The week in radio Iona Mclaren Hearing about boredom on radio is anything but boring
One of the quirks of the radio is that, more often than not, you tune in to the middle of a programme which could be about anything, so you have to sift it for clues about what might be going on. (Kitchen-sink drama? Any Questions?) It’s an odd way to consume an art form – you probably don’t make a habit of starting novels at page 80 – but the pleasure of exercising one’s logic (and one’s eavesdropping) can make it more fun than listening to the whole programme politely from the start, as its maker intended.
For this reason, the always-excellent
Words and Music (Radio 3, Sunday) must be one of the most “radio” things on the radio, because it keeps you in that just-tuned-in, on-your-toes state for more than an hour, and very good it is, too. The words are snippets of novels, poems, memoirs, each read by a different voice. Then comes a piece of music. Nothing is introduced, so you are listening “without labels”, which is of course very zeitgeist. If you like anything, you can look up what it was later, for delayed gratification, so there is “jam tomorrow” as well as “jam today”.
The theme was Boredom, Restlessness, Killing Time and we had some obvious things, like Madame Bovary anatomising the precise misery of waking up to the same old thing, and the irrational hope each night that tomorrow will be different, or Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, yawning in high society about “how much gayer it would be to wear spangles and trousers, and dance before a booth at a fair”.
We also had some not-obvious things, like Saul Bellow on the Russian Revolution, which “promised mankind a permanently interesting life” but invented “the most boring society in history: dowdiness, shabbiness, dullness, dull goods, boring buildings, boring discomfort”. What could be more tedious, he wonders, than Stalin’s 12-course banquets that ended at 2am, after which the guests had to watch a western, with dread in their hearts, as he picked who was going to get it in the neck?
After that, it made sense to play a sympathetically jumpy Shostakovich number, but otherwise the music didn’t try to enact the theme and make you feel restless. Instead, most of it was soothing, the jokes in the titles, like Scott Joplin’s A Real Slow Drag. This was sensible because getting to grips with the words does take it out of you, and the music is the respite. But then again, having tuned in, you can drop out (or off) at any point and it couldn’t matter less: you just start again from scratch when you want. I like very much radio that monopolises your imagination but not your time. Of course, next Sunday’s episode, about “man’s old friend, the chicken”, will be doing both, but it’s nice to know you have leeway.
Boredom, scaled up to an epidemic of disgruntlement, was also the theme of The Wrong Job (Radio 4, Tuesday), a two-parter about why so many British workers – perhaps as many as 75 per cent
– think they are in jobs which don’t suit them, or they simply hate; why our productivity is the lowest in Europe, and “work-related stress” is the most common cause of sick leave.
The presenter was Emma Kennedy, who interviewed a woman who had tried 25 jobs before she was 25 (and discovered she wanted “a portfolio career”), as well as the founder of an excellent-sounding charity that encourages businesses to take schoolchildren for work experience.
Kennedy herself had been a lawyer for five years before she realised she’d be happier doing something else. To retread that anxiety, she filled out a psychometric test for advice on what jobs would suit her, and momentarily succumbed to the disgruntlement epidemic when she was recommended “lawyer” or “anaesthesiologist” (“Putting people to sleep?”).
Aradio play that threatened to put me to sleep was Ground Control (Radio 4, Monday). Tamsin Greig was Tess, a surgeon playing second fiddle to her husband Scott, a self-absorbed astronaut. Her dappy shtick is always likeable (she kept calling the International Space Station “the IBS”) but this was an issues-led comedy in which the issues kept rearing up and kicking you in the face. For example, a blogger’s voice interjected to ask whether the money used for space exploration would be better spent on the NHS (“# just asking”). At one point, Greig told a mystery, Id-less patient in a coma, “You know what John? I might have lost my identity but that doesn’t mean I can’t find yours.” And that became her mission.
Perhaps as a rule of thumb, if a line of dialogue can work as the blurb, the dialogue might not be very good.
Jemima Lewis is away