If this is radio’s future then we should all be worried
Quake, a new audio drama, is a signpost to the BBC’S future. It appeared on Monday, not on radio but online. Go to find it on the Radio 4 website or BBC iplayer and a little sign tells you that soon you’ll need a password for access. Here’s why. “Your BBC gets better when it’s all about you,” it says, meaning the BBC’S intention is to feed you online more of what your listening habits reveal.
That’s a dangerous proposition. I like cake but if I ate lots more lemon drizzle it would definitely be of more benefit to the cake makers than to me. It is, however, a proposition for the internet age as old media fight off competition from the new. The BBC, having led the way into the digital revolution, must now prepare for a future beyond the licence fee, where viewers and listeners subscribe specifically for what they want. To ensure it keeps its substantial share of the radio and TV markets, the BBC is competing vigorously for additional online customers.
Hence Quake, a 12-part drama in four to six minute episodes, with illustrations, animations, superb sound design. If you have a virtual reality headset you can watch the first episode in 3D, as if an earthquake is actually happening to you. Thereafter, the 2D episodes can be shuffled in any order, following the action from differing points of view (survivors, rescuers, etc) via computer, tablet or smartphone. But would you want to?
Er, no. All those inventive graphics and beautifully designed sounds don’t make you believe, even for a single minute, that you’re inside the action. The characters are too thin, the plot too linear. Everyone keeps explaining things. You could say the same about other Radio 4 plays (Home Front, a four year, day by day account of everyday civilian life in the First World War, is a strong contender in the tedium stakes) but that’s old fashioned radio and Quake is trying to be thoroughly modern audio. It also comes as a podcast. On Monday’s Front Row (Radio 4’s nightly arts review) Telegraph critic Pete Naughton said that’s where, in sound only, it works better. That was kind. Even without having to look at Quake, its big captions swimming up at you, saying THINK or DAUGHTER, as drama it’s hollow, a triumph of form over content. John Cleese Presents (Radio 4, Wednesdays) is more of a tussle between expectation and despair. We remember Cleese as funny on radio, shining long ago on I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again. We know he’s thoughtful, as shown in the two books he coauthored with psychiatrist Robin Skynner, their Families and How to Survive Them even becoming an impressive Radio 4 series. Hopes were high for this new one but, listening to last week’s opening episode, I wondered if it might be a parody, so bad it was good. Alas, it was too sad even to be that memorably bad. This series offers so many excuses for Cleese to read from his autobiography that the BBC could send him a bill for promotional services rendered. Come back, Midweek, all is forgiven.
For something genuinely amazing go to the BBC iplayer and find the edition of Frankly Speaking that was repeated recently on Radio 4 Extra, the one with Evelyn Waugh, aged 50, being interviewed by three critics, Charles Wilmot, Jack Davies and Stephen Black, on the old Home Service in 1953. The aggressive banality of their questions (“What kind of paper do you write on?”) grows sinister, Kafkaesque. Waugh’s answers thrust back, disdainful, aimed at reciprocal discomfort. It could be a play by Harold Pinter. Maybe this broadcast inspired him. It is certainly said to have inspired Waugh’s novel about breakdown, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. You can find this radio treasure on the iplayer for another 10 days or so. For future access to such broadcasts I will gladly obtain a password. Fifty years from now, I wonder, will anyone do the same for Quake?
Meanwhile, the ground seems to be trembling at Radio 4’s Today programme. Reports abound of discord among its five presenters. Two, it is said, have complained about the overweening ways of Nick Robinson, one of them to Radio 4 controller Gwyneth Williams, the other to Gavin Allen, head of daily news programmes. What an undiplomatic way to welcome Today’s new editor Sarah Sands. Still, they may find Sands more inclined to augment the show’s seriously depleted reportorial staff than feed the egos of its front persons.