Mantel’s piece of history brings the past back to life
When the US President questions the truth purveyed by mainstream media, when our own Prime Minister trips over her slogans, it is time to consider the value of words, what separates fact from fiction. Welcome, therefore, Hilary Mantel, novelist, scholar, this year’s Reith Lecturer.
Her overall title is Resurrection: The Art and Craft, by which I understand her intent is to show what we discover from the past about ourselves. The first broadcast yesterday on Radio 4, was titled The Day Is for the Living, which is from something her great-grandmother would say a century ago, “The day is for the living and the night is for the dead.” Neighbours would call on that great-grandmother to lay out their dead. Why do we do this? Mantel asked. Because we honour that which has been human.
Commemoration is an active process, she added. We define ourselves by our families, our memories of them. We chase the dead, looking for clues to ourselves but, while memory is powerful, it is not always reliable. We look to history for facts but its evidence is not always complete and often re-evaluated. Good history must always be in a constant state of self-questioning. Historians can tell us what people did, she said, they can’t tell us what they thought. That’s where art comes in.
Her art enters that margin between the objective and subjective, filling gaps between established fact, making us feel the past, trying to get at its truth. My historian friends will mock this. Questioners at this first lecture (and at the second, as I know because I was at both recordings) challenge her on it. Interpretation, she replies, is inevitable but so are the dangers of fallibility and our own inbuilt bias.
If you agree that art can help us comprehend what happens, you should listen to these lectures, read them on the BBC website. Now is the time to search for the value of words, whether uttered or printed. And if you only know Mantel by her Booker Prize-winning Tudor novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, read her more widely. I recommend her earlier
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, set in Seventies Saudi Arabia. It sprang to mind when yesterday’s news reported a woman arrested there for driving a car.
Radio 5 Live listeners won’t have been totally surprised by the General Election results. This network’s coverage of the campaign and how it was being received all over the country was indicative of how the vote would go. Yes, I admit I grew weary of all the angry phone-ins. But at least it felt as if 5 Live, from Wake
Up to Money through to late-night conversations, was in real touch with the national grass roots.
Considering, too, that 5 Live in Salford had responded so swiftly and so well to the challenge of reporting the Manchester and London bombings (when everything, including the running orders of 6 Music shows, was minutely examined for possible breaches of propriety), the energy and range of its election reporting was remarkable. Congratulations to Stephen Nolan, Emma Barnett and Chris Mason, the overnight team that truly shone.
If you have had enough of politics, take comfort in comedy. On Wednesday evenings, Radio 4 has John Finnemore’s Double Acts, charming plays for two actors that take the familiar and shape it into something bright and surprising. Last week, Julia Mckenzie played a lady of later years, disposed to verbal and other confusions. Gus Brown played a man about to take her for a ride. For two minutes I thought I knew where it was going. Then, deliciously, I began realising I didn’t.
On Wednesday mornings, there’s It’s a Fair Cop (Radio 4), in which serving police officer Alfie Moore takes his audience through an actual case, something that happened to him, asking what they would have done, outlining the requirement of both law and police procedure. How worthy that sounds. This, however, is truly funny because Moore, and co-writer Will Ing, appear to be men of good humour, not an inevitable element of radio comedy as its snarkier side (eg, The News Quiz) often reveals. This show actually makes you feel glad.
From tonight onwards (what is it about Wednesdays that makes Radio 4 feed us so much comedy?), there’s also, late night, The Damien Slash
Mixtape. I’ve heard a preview and I love, love, love it. Why? It made me so happy I forgot Trump, May, reshuffles, Brexit, even the persistent braying of Nigel Farage on LBC. Need I say more?