Radio Valerie Grove
On a spring break to a volcanic island in the Atlantic, we brought no laptops, and there was no TV. Not much to distract one from reading: just windswept tennis, or walking in chill damp mountains. But on day four, my husband suddenly announced, ‘I seem to have got the Today programme on my phone.’ And there was Melvyn Bragg’s voice – ‘About fifty million years ago, the earth’s climate changed at a faster rate than ever before’ – trailing a discussion of PaleoceneEocene Thermal Maximum. Having discovered this unlooked-for link with the arcane corners of Radio 4, we found ourselves tuning in every day. So Sunday morning was just like Sunday morning at home. The three singing priests – delightful chaps – were on Sunday Worship, with ‘How Great Thou Art’ and ‘Amazing Grace’. Tweet of the Day was the skylark, quoting Meredith’s poem ‘The Lark Ascending’, which inspired Vaughan Williams. Then, by contrast, came ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ and a ‘So it is goodbye then, Chuck Berry,’ from Eric Burdon (a voice from my youth at the Club A’gogo, in Newcastle). Burdon told Paddy O’connell that the Animals had once been on tour with Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, ‘two of the baddest guys in rock ’n’ roll history’.
Oh to be in England: Robert Browning’s ‘Home Thoughts, from Abroad’ are perennially applicable, wherever you are. Church services, history, poetry, birdsong – and even home-grown pop music: such things represent England in expatriate thoughts. Then came the day we heard about the killings on Westminster Bridge, where Earth had not anything to show more fair. Now there was little else on the agenda. Lesson learned: there is no escaping the world, if you allow news media to accompany you.
‘Edward Thomas has been largely forgotten,’ wrote the Times’s radio previewer. Not by Oldie readers, I’m sure, nor by the hundreds who gathered at Adlestrop in April for the centenary of the Battle of Arras, where Thomas
was killed. Anne Harvey’s classic documentary No One Left and No One Came had its sixth repeat, on Radio 4 Extra. Nick Dear’s Radio 4 play The Dark Earth and the Light Sky, with Sylvestra Le Touzel as Thomas’s friend Eleanor Farjeon, and Robert Evans as Robert Frost whose poems Thomas took with him to the trenches, pondered why he volunteered for France: suicide by war? There was no answer.
So to the final edition of Midweek. Jockey Declan Murphy related how he fell so catastrophically at Haydock Park in 1994; brilliant Harriet Walter said she found it much easier to stride about the stage in boots, playing Shakespeare’s heroes, than to play foxy Cleopatra; Suzi Quatro told how she once whacked a fellow performer over the head with her bass guitar. Fourth guest Richard Curtis asked ‘Did he die?’ ‘I didn’t kill him,’ was the answer. ‘That would have been a big reveal for your last show, Libby,’ said Curtis. Then Suzi Q rocked everyone out with ‘Devil Gate Drive’. It made a dazzling finale. Midweek’s replacement, Only Artists, opened with Grayson Perry and Naomi Alderman wondering whether computer games can be called art. Roger Bolton invites listeners’ reactions on Feedback. I think I know what the verdict will be.
Presenter Libby Purves had announced to Bolton that she is open to all offers. Brian Matthew, who at 88 had railed against losing Sounds of the 60s in January, suffered the indignity of having his death reported, then retracted, two days before the end. And if there were a prize for having the last word it would go to Baroness Bakewell, 83. She crisply performed the top-and-tailing of her own play Keeping in Touch, about her affair with Harold Pinter, which aired on Radio 4 alongside Pinter’s play Betrayal. His was perfectly Pinteresque; her version clarified the situation – not Pinteresque at all.