1992, a glorious “what-if ” imagining of the Royal family being replaced by a dour republican regime, MM doing every single voice.
This, like other items on this rich bill, was directed by John Tydeman, who had discovered Townsend years before and backed her ever after. Since Margolyes asked specifically for him to direct this reading, the BBC flew him to America to do it. “Cheaper,” he told me, “than getting her back here to do it,” so much in Hollywood demand she was, and is. Follow it all week on Radio 4 Extra at 2.00pm and count our radio blessings.