This alluring Miss Julie was all heart and no soul
Alma Cogan, Sixties songstress, had a number to which her husky but tuneful voice gave merry emphasis. Bell Bottom
Blues, it was called, about her sweetie being a sailor away on the seas. It came into my mind, unbidden, in the early hours of Friday morning, exactly fitting my post-Brexit blues.
I’d gone to sleep around midnight on Thursday uneasy. The referendum polls had barely closed yet radio’s pundits were predicting a Remain majority. I wanted to believe them. My gut advised caution. It duly awoke me at 3.30am, the time Radio 4’s James Naughtie had said enough votes would have come in to show which way the nation preferred. My gut, alas, was proving right.
By 5.00am there was jubilation on LBC. On 5 Live, starting its breakfast show earlier than usual, there was surprise tinged with excitement. Here was a story, they had the reporters around the country covering it and so they did, very well. It didn’t take long for the faction fights to break out all over the airwaves and here we are, six days on, and they’re raging like there’s no tomorrow. My gut tells me to let them get on with it. My internal jukebox is playing selections from
My brain reminds me there’s more to radio than the news.
Miss Julie, for instance, on Radio 4 last Saturday afternoon, with Sofie Gråbøl and Lars Mikkelsen, stars of Scandi-noir drama The Killing, shining bright as upper-class Miss Julie and her father’s valet Jean. She’s an outrageous tease and flirt, for reasons that later reveal themselves. He’s smart, powerfully attractive, cunning. The sexual tension between them was palpable before the gulfs between them widened. She thinks she’s seducing him. He thinks she’s rich enough to fund his future. Both are mistaken, tragically in her case. Time was when August Strindberg’s Miss
Julie would only ever be on Radio 3. This hour-long “reversioning” for radio by Roger James Elsgood was taut, the location recording in an old house lent atmosphere, the sex was great. The heart of the play beat fast. Alas, its soul was missing. David Hockney – Back In LA (Radio 4, Monday) was Martin Gayford’s portrait of Hockney’s latest exhibition, just opened at the Royal Academy. This project, 82 portraits of friends (Gayford among them) painted on identically sized canvases as they sat, each of them for three days at a time, in the same chair, is what has made Hockney paint again after a severe depression, a small stroke and the accidental death of an associate.
The Telegraph’s Mark Hudson wrote yesterday he was entertained by the exhibition, appalled at its lack of ambition. Others have been kinder.
This radio feature offered different perspectives: what is it like to have your portrait painted; what a portrait says about both subject and artist; what is it like to watch the process. Bright, sharp and wittily enhanced by music (West Coast jazz, traditional accordion, accordion jazz), anyone contemplating seeing the new Hockneys should go first to iPlayer and have a listen. It will give us something to ponder as we queue, and queue we will.
One Day In Entebbe (Radio 4, last night) was Jonathan Freedland’s multi-layered account of the dramatic raid carried out by Israel 40 years ago to release over 100 Jewish hostages plus the crew of an Air France plane hijacked by a breakaway faction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and brought down in Uganda.
Freedland, who was nine in at the time, told the story through people who were in it or connected to it, like Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, whose elder brother Yonatan was the raid’s commander, killed in the first moments of the encounter.
Benjamin was in Massachusetts then, headed for a career in marketing. His father was teaching at Cornell. They flew home together for the funeral. Yoni became a national hero, Benjamin went into politics. Sara Davidson and her son Benny, then 13, remembered the hijack, the gunman with a grenade in his hand, being held hostage, the fear. “Every minute passed like a week,” said Sara. There were testimonies from Israeli commandos on the raid, how their initial attack on the Ugandan guards went wrong.
But Freedland also included interviews with former PLO activist Leila Khaled, saying the hijackers should have known better, and Max Hastings, biographer of Yonatan Netanyahu, on how his feelings towards Israel have changed now from what they were then. If these were included to satisfy some BBC imposed notion of “balance”, the effect was entirely contrary.