The week in radio Gillian Reynolds If radio is well-guided and informed, it is unmissable
Radio executives, BBC and commercial, worry about the future. They have good reason. Count the number of people you see tethered by ear plugs to some small device. The odds are they are listening not to radio but either to streamed music provided by the phone makers or to podcasts. One day soon, the executives foresee, listening to radio as we know it is therefore bound to drop.
I think they overlook some things about British radio, BBC and commercial, that make nine out of 10 of us still love it. One is the company of favourite presenters, Eddie Mair, Jane Garvey, Nick Ferrari, Ken Bruce, Sue Macgregor and all. Another is the personal pleasure of having complex issues explained in plain language, think of Radio 3’s The Essay, Stephen Hawking’s Reith Lectures or, currently, Radio 4’s The Briefing Room
(Thursday nights), radio’s most unmissable half-hour.
This programme takes an issue in the news, addresses it with simple questions, obtains expert answers, arrives at a logical conclusion. The questions, however, come from careful analytic thought, the experts are the world’s best. The subject is usually something that’s starting to be significant in the news and will, probably, become more so over the following days.
Last week, it was missile defence systems and, particularly, the firing of a North Korean missile over Japan. Since then, this subject has become more urgent each day, bubbling up everywhere. As it does, I keep in mind what David Aaronovitch, The Briefing Room’s presenter, helped me grasp: what technology North Korea has, what damage it could do, and what might prevent it. As the stages of his interrogation made plain, this is a situation to manage rather than a problem to solve; that offensive action has a devastating advantage; that diplomacy is the most reliable defence. For anyone who has listened to Radio 4’s Analysis over its five decades, this may have been a trip down dark memory lane. It was, however, a singularly well-guided one, timely, assured, informed, pellucid.
Iheard The Funeral Singer (Radio 4, Friday) by accident. The trailer didn’t draw me to it. If I’d known the presenter, Kate Bottley, had been a contestant on TV’S Celebrity Masterchef I’d have retuned (my resistance to TV cookery contests being unfashionable but total). As it was, my first thought was that she didn’t have much of a voice but then, because she seemed really interested in the music people choose for funerals, I started to warm to her. I didn’t realise until afterwards that she is an ordained minister. I just liked how she talked to people.
I knew that religious funerals are dwindling in number, that music helps evoke the spirit of the departed and soothes mourners. What I didn’t know was there’s a musical repertoire that spans religious and secular funerals, and there are agencies for singers who perform do everything from Abide With Me to Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. I still can’t decide whether my funeral will start or end with The Spacious Firmament on High.
The louse. What a subject. Forget the metaphorical application of the noun to humans. Think nits, head lice, body lice, disease. What? You don’t want to? I didn’t either but Radio 4 was on and my hands were wet and the phone was ringing and by the time I got around to turning off
Natural Histories (Tuesday, repeated this Monday night) I was hooked. This series is such a charmer, nits or not, that its mix of poetry, expertise and legend always seems to catch me by the ear. Launched with great fanfare a couple of years ago, and somewhat taken for granted since, I was particularly pleased last week to learn the fine-tooth comb was only invented in 1942. No wonder my mother wielded ours with such elan. And now I know the officially prescribed routine: find, lift, remove, rejoice. Yesterday, they did snails, from the Romans to Dali, to eat, use or eradicate.
Book of the Week (Radio 4, daily) is Robert Mccrum’s latest slice of his life, Every Third Thought, about falling over and glimpses of his own mortality. Nicky Henson is the reader, his voice a bit like Mccrum’s (midbrown shading to dark) but a delivery altogether more off-puttingly theatrical. Last week, Robert Webb read his autobiography How Not to Be a Boy. I tried to ignore it, so much was it being promoted everywhere else. Enough, I huffed. But it wasn’t. The text had unexpected depth, his reading took us into dark corners and out again. Good company indeed.