Is BBC radio celebrating an anniversary? Well I never…
Is there anyone in the UK who doesn’t know Radios 1, 2 3 and 4 all reached their 50th anniversary last Saturday? That claim is not entirely true, of course. Radios 3 and 4 went on evolving for another few years, ditto the separate identities of Radios 1 and 2. What actually happened on September 30, 1967 was that BBC radio launched Radio 1 to grab the young audience that had listened to pirate radio. This monopoly lasted until 1973 when British commercial radio was legally born. But that’s a bit boring for the BBC.
Hence the universal celebratory presence on most BBC networks last week of Tony Blackburn, the first DJ on the air for Radio 1 and (having settled his dispute with the BBC for unjustly suspending him) still broadcasting. How well he did, saying more or less the same thing to so many different people and still sounding cheery.
His rate of cheeriness, however, rose in exact parallel to mine of grump. Every day, I admonished the radio, is some kind of anniversary. So I turned it off to prove my point. At 8.00pm I relented. Radio 2 was putting on a special six-hour disco. My passion for disco being intense I had to be, in spirit at least, at Manchester’s O2 Apollo arena with Trevor Nelson, Craig Charles and Ana Matronic.
“Are you ready for this, Manchester?” said Nelson. Ready I was. My kitchen has not witnessed such dancing since I discovered where my sons had hidden my complete works of Earth, Wind and Fire. There was a brilliant live set here from Soul 2 Soul, strong drummer, superb singer. Trevor told us to feel the universal love. No problem. On came American band Shalamar. My love dwindled slightly, until they got to A Night to Remember when I realised that with a drummer as good as theirs, I could forgive the lead singer’s sexist backchat. Craig Charles’s session that followed was a revelation in disco art, overlapping patterns of changing sound and rhythm, alchemising the familiar into the elegantly new. When Charles is in the house, kitchen dancers come into their own. Alas, I didn’t make it through to Ana Matronic at midnight, needing by then the company of Morpheus rather than Bacchus.
Ahead lay the mighty challenge of Sunday night on Radio 3, a lavish new production of in centenary tribute to its author, Anthony Burgess. This was the first performance of Burgess’s own adaptation, a kind of musical akin to John Gay’s 18th century Beggar’s Opera, about morality, brutality, the role of the state, the nature of freedom. Grimly funny, wildly inventive, it makes the mind spin, stopping it with such sudden propositions as, “Is the man who chooses the bad better than the man who has good imposed on him?” Weaving in and out of music from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (played by the BBC Philharmonic, live, at the recording three days before), Burgess, in both his 1962 novel and here, made it a more of an epic struggle between good and evil than Stanley Kubrick did in the 1971 film. This production, by Gary Brown, captured its swoops of thought and irony. Samuel Edward-cook as Alex, the hoodlum protagonist brainwashed into “goodness” by the state, then reverse brainwashed to fit politics, was truly impressive.
M(Radio 3, Saturday, repeated Sunday) was marking its own 40th birthday and, via Paul Lewis, did it well. The programme sprang, we learned, from the old Financial World Tonight because, back in the Seventies, ordinary people were building small investment portfolios. Mark Rogerson from the original team told the story, remembering asking listeners to send in their queries, secretaries in tears at not being able to get into the office for the resulting sacks of mail. Those were the BBC days: secretaries; offices; letters; answers.
I won’t be here for the next four weeks. I’ll be jaunting around to conferences and festivals and such. But I won’t stop listening, especially to
where we are, I think, at several significant plot points. That dead horse in Alistair’s surgery. Lilian’s impending marriage to Justin. Adam and Mark thinking of having a child by a surrogate mother, not the erratic Kate thank goodness but possibly the still flaky Helen. What are they thinking of? Every soap in the known universe knows the perils of surrogacy. I can’t leave them on their own to manage. They need you in your small corner and me in mine to advise them. Let’s compare notes in November.