Radio Valerie Grove

In the closing moments of Today, there came several enthusiastic voices urging everyone to get onto Radio Garden online at once and have endless – and educational – fun. Naturally I obeyed and I didn’t regret it.

Radio Garden is an online radio station which allows you to click on radio stations across the world – and during COVID it has been booming. You follow a little green light on a global map, click and, in a trice, you’re there: in Vancouver or St Malo (a lovely talk station on which French books are read clearly, comprehensibly) or an unlimited number of small towns anywhere you like. I flitted around Teruel, Marsala, Tucumán…

What larks! A life of promiscuity now beckons – and I was already fooling around on my trusty Azatom portable. Times Radio has become a fixture (Giles

‘Motormouth’ Coren on Fridays, Hugo Rifkind on Saturdays, Tom Newton-Dunn on politics, and weekday afternoons with the lovely Mariella Frostrup.)

I’d been dabbling in Scala Radio, too, with its ‘soothing’ playlist: typically a random concoction of Albinoni followed by John Rutter, Puccini, Karl Jenkins, O Sole Mio, Scott Joplin, the Triumphal March from Aida and an Icelandic duo called Hugar playing Waves… Mmmmmm. And sometimes Zzzzzz.

Then suddenly up creeps Boom Radio, ‘tailor-made for Baby Boomers’, of which I had no warning until the Daily Telegraph reviewed it warmly. Radio 2 has ‘lost its way’, they said. I tuned in and caught its jingle – ‘Bee-double-oh-em’, followed by the ultimate vintage rock disc, Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock (1956). All their callers have to state the first record they ever bought. Mine was Buddy Holly’s That’ll Be the Day in 1958, when singles cost 6s 8d – so I am their target audience.

But, just as I can’t read fiction in the morning, I really can’t switch on pop music before sundown (except for aerobic purposes). So although I appreciate its existence – and its revival of old DJS such as David Hamilton – I find daytime Boom a bit milquetoast, especially compared with the more raucous Gold, where I already get my late-night fix of Sixties hits.

Back to Radio 4, then, and Keats. It seems only yesterday – it was a mere 25 years ago – that I was celebrating in these pages the 200th anniversary of Keats’s birth, and the beautiful readings on Radios 4 and 3. The bicentenary of his death has just given us a rich, well-made (by Beaty Rubens) two-parter, John Keats: Life and After-life, by the poet Sasha Dugdale.

She began by asking, ‘What use are poets when we need virologists, nurses and ICU doctors?’ She linked Keats’s medical studies with his illness, poems and death from TB, the COVID of its day. There were excellent contributions from academics, plus the unmistakable Bob Geldof, the bicentenary spokesman for the Keats-shelley Memorial in Rome. ‘Where are the songs of spring?’ asked Bob.

Ode to Autumn, recited by Thomas Brodie-sangster, made a fitting close, with its elegiac last line: ‘And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.’

Tim Harford tapped into the Zeitgeist when he scrutinised statistics in More or Less. Just in time to make sense of government claims of the ‘Ninety per cent of over-75s will be two-thirds safer from infection’ variety. His appearance on Private Passions on Radio 3 revealed his gratifying preference for electronic, mathematical sounds – most memorably Knee Play 5 (Einstein on the Beach) from Philip Glass, with its refrain of 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8.

Which reminds me: Shostakovich deliberately created his String Quartet No 15 to drive audiences to leave the auditorium in tedium. I heard that in Something Understood, from John Mccarthy, the famous hostage. He was discussing boredom with Dr Tiffany Watt-smith from the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University. Didn’t know that existed!