It must be really hard work being a polymath
Monkman and Seagull’s Polymathic Adventure (Radio 4, Monday) was summer flummery. Eric Monkman is 29, a Canadian graduate student at Cambridge. Bobby Seagull is 32, British, a graduate student at Cambridge. It is said they captured the nation’s hearts with their performances as captains of their competing Cambridge college teams on BBC television’s University Challenge. It is also said they have become Twitter sensations. It’s been years since I watched University Challenge and, whisper it softly, I do not do Twitter. But if Radio 4 thinks they’re interesting that’s good enough for me.
The point of this programme was to explore the definition of a polymath. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary says it means “a person of much or varied learning”. You have to be one of those if you’re going to compete on a quiz show where the questions can be about anything, from anthropology to zoology. Monkman and Seagull fit that bill. University Challenge chairman Jeremy Paxman said “Correct” to their answers so often his sneer froze.
Here they said they were exploring the difference between being quiz show know-it-alls and genuine persons of much or varied learning. So they went to Cambridge and questioned some dons. A proper polymath, it emerged, is probably someone who has learned a great deal about a particular subject and is drawn thereafter to applying the disciplines of learning to other fields. To become one you have to be tireless. Stephen Fry told them that. Proving the point they competed in a pub quiz and came fourth. Personally, I doubt they were trying. Cute losers make better Twitterbait.
Now, who is the person I heard and saw everywhere last week, demonstrating her polymathic journalistic skills on every subject from the necessities of Brexit to the essentials of impersonating Elvis Presley? Emma Barnett, of course. After co-presenting her usual Sunday Morning Live on BBC One, she guest-hosted the Westminster Hour on Radio 4 that night, then did five days (not the usual three) of her own midmorning show on Radio 5 Live, plus anchoring two editions of BBC Two’s Newsnight (the first including a live interview down a transatlantic line with two opposing and equally shouty Americans) as well as writing her weekly newspaper agony aunt column. I wonder what she eats for breakfast?
Life Drawing (Radio 4, all week) brings conversations about the art, effect and value of political cartooning. Martin Rowson is the cartoonist, as he draws, drawing out his subject. The peril of his occupation, he said to us and to George Osborne, his guest on Monday, is that you fall in love with your subject, as he did with Tony Blair. It was, I thought, distinctly flirtatious when he complimented Osborne for bringing back the political cartoon to the Evening Standard, the London freesheet Osborne now edits. Rowson also reminded Osborne of how many times he had depicted the former Chancellor of the Exchequer’s years in power “in horrible ways”. Better than not being noticed, said Osborne. And the finished article? “The nicest cartoon you’ve ever done of me,” he said.
Yesterday it was the turn of political journalist Julia Langdon, one of the first women to be a political editor (on this newspaper, among others). This session took place in the Gay Hussar restaurant, the famous Soho haunt of the old Left (and where Sean Daylewis interviewed me for this job). Rowson sketched in a ghost of Michael Foot hovering over Langdon’s smiling head. How do I know she was smiling?
For a start, she laughed a lot throughout their conversation which was mostly, and seriously, about politics, why it matters, how it has changed. Was it a good thing, Rowson asked, to encourage a lynch mob attitude towards politicians? Yes, she said. Expose those who don’t do a good job. But, she added, when told Labour was proposing her for the House of Lords she fell about laughing. “No way could I toe the line for the Labour Party. I’m a journalist.”
Rowson lamented the cartoonist’s plight. Way down the journalistic hierarchy, he said, scorned by the public as in “my five-year-old could do a better cartoon than that…”, at which point Langdon interviewed him, steering him back to the drawing. He spattered some ink, added some ghosts because politicians these days don’t know what they’re doing. He showed it to her. “I think it’s fantastic,” she said.
See what you think. All the portraits are on Radio 4’s website. Does Osborne have vampire lips? Are the old Labour ghosts above Langdon’s head howling with laughter or just howling?
Read The week in radio in next Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph