The British attitude to its fish is a head-hanging shame
Already a familiar face from television, chef Angela Hartnett is even more impressive on radio. Her clear, assured, instantly recognisable voice is made for the medium. In A Fishy Phobia (Radio 4, Tuesday) she argued passionately for a change in British attitudes to seafood, a national food resource in which we are unbelievably rich. Yet what do we do with it? Send most of it abroad.
It’s a situation made even more baffling by our seeming love of eating fish while on holiday yet abandonment of it once we get back. Hartnett began in a pre-dawn Brixham, Devon, home to Britain’s largest fish market, listing the amazing variety on offer: “lemon and dover sole, squid, monkfish, turbot, scallops, hake, bass, pollack, red mullet, whiting and herring, to say nothing of the lobster and crab.” Almost all of which was destined for export to Europe.
Hartnett’s most damning statistic related to the rigidity of British tastes and the so called “famous five” – cod, salmon, haddock, prawns and tuna – that are about the only seafood available in supermarkets anymore. As a result, while 80 per cent of what’s caught by our fishermen is exported, 80 per cent of the fish we do eat comes from abroad. Unbelievably, we import 23,000 tonnes of cod from China every year. China. Which is, in just about every respect – politically, economically and environmentally – a head-hanging national shame.
Underpinning all this was a filleted social history of fish-eating in Britain (was it the associations with Catholicism, or class attitudes to herring – once a staple for the poor – and fish’n’chips that made us turn up our noses?) and the acute observation that, nowadays, we seem happiest eating fish when it comes from another culture, even if it’s raw.
Sometimes, all it takes is a strong clear voice and vision to make people change their minds and habits. This is just the sort of radio that could achieve that. On Monday, the birth of BBC radio 100 years ago was marked with a refreshingly light touch: a smattering of features on Radio 4’s Today and other major news bulletins, a respectful nod on Front Row. Nothing like the gush of selfcongratulatory, archive-based and, inevitably, overlapping programming we’ve had in recent months – suggesting the celebratory taps are finally being turned off.
Which is a relief, though it must be said that some of the centenary programmes were sensational; top of the pile being Radio 3’s eight-hour Soundscape of a Century a fortnight ago. Less epic but also enchanting was this week’s Sunday Feature on Radio 3, in which the great Alan Dein paid tribute to the piece of tech that, in part at least, made it all possible: the humble microphone.
This was a gift for Dein who, as a philosophically minded “oral historian” is more aware than most of the power of the mic. As he said, he wouldn’t be doing what he does if it weren’t for the microphone, and neither would we be listening to him. Still, this was never going to be a dry hymn to technological wizardry. Dein’s focus, as ever, was on the human; how the microphone has transformed the way we hear and consume the world, and how we understand ourselves.
Throughout, we heard the evocative buzz, hiss and crackle of technological imperfection. The turning on and turning off. The acknowledgement that no matter where a microphone is placed, unless it is hidden its presence will affect how the person speaking into it behaves. Performs, even. There was history, but of the recherché variety. Such as how the first practical use of microphone technology was not in radio or amplification, but in the telephone.
We heard evocative 1898 recordings of Torres Strait islanders singing. And the surround-sound rush of wind in a forest canopy, so high-tech it couldn’t be rendered fully on radio. Thus, though it was never noticeably chronological, we managed to journey from the very beginning to the absolute edge of now. At one point, Dein asked a smart speaker when the microphone was invented. The factoid Alexa spat back at him (“[It] was first invented and introduced to the public by Emile Berliner in 1877”) and Dein’s response (“Well, that’s one version but there’s quite a few”) was wonderfully illustrative of the sinister limits of contemporary AI technology.
This was as engagingly playful a history as one could wish for, of an object that is now omnipresent to the point of invisibility in our lives. Ultimately, Dein’s point was that any microphone is “useless” unless it is connected to something. And that the most important connection of all is the human holding it. Bravo.