It’s not just the BBC giving us powerful and brave radio
Does the BBC make the best radio programmes? That’s what a Radio Times list of the “30 best programmes ever broadcast”, published last week, evidently concluded, as not a single programme on their list was made by anybody other than the BBC. The top three, in order, were Desert Island Discs, The Archers, and Round the Horne.
Can that be right? Admittedly, it’s difficult to think of long-running radio programmes made by commercial broadcasters that have the same kind of enduring appeal, though if a future list included podcasts it could be a different picture.
My problem with the survey isn’t so much with the list itself as the question it’s asking in the first place. What makes a radio programme something you treasure forever? Can a long-running daily live show, such as Today or Wake Up to Wogan, really be called a programme, or are they a thousand individual programmes, newly minted each morning?
Unlike for TV, you rarely sit down to enjoy a radio programme from start to finish. So great radio, I think, isn’t necessarily to do with the format of a programme, but in the moments that you happen to catch in the car on the way home, and then you have to sit parked outside your house for 20 minutes waiting for it to finish.
Two shining slices of radio this week were a reminder that although the BBC is great at making brave programmes, it’s not the only broadcaster bringing us powerfully emotional, memorable radio moments.
I can’t disagree with The Archers
(Radio 4) being one of the best things the BBC makes, even if it can sometimes be as tedious and infuriating as any cherished family member. This week, there was a reminder of a series’s capacity for real emotional range and depth.
Wednesday’s episode was about mental illness and given over entirely to Elizabeth Pargetter, née Archer, having her first session with a therapist, played by Lorna Laidlaw. If you didn’t already know about how Elizabeth was widowed, her lifelong heart condition and her juvenile delinquency, now you do.
Elizabeth has been through a lot, and after years of bottling it up, she finally poured it all out: her fury with her husband Nigel for being dead, her self-hatred for being a burden and disappointment to her parents, and the darkest, most terrible fear: that the fleeting happiness she’d felt once, when Nigel was alive and the children were small, was gone forever.
Alison Dowling, who has played Elizabeth for 30 years and lived these traumas the first time around, gave a magnificent performance. She made Lizzie’s desperation, rage and terror real and visceral. It was an outstanding episode.
Radio that you remember forever is about serendipity. You don’t remember your favourite radio moments because of how cleverly they were made but because they touched your heart, and that’s at least partly because of where and who you were when you heard them. And if this intimate portrayal of therapy, showing how vital it is to understand the darkness that we all have inside us, helped any listeners to take their own first steps towards a happier life, it will have been an important and lasting radio moment.
On The Chris Evans Breakfast Show (Virgin Radio), a different moment of reflection also stopped me in my tracks. Evans interviewed the Reverend Ruth Scott, who discussed her diagnosis of terminal cancer.
“I’ve had the most fantastic life, Chris,” she said. “I wouldn’t have it any other way – I just wish that it had been longer.” She spoke with composure of wanting to die naturally, of not being afraid, and of wanting to show others that death doesn’t have to frighten us. Evans, as he sometimes does, put his own considerable personality to one side for the 20-minute interview. He was sensitive and respectful, letting his friend’s calm, dignified words settle into the silences, leaving their ripples. It was beautiful and sad and full of hope.
Evans and Scott – who were colleagues at Radio 2 before he left for commercial radio – showed that commercial broadcasters can give us radio every bit as powerful and brave as the BBC. Programmes and formats are essential building blocks, but ultimately they’re just the framework. It’s people, and the snatched moments of drama, connection, unexpected humour or honesty they create, that make radio you never forget.