Radio Valerie Grove

When I started writing this column in the very first Oldie, in 1992, it was named, fogeyishly, ‘Wireless’ – the word favoured by Richard Ingrams and also, in a faux-nostalgic 1950s spirit, by people like me. For a quarter of a century I wrote happily, mostly about the Home Service, the Light Programme and the Third.

When Alexander Chancellor arrived, he gave his snuffly-wuffly laugh and told me he thought it was time we called radio ‘Radio’. Woah! – extinction alert. Wireless, he said, now meant Wi-fi, ‘or something’. He told readers it was ‘the only change I am going to make’. Well, what a peculiarly dull way to make your mark on The Oldie, I thought.

Now, in a neophiliac age, what threatens to dominate listening life is the podcast (a portmanteau word, from ipod and broadcast), invented in 2004 in the

Guardian by the BBC’S Ben Hammersley. I have obediently mastered downloading content ‘for free’ (as they illiterately say), and I will do more podstering (as I’ve done for The Oldie podcast), though I’m out of my comfort zone. Luckily, my son, who listens to podcasts all the time,

was on hand when this year’s Broadcasting Press Guild Awards shortlist arrived. There was, for the first time, Best Podcast – and my son was familiar with the contenders. Since you ask, they included Jon Ronson, Ed Miliband ( Reasons To Be Cheerful), Remainiacs and Romesh Ranganathan’s Hip Hop Saved My Life.

A week earlier, the BBC’S Audio Drama Awards also introduced a trophy for Podcast Drama of the Year. The deserving winner was Rathband, written by Christopher Hogg, produced by Jeremy Mortimer and John Wakefield. A taut and technically stunning reenactment of the 2010 manhunt in Northumberland for Raoul Moat, the evil maniac, bent on revenge, who shot the traffic policeman David Rathband in the face, blinding him.

The play deals with another element: the intrusion of social media, as mindless tweeters take the side of Raoul Moat, their hero. Rathband, defeated by the ending of his marriage and his hopelessly blind state, is found hanged. It’s harrowing, angering. Go to www. rathbandplay.com to listen.

According to the Spectator’s radiohead, Kate Chisholm, a podcast entitled Brexitcast is ‘racing up the UK podcast charts, just behind the number one, My Dad Wrote a Porno’. I share Kate’s amazement that Laura Kuenssberg, Chris Mason, Katya Adler and Adam Fleming can have anything more to tell us than they already do on mainstream programmes. How many of us have the time, or the desire, to seek out extra listening?

I do know this: hearing stuff from an authoritative speaker is still what makes radio one of the pleasures of existence. Call it lifelong learning. So Wendy Mitchell’s memoir about dementia, Somebody I Used to Know, was a brilliant Book of the Week; and who knew about the vital importance of Awesome Iodine before the World Service’s series In Their Element? Also, every night in Radio 3’s 10.45pm brainbox quart d’heure, there’s The Essay, promising ‘insight, opinion and intellectual surprise’. A recent five-parter was Walking The Lobster, delivered with wit and aplomb by John Walsh, mainstay of The Write Stuff, Oldie contributor, wordsmith, dandy and good egg. His subject was flamboyance or ‘the male desire to stand out, sartorially and in attitude’: chaps who strut and preen and cut a dash, from Caesar and Alcibiades to Beaux Brummell and Nash (whose mistress was called Juliana Popjoy), pancake-faced Gérard de Nerval (who walked the poor pet lobster), Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde.

‘I always loved Oscar Wilde. We had such a lot in common,’ said Walsh, mocking his own Flash Harry tendencies. But of course he and Wilde are twin souls: two Irish-born swaggerers lighting up literary London.