The audacious, highbrow hit at the heart of Radio 4
In Our Time – the polyhistoric programme devised by Melvyn Bragg after Radio 4 offered him its Thursday 9am slot – turned 20 last month. There wasn’t a fuss made, and there should have been. It’s a triumph for any show to get two million listeners a week in that slot (plus at least another million downloading the podcast) – let alone with such an audaciously highbrow offering. No theme tune, no celebrities, no “relevance”. Just three serious academics discussing a subject apparently chosen at random from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, such as Cephalopods or the Later Romantics, while Bragg circles them, growling, to stop them wandering off the point.
There is a marvellous urgency to Bragg’s pedagogic mission. Every week, he introduces the programme in a breathless rush, as if afraid that he might run out of airtime before he has finished educating the nation. “Hello-bernard-mandeville-1670-to1733,” he gasped this week, sounding exactly as if he were answering an early telephone. In fact, he was referring to the 18th-century author of The Fable of the Bees – one of the most scandalous, and influential, philosophical tracts in the Western canon.
I had never heard of Bernard Mandeville before, and there’s a good chance you hadn’t either. Even at the height of his fame, he was already persona non grata. A physician and philosopher with a journalist’s knack for bombast, Mandeville upturned centuries of Western thought by arguing that the qualities traditionally seen as social virtues – temperance, thrift and modesty – were less useful than vice. Greed and hedonism were the real engines of progress, since they encouraged trade and innovation.
These are pretty much the founding ideas of modern capitalism; but at the time they were regarded as little short of blasphemy. There were calls for Mandeville to be jailed. Contemporary intellectuals regarded him as an embarrassment – someone whose ideas, even if they rang true, were too disgusting to acknowledge. Yet those ideas slipped through the veil of disapproval, and shaped many of the great minds to come, including Voltaire, Rousseau, Hayek and Keynes.
I learnt all this from Bragg and his team – a historian, a philosopher and an economist – in just 41 minutes and 31 seconds, not counting Bragg’s nine second sign-off (“Next-week-it’sfree-radicals-the-highly-reactiveatoms-or-molecules-essential-tolife…”). What a feat of public service broadcasting that is! It deserves to be properly celebrated.
Mindful of its own Reithian obligations, the Today programme has launched a new podcast. The aim of Beyond
Today – not stated, but at times cloyingly obvious – is to make current affairs more appealing to the young. A bold choice, then, to launch on budget day, when current affairs feel like hard work even to us ancient ones.
“One story, properly told,” is the programme’s promise. But the first episode, entitled Do We Have Enough Money Now?, was more of a basic introduction to tax and spend economics. Matthew Price – a youngish and likeable Today correspondent – started by asking whether, after a decades of cuts, “this ‘austerity’, as it’s known” is finally over.
Helen Miller, of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, along with the BBC’S own Evan Davis, took us through the sums. There was lashings of that ambient background music beloved of podcasters, which sounds like an electronic keyboard falling down a well. The programme’s music editor was featured singing in the shower (Taxman, George Harrison’s protest song about being taxed at 95 per cent during the soak-the-rich Sixties).
It felt like a good programme for 15-year-olds, but I can’t imagine any 15-year-old downloading it. Price’s co-presenter, Tina Daheley, got an easier job on Tuesday – examining the rise of the Instagram influencer – but still the question remains: who is this really for, and will it ever reach them?
End of Days, Radio 5’s new podcast about the British members of the doomed Waco cult (released from today on BBC Sounds), is even more afflicted by forced informality. Presenter Chris Warburton, slurping loudly from a cup of tea, kicked off episode one with exaggerated mateyness: “So the obvious question, right, is how the hell did a man in Texas, David Koresh, who thought he was the new Messiah, convince a load of Brits to leave their lives, their homes, their jobs, to go over there with him to prepare for Armageddon? Because, obviously, that’s insane.”
I almost switched off there and then. But the story itself is so fascinating (charismatic monsters always are) that I ended up bingeing on episodes until one in the morning. You have been warned.