Dropping ‘Listen to the Band’ hit a bum note for Radio 2
If you read last week about Radio 2’s new schedule which, in May, will bring in more women presenters, shuffle some time slots and drop two of the network’s oldest programmes, The Organist Entertains and Listen to the Band, you may have felt a faint tingle of precognition. Fairy Gill, a creature who appears at Christmas in this space, had foreseen the BBC’S determination to capture and retain listeners aged 45 and under.
Why this age group? Because, the BBC believes, without younger listeners all radio will rapidly wither and perish. What nobody yet knows, however, is whether listeners aged above 45 will still love Radio 2 enough after these changes to maintain the network as the nation’s favourite.
The dropping of Listen to the Band bothers me most because, although it is hidden away in a late-night slot on Tuesdays, it is a vital part of Britain’s musical heritage with a vivid role in musical education now. Radio 2 has pledged to keep some brass music in Friday Night Is Music Night and Clare Teal’s Sunday night show. But what Listen to the Band has done, consistently, for decades, is keep alive the links between learning to play and performing at every level, from school to concert hall. Yet, maybe there’s a glimmer of hope. Radio 3’s In Tune on Monday had host Sean Rafferty talking and listening to A4, a bright young brass ensemble on their way to a performance that night at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall.
Archive on 4 (Radio 4, Saturday) was Frankenstein Lives!, part of the network’s tribute season to Mary Shelley. It is 200 years since the publication of her novel, and Christopher Frayling did very well by it. His breadth of reference, from lit-crit through psychology to screen studies, was a joy. His conclusion – that Shelley’s creation myth has become, in this century, more familiar to us than the biblical Adam and Eve – was logical, thoughtful, astonishing. The deft producer was Jane Long for independents Hidden Flack.
There were all sorts of surprises in The Week in Westminster (Radio 4, Saturday), presented by Helen Lewis, produced by Peter Mulligan. The first was to find so much cross-party support for serious thought (as opposed to the mouthing of partisan clichés) on what to do about the crisis in the National Health Service. Successive guests provided more unexpectedly united insights, such as how to view last week’s government reshuffle (sceptically), what went wrong with the introduction of Universal Credit (it needed three departments to cooperate, they didn’t) and why it is a very bad idea to change Secretaries of State and Ministers so often. It isn’t often The Week in Westminster cheers me up. This one did, as if the radio had been listening while I shouted at it right through 2017.
The Vital Spark, Radio 4’s tribute season to the novelist Muriel Spark, is proving anything but sparky. A dramatisation of her 1959 novel Memento Mori (Radio 4, Saturday) tried ingeniously to bring to life her crew of interconnected oldies, each of whom is getting anonymous phone calls reminding them that they will die. On the page you can keep track, if you try hard, of who is who and why they all prey on each other. On Sunday, there was an adaptation of her thriller, The Driver’s Seat, about a woman impelled towards her own murder. For two weeks The Book at Bedtime has been A Far Cry from
Kensington, her autobiographical adventures in Fifties bedsit land. To start the year the Book of the Week was Alan Taylor’s memoir of her,
Appointment in Arezzo. None of the programmes I’ve heard so far has caught her fatal attraction as a writer for the page, how she seems so chatty, observant and funny but is actually an assassin, a witch, “a bitch”, a stitcher-up. Men, I think, love Spark more than women do, perhaps because her heart is so cold, her eye so icy. On radio her essential spell is proving harder to weave.
There are no reservations at all about Cathy Fitzgerald’s series
Moving Pictures (Radio 4, yesterday). This is where you can listen to an art work being described and, if you have access to a computer, tablet or phone, see it too, zooming in on the details she’s describing. Her first choice was an early 19th-century patchwork of embroidered scenes from life, minute people, animals, flowers – Ann West’s work, 1820. This programme, even if you’re not very adept on doing zooms on a computer screen, is utterly beautiful, essentially BBC, whatever your age.