‘Naughty’ Rev Coles bids a grumpy farewell

ANOTHER week, another goodbye at the BBC. This time it was the turn of the Reverend Richard Coles, who signed off from presenting Saturday Live on Radio 4 last weekend with the slight air of someone wanting to say something about the situation.

Coles had spoken out in advance about his disappointment at the “rushed” nature of the announcement of his departure and the fact that he didn’t feel the programme needed to be relocated to Cardiff from London. Would any of this be aired on air? It did look promising for a while.

When co-presenter Nikki Bedi set him up to give out the number for listeners to text in, he demurred. “I don’t know, not my problem any more.”

“He’s naughty. He’s going to get naughtier as well,” Bedi suggested.

“Just a little demob happy. No I am not going to. Professional always,” Coles replied. And he was. I have a lot of time for Coles. I’ve talked to him a couple of times, once about loss and grief and he was honest, eloquent and even amusing on the most painful of subjects. And he brings all of that to bear as a broadcaster, helped by one of those great soothing radio voices.

Which is why Saturday Live is, for all its cosy, couthy Radio4ness, worth listening to. Or was. On Saturday, former presenter turned psychologist Sian Williams was one of the guests, which prompted an interesting debate about journalistic ethics.

“We love stories,” Coles pointed out. “Your job as a journalist, my job as an interviewer, is to elicit stories from people. And I wonder if that is also part of the therapeutic process? That one of the things that helps people to engage with what has happened to them is to construct a sort of narrative that

is robust enough and has a direction and has a dynamic that enables them to deal with stuff that otherwise might be intractable.”

The conversation was not all at the same level, to be fair.

Williams was just one of a number of guests on Saturday, including the American novelist Harlan Coben who was clearly not familiar with British children’s TV. “Blue Peter?

That’s b-l-u-e?”

(Such sauce for a Saturday morning.)

But it was Coles who was the centre of attention. In the end he didn’t do a DLT. (I don’t have to explain that, do I?) Instead, he offered a bittersweet cheerio with a sly kicker at the end. “A nosey man could ask for no better job,” he said before setting up the final track.

“Well, back in the eighties, when I was a young thing running around the nightclubs, I

used to get absolutely s***faced listening to Joe Smooth’s Promised Land and we’re going to hear it now.”

Cheerio for the moment, Richard.

I don’t often cover podcasts in this slot (mostly because I don’t listen to many). But I have been dipping into Composed, a 12-part series in which Devonte Hynes (aka Blood Orange) has been exploring his love of classical and contemporary classical music.

The idea of a young(ish) black man from a pop background talking about classical music has inevitably triggered some of the crustier types on social media, but this seems to me a very approachable way of engaging with those who are classicallycurious. And Hynes’s choices are great.

The series is also being broadcast on Radio 3 on Saturday mornings at 1am if you’re still analogue.

Rev Richard Coles had felt his departure from Saturday Live was rushed