The Proms give the perfect picture of sound and quality
The sound picture is how radio gets away with being so cheap. You don’t need much. It’s the tick of a clock to show you’re inside, or the howl of wind to show you’re not, or those very insistent cows from The Archers. You then do all the heavy lifting, imagining the backdrop, but it doesn’t feel like a sweat because your mind’s eye is such a nimble producer, the ultimate fixer, in fact. It can conjure up a cast of thousands in full period dress in the time it takes to say “rhubarb”.
Monday’s late-night BBC Proms 2018: Pioneers of Sound (Radio 3), a celebration of the art of making wildly abstract sound pictures, was topped and tailed by two women who invented electronic music as we know it. Both started as BBC studio engineers, trying to give the listeners at home the most faithful recordings and the most suitable sound pictures. Then both went rogue.
First was Delia Derbyshire (19372001), who composed the Doctor Who theme. We heard a bit of The Delian Mode (1968), her incidental music for the same show. The sound picture slithered all over the place. Sometimes the timbre of the notes was like jet planes overhead; then the odd peep of sonar pushed you underwater.
At the end came electronic music’s Prometheus, Daphne Oram (19252003), who co-founded the BBC Radiophonics Workshop in 1958. We heard the then 23-year-old Oram’s Still Point (1949), played by two orchestras, as live microphones distorted her Shostakovich-like score. The effect was like staring at an Old Master with strange disco lights playing upon it.
The concert came across perfectly on the radio at home, the sounds trotting palpably – picturably – from left to right and back across the stereo. It made you remember what a feat it is that, for every Prom, the Radio 3 engineers give us sound of such warmth and crispness from the Albert Hall, which by default has the acoustics of an enormous bathroom.
Amore grisly sound picture was to be found in Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is (World Service, Thursday), which began with the malevolent purr of a dental drill, and from which I gleaned (or flossed) the fact that 40million Americans have absolutely no teeth. If you like comparisons of the high-as-nelson’scolumn sort, I calculate that Spain (population 40.6million) could be resettled by all the Americans with no teeth at all. This was surprising. Don’t Americans take their teeth famously seriously? Then, on second thoughts, not surprising. The programme was part of the World Service’s Money and Power season. Last week, we had the rise of the financial dominatrix. This week, we had dental inequality – as the presenter Natalia Guerrero put it, “I’ll be asking America to open wide and say AH!” (Guerrero had a strong Spanish accent, and to make up for it she spoke clippedly, as if she had a dental mirror in her mouth, which did in fact enhance the sound picture.)
She met a Californian woman who made a fetish of the Hollywood smile (“Super white healthy teeth! And he’s laughing, and you look into his mouth, and you’re like: I want to be there!”) and the dentist who made Katy Perry’s million-dollar golden grill. At the other extreme, Guerrero met those in dental poverty – a woman who didn’t have a toothbrush until she was 13, so had to rub her mouth with baking soda and a cloth; a woman who wanted a charity to pull out all her teeth so that never again would she have to endure a toothache she couldn’t afford to treat.
The Money and Power season is an example of the World Service way of tackling big themes, which is to tell stories. The Radio 4 way is to get a well-known presenter to “crack” the problem by asking talking heads what they think, then cutting their flailing abstractions into a 30-minute pudding.
This is not a fair description of Evan Davis’s Sweet Reason (Radio 4, Thursday), which was a tastier pudding, for two reasons. One was Davis, who supplied the “sweet”: you could hear his smile, even if you couldn’t see his teeth. The other was his avowed aim to get somewhere.
Each episode tries to find consensus on a divisive subject, and this, the first, thrashed out whether “patriarchy” was a helpful word. I expected Davis to play ringmaster as two warring tribes slogged it out, but instead, weirdly, he clambered into the ring and tried to persuade two feminists that “patriarchy” was not a useful term. In the end, they agreed to disagree on minutiae, and it was all good-tempered. What it wasn’t was very interesting. If you’ll forgive the abstraction, I think the trouble might be that abstractions don’t change people’s minds; stories do.
Jemima Lewis is away