My places of refuge when I’ve had my fill of politicians
Ifeel guilty. Ashamed. Wretched. Ungrateful. My radio tries hard to inform, educate and entertain me about tomorrow’s General Election, yet here I am, totally fed up with the subject. It’s like being served a dinner over which you know vast trouble has been taken but of which you can barely face a fork full. I don’t think I am alone. There’s a gap between party rhetoric and practical reality and it’s yawning.
Every morning I hear people on Radios 4 and 5 Live, on LBC and BBC local stations being asked about their concerns (taxes, Brexit, food prices, schools, public transport, safety) but replying that they aren’t sure how any party will address them. Presenters try to illumine the statistics, explain issues, debate them. Politicians deliver pat, predictable, formulaic responses. Audience figures for music stations are probably surging.
Me? I go looking for wisdom, cheeriness, jokes. I thought I’d find some of each in The Weekend
(Radio 4, Saturday) by and starring Michael Palin, adapted for radio by Richard Stoneman. An enthusiastic publicist described this work as “dryly comic and acutely observed as Ayckbourn, as wry as Wodehouse and as acerbic as Coward.” That turned out to be hyperbolic for a somewhat
predictable study in suburban depression lit by occasional flashes of insight. Palin carefully played the lead, a man eviscerated by unhappiness. Penelope Wilton played his wife brilliantly. Marilyn Imrie directed, fitfully.
Howzat for Hollywood (Radio 4, Saturday) had a peculiar feel to it, of a good idea, long discussed in commission, finally brought to air because it had a famous presenter. This was the story, patched together from old photos and memories, of the Hollywood Cricket Club, founded in the Thirties by expatriate British film actor C Aubrey Smith. It was told by Jim Carter, a fine actor and ardent cricketer whose metaphysical kit now bears the noted brand name of Downton Abbey.
But what was the story? That Americans don’t understand cricket? That, once upon a time, there were enough cricket-playing actors in California to make a regular team? I knew about David Niven and Errol Flynn, each of whom were mentioned. I didn’t know about the cricketing life of Nigel Bruce, the Dr Watson to Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes in many a film, or that Boris Karloff was a cricket fanatic who spent his final decade in Britain, going to matches every possible day. Imagine, the man who made Frankenstein famous drinking beer on the boundary at Lord’s. Lots of stories, but no particular place for this show to go. Pity.
How to Make an Archive on 4 (Radio 4, Saturday) was all about self-instruction, through records or radio programmes. Alan Dein, himself a walking audio archive, had enormous fun playing old recordings of the legendary Sparkie Williams, Tyneside’s famous champion talking budgie, and daring to wonder if that really was Sparkie’s voice or that of his enterprising owner. There were startlingly intimate instructional discs on how to make love (a warm room and supportive furniture advised). Dein recalled Eileen Fowler’s still memorable sessions of exercises to music (“arms up, over to the left, over to the right” to the tune of Put Your Shoes on, Lucy played, briskly, on the piano), with two ladies in their eighties attesting to the lasting benefits of Eileen’s routines. Here was how to teach yourself folk guitar, the recorder, yodelling (“relax, breath deeply, use tongue and voice flexibility”). The next time I hear a Cabinet minister talking across a Today programme interviewer, I shall definitely try the yodel.
Tony Hatch: as Heard on TV (Radio 2, last night) is recommended to anyone who shares my knack of recognising signature tunes but not quite recalling which was which while hating, with intensity, quite a few of them. In this first of three episodes, Hatch, composer of many a song and signature tune, chatted happily to the inventor of the annoying blast that signals BBC TV’S The One Show, before comparing and contrasting his Neighbours theme with that of the man who did the one for Home and Away. In the “mystery” section of children’s programme idents, I got more than half. Hatch’s presentational style may be stoutly oaken but his material is nostalgia gold.
In the tributes to the late actor Peter Sallis I’ve heard no mention of his radio work. Yet anyone who remembers him in When the Wind Blows, the award-winning play by Raymond Briggs, based on the latter’s famous cartoon book of the same name, will still recall that warmly reassuring Sallis voice amid Brigg’s chilling imaginings of nuclear war.