It’s all too easy to take a staple like Front Row for granted
Certain Radio 4 series have a profoundly reassuring quality, like fixtures of a landscape, where they project a sense of having been around since time began. Was there ever a world without The World at One, for instance? Or a weekday without Today? Or a season untouched by Just a Minute, I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue and Desert Island Discs?
I would have put Front Row firmly in this category until last week, when the show cleared its throat and reminded us that it’s actually a millennial. Perhaps it’s the fact that it follows The Archers every weeknight, and so is inextricably associated with the Ambridge theme music, accounts for why I’d wrongly recalled it being far older. But there John Wilson, Kirsty Lang and a whooped-up BBC Radio Theatre audience were on Friday evening, ringing in Front Row’s 20th birthday with a special extended edition of the show.
The party itself was a fittingly upbeat and multifaceted affair, graciously marshalled by Wilson and Lang and peppered with critical expertise, spry performances, intriguing ideas – and that faint sense of barely-contained chaos that accompanies all of the best live broadcasts.
Bob Geldof made an impassioned and persuasive case for The Sopranos being the most significant creative work to have come out of the Front Row era. Neil Macgregor, former director of the British Museum, gave a long and thoughtful interview about the cultural changes he’s witnessed over the last two decades, as governments have come to recognise that “the arts are absolutely central to community and place”. Further along, poets Kate Fox and Caleb Femi gave pin-sharp readings of their work, before the Lancashire-born singersongwriter Rae Morris elegantly played the show out.
It’s easy to take a staple like Front Row for granted, but the truth is that arts broadcasting as varied, lively and unpretentious as this is a rare thing. Front Row Late – BBC Two’s latest attempt at a TV spin-off of the programme, with Mary Beard as host – demonstrated as much just a couple of hours later, with a debut episode that felt leaden and self-absorbed by comparison. It was hard to imagine that lasting much beyond a series or two – let alone 20 years.
The Book at Bedtime (Radio 4), all last week and for the rest of this one, is John Updike’s Pulitzer Prizewinning 1981 novel, Rabbit is Rich.
It’s the third book in a quartet charting the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, an American everyman who grows up and slowly goes to seed in a decaying industrial town called Brewer, Pennsylvania, and finds him running a Toyota car dealership in the late Seventies in his prosperous middle-age.
Updike is famous for the beauty of his descriptions, and for the Joycean skill with which he captured the interior life of his protagonists. Toby Jones, reading here, drew it all out masterfully, catching the poetry of Updike’s narration and giving each character – the half-satisfied Rabbit, his alcoholic wife Janice, his awkward son, Nelson – a voice that brought them swimming into the imagination.
The Beef and Dairy Network (Radio 4, Thursday) is a delightfully surreal comedy, like a bovine industry newsletter as reimagined by Chris Morris and the Pythons. It exists mostly as a podcast, produced and presented by the comedian Ben Partridge; but is so good that Radio 4 commissioned a handful of episodes for the airwaves – and Thursday night saw the series return for a new four-part run. The opener was given over to an interview with the former Bovine Poet Laureate, Michael Banyan (Henry Paker), which was surpassingly funny and dark – and came as a welcome break from the kind of play-it-safe groupthink that often passes for comedy elsewhere at the BBC.
The winds of change blew gently through Radio 3 on Saturday afternoon, as a new series called J to Z replaced Jazz Line-up in the 5.006.30pm slot. Like Jazz Now, which replaced Jazz on 3 in 2016, the aim of this new show is to freshen up the network’s non-classical offerings – and to appeal to curious listeners as well as devoted jazzers. That’s not an easy brief; but the first episode came close to acing it. Singer Jumoké Fashola, hosting, was relaxed, confident, easy to like. There was live music with a dancing beat, from a brilliant, Caribbean-inflected British jazz group called Sons of Kemet; there were wonderful old records from Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Art Blakey; and the music was interspersed throughout with illuminating, non-fusty discussion of the songs and the players. I’ll be back for more.