Maureen Lipman is well worth the BBC licence fee
Ilove Maureen Lipman. I have ever since I saw her on stage 40 years ago in Alan Plater’s play On Your Way, Riley. She can take on any role – big or stonyhearted, muzzily misled or magically prescient. Admittedly, there was that radio comedy where she played a daft mother always going a scheme too far, but I have nothing against all the rest.
Radio 4 is featuring her in A Month of Maureen, four different Monday morning comedies, and, on the evidence of the two that have gone out so far, my faith in her and, indeed, in Radio 4 as a nurturer of writers has come flooding back. Last week, in Gary Brown’s Three Journeys, she played a mother driving her son (played by Jasper Britton) to a place where he could go to live. She’s a widow, aged 72. He’s 43, with learning difficulties. Their bond is strong, loving, mutually dependent, responsive to each stage of change, convincing in every word and moment.
In this week’s, Five Lessons by Marcy Kahan, she was quite a different person, a successful writer who (under a pseudonym) wants to return to learning to play the piano. The tutor, played by Julian Rhind-tutt, is in awe of her as a writer, reserved about her musical ability. She does phenomenal hours of practice, makes huge technical progress. He is earnest, trying to get her through her professional bad patch, but honest. Both plays lifted the heart and lit up wintry corners of the mind. If the next two are half as good, the licence fee payer will have been richly served. And, Maureen, you really are marvellous.
Don’t Log Off, Alan Dein’s compilations of online conversations, returned to Radio 4 on Saturday morning. Aren’t these usually on later at night? It’s good to find them here, even though (for listeners on Long or Medium Wave) they currently risk displacement by Test Match Special. The idea is that he tells internet users he’d like to talk and they come back, with their stories. We’re not hearing the real thing, live. We’re hearing meticulously edited compilations, global variations on a common human theme.
Surviving against the odds was the first theme and we heard from a base jumper in Australia, a hugely dangerous sport that makes him feel alive; a woman and man in Ukraine, who work together for pitiful wages in an economy “beyond fixing”; a woman, an external auditor in the United Arab Emirates whose loneliness seemed palpable; and a man from Syria, having walked thousands of miles, escaped border controls, evaded capture to live in Vienna. I read about these things and turn the page. I hear the voices and they haunt me.
Jim – We Love You Because… (Radio 4, Saturday afternoon; repeated from Tuesday) was a story that drew its own pictures. Tayo Popoola, who lives and works in London, went back to Nigeria to find out from family, friends and musical stars why American country music has such a hold there. Why would his father, his mother, his uncles and aunts have fallen in love with Jim Reeves? Why, more than half a century since Reeves’ death, would his records still sell there? Why, when European audiences adore the music of Fela Kuti and King Sunny Adé, do Nigerians of every age cherish the songs of Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, the pedal steel guitar and distant drums of Nashville?
It’s Jim Reeves’s dignity they like, we learnt, as we him being well dressed, cultured and his music being “slow, cool, relaxing”. Tayo’s mother and uncle sang Roses Are Red… to show what they meant. It was lovely. We travelled away from Lagos to find out more, his mother in the seat beside him as they drove, talking to young artists, legends, DJS, whenever he could get a word in. The DJS liked the Kenny Rogers philosophy of “You gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em…” Hmm, I remember a previous Radio 2 controller saying that was his motto too.
In Port Harcourt, they put on a special show for Tayo. He met Nigeria’s answer to Don Williams, learnt about the link between gospel and Nigerian music. From Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey, the nation’s top star, his parents’ idol, he heard how to make American country music sound properly Nigerian which, as the Chief Commander said, was only claiming back the music taken from Africa in the first place. Made by independents Whistledown, this was a rare burst of sunshine on a sombre weekend. And Tayo Popoola is a reporter to look out for.
Animal behaviour is regular theme of wildlife programmes but how do they act in captivity? Filmed at Chester Zoo, which houses 15,000 creatures, this lively new series captures animal dynamics and behaviour from black rhinos, jewel wasps and a Madagascan tenrec. SH