Do not adjust your radio, this is the sweet sound of summer
Usually a persistent buzzing sound is the last thing you want to hear coming from your radio, but all was going according to plan at Radio 2 for the Big Bee Weekend (Radio 2, Saturday and Sunday). Bees, you see, are big news. Not just the threats facing them and other important pollinators, but how to turn the tide around. Radio 2 has made bees its theme of the summer, all culminating in a whole weekend of bee-themed radio and a specially recorded version of the Radio 2 jingle constructed using tuned buzzing bee noises. Do not adjust your wireless.
“Bees are basically hairy vegan wasps,” said Dave Goulson, helpfully. He’s been appointed the BBC’S resident bee expert and dubbed Dr Bee for the summer by Radio 2, though he’s actually Professor of Biology at University of Sussex, specialising in bee ecology. He popped up on Zoe Ball’s breakfast show offering tips for how to turn your garden into a buzzing bee metropolis, from planting marjoram and bird’s-foot-trefoil in pots to helping little bumbles escape if they accidentally get stuck in your kitchen.
Dermot O’leary (Saturday, Radio 2) eagerly sampled a range of honeys provided by a honey sommelier, Sarah Wyndham Lewis. Wyndham Lewis’s life tragedy is that she is dangerously allergic to bee stings, so her husband keeps bees, and she presumably stands well back.
The joy of proper honey from a beekeeper rather than a supermarket, she said, is that it brings in all the flavours of the area. For instance, in honey from bees that live near the seashore, you can detect the tang of sea salt.
These big themed radio weekends are good fun and a nice way to get listeners of all ages involved – children sent in their designs for bee-friendly gardens and grandparents shared pictures of the flowers they’d planted together – but it’s best if everyone’s on-message. O’leary, Ball and Claudia Winkleman were all game to spread the good bee news, but not every Radio 2 DJ sounded as keen.
“Talk about a tenuous link, that was Plan B,” said Paul O’grady (Radio 2, Sunday), back-announcing yet another bee-themed song on the playlist. “Geddit?” He sounded under duress, but cheered up a bit when he talked about planting a pollinator-friendly meadow at his countryside home and read out a recipe for a “Stinger” cocktail ( just brandy and crème de menthe). But then it was time for more music. “And here’s Lavern Baker,” he sighed, “with Bumble Bee.”
Elaine Paige (Radio 2, Sunday) was much happier about her extensive bee and honey-themed playlist, maybe because the world of musical theatre is, it turns out, absolutely obsessed with bees, so there was plenty of music to choose from.
“I hear that bees love a show tune,” said Paige, “so they’ll be flapping their jazz wings in pure ecstasy for this whole next hour.” A Taste of Honey, Funny Honey, A Hive Full of Honey, Honey Bun, Honey Honey, and Be My Little Baby Bumble Bee were just the start. It felt as thought she could have gone on for hours.
There’s even a questionable new Radio 2 podcast series about bee facts, Bees in a Pod, presented by comedian Rob Beckett, who confesses to know nothing about bees but says he just fancied his own Radio 2 series. Really the calm and superbly informed Dr Bee could just have presented the whole thing on his own; Beckett’s presenting style is too chaotic and abrasive.
If some presenters sounded baffled, distracted or downright bored by the theme, overall it was still an innovative use of the schedule, and in the places where it worked, it was truly sweet summer radio.
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peaking of innovation, every weekday last week on Radio 4 there were the winners of the Charles Parker Prize, an award for student radio producers set up in memory of the great influential radio maker, Charles Parker. I had the privilege of being one of the judges. All of the five winners had made stop-you-in-your-tracks radio, and the gold award (New Storytellers: Remembering the New Cross Fire,
Radio 4, Friday) was an astonishing and beautiful piece by Magdalena Moursy blending powerful music, composed in response to the New Cross Fire of 1981, with searing reflections from those directly affected.
Moursy’s programme was firmly in the spirit of Parker’s project to use music and original testimony to bring voices to radio that wouldn’t otherwise be heard. All of the prize winners are proof that radio’s future is in good hands.