Daunted by James Joyce? Radio 4 is here to help
Last week, the Labour peer Andrew Adonis took pause from a gruelling schedule to offer his thoughts about broadcasting in the UK. “BBC on ropes”, he tweeted. “Sport largely gone to Sky. Quality drama gone to Netflix. BBC news increasingly Brexit, weak & simply Govt press releases. If Netflix set up a sharp, balanced News service, what would be left besides local radio, a desert island & a few good foreign correspondents?”
As with most incendiary tweets, it caused a brief furore – and ultimately revealed more about the sender than the subject. It would appear that Adonis doesn’t listen to much BBC radio. If he did, he’d know about the hours that millions of us spend, every week, in the refined company of DJS and presenters whose voices are as familiar as family members; or the magical feeling of being transported, over the airwaves, to the Albert Hall, Maida Vale, Old Trafford, Lords, Ambridge; or the brilliant documentary-makers employed by Radio 4 and the World Service; or any one of a hundred other broadcasting pleasures that are unheard-of on any service but the BBC. Perhaps someone should take him aside and show him the schedules.
They could start with Book at Bedtime (Radio 4). It’s given over, all this week and next, to a reading of James Joyce’s first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The book follows Stephen Dedalus – a fictionalised version of Joyce himself – through childhood and adolescence in late 19th-century Ireland, and is alive with music, wit, moments of wonder and terror, and some of the most beautiful descriptive writing in the English language.
Many readers remain wary of Joyce, whose reputation as a titan of modernism casts a daunting shadow. But to hear his work performed well is to feel all wariness melt away. And Andrew Scott, who read it, may be the finest performer of Joyce in a generation. His voice, by turns tender, quizzical, roused with anger, dancing with glee, moves with the text like a musician following a conductor. You can tell that he knows the work backwards; but something else, too: that he loves it. All 10 episodes are available online and I’ve listened through twice, and they keep getting better.
One of the curses of a successful radio format is that it can gradually nudge the production team into complacency and repetition (Dead Ringers, I’m talking to you). But Short
(Radio 4, Tuesday) – produced by independents Falling Tree, and now into its 15th series – still retains a remarkable capacity to surprise. Each episode presents three short audio stories by three different producers, all relating to a common theme and linked together by mini-monologues from the host, Josie Long. This week’s theme was landscape. Evocative pieces about a woman’s journey through the charred ribbon gum trees of New South Wales, the strange interior life of a tiny island in the Baltic Sea, and a man’s reluctant exile from the wartorn city of Mosul followed. Each one conjured a cinema-reel of pictures, and brought voices to the fore that aren’t often heard on the radio. Long may it continue.
Jo Whiley is a fine radio presenter but not the best interviewer, with a deferential, unfocused style of questioning that reminds me of political broadcasting from the Fifties (“What would you like to talk about first, Prime Minister?”). It didn’t take the shine off Liam Gallagher, though, who came on her Radio 2 show last week to talk about his new album. Gallagher is one of the world’s great un-self-censoring talkers, a gift to listeners everywhere and soon launched into an account of a preoasis trip to Amsterdam, during which he found a generously stuffed wallet on the pavement. The trip, he added, was then extended for a few more days. Wiley stuttered nervously, and tried to get him to say that he’d do things differently now. To our amusement, Gallagher was unrepentant. “No, I’d keep the money, man,” he deadpanned.
When the drizzle falls, and it feels as if every pop song on the radio has either been sung, written, or inspired by Ed Sheeran, I turn to Late Junction
(Radio 3) for solace. It’s like a radio programme from an alternative universe, where musical genres have blurred and weirdness has been allowed to take hold. Last Thursday’s edition featured artists from Morocco, Japan, Turkey, Canada and Brazil, an old song from Shirley Collins and brand new compositions created in Maida Vale studios that same day by a trio of artists who’d never met before. The 90 minutes flew by.