Radio Valerie Grove
YESTERDAY I listened to the story of Andreas Egger by an Austrian novelist, Robert Seethaler, read by Robert Powell. Heart-stopping. Also to Matthew Parris’s Great Lives on Katharine Hepburn, with Toyah Wilcox. And to the interview with Nawal El Saadawi, 83-year-old Egyptian author of ‘ Woman at Point Zero’, talking about her life of prison and exile. This was one of those ‘stop what you’re doing and listen to this’ items, according to the Woman’s Hour Twitter feed – and so it proved to be.
All the above recent broadcasts were prompted by tweets from perfect strangers, discovered by chance. Averse as I used to be to the words ‘Follow us on Facebook or Twitter’, fearful of having my mind cluttered by gratuitous, extraneous online chat, I am now extremely likely to listen or re-listen online, liberated by increased access. I heard the excellent ‘Attention Must be Paid’, the Archive on 4 about Arthur Miller this way, when Miller’s biographer Christopher Bigsby used his personal recordings, including Miller’s view of LBJ (‘Could have been the greatest reforming president we had in this century, if he had not destroyed himself with this madness in South-east Asia’) and his account of the failure of his marriage: ‘The self-destruction was terrifying. It was beyond me to master it, but I doubt that anybody could have.’
My ears completely glazed over during the debate on the future of the BBC, chaired by Steve Hewlett of the Media Show, who actually referred to ‘services available to we consumers’, which is a hanging offence. I learned nothing from this debate and as usual it was dominated by television. Few actual programmes were even men-
tioned, other than Strictly, Bake Off and
Eastenders.
Someone tweeted Woman’s Hour, incidentally, about the tedious BBC debate being followed by Woman’s Hour: it was such a glaring contrast. All that impenetrable male theorising (apart from Liz Forgan) – and then a madly lively live discussion between Erica Jong and Joanna Trollope. Jong’s reading from her novel Fear of Dying gave a wonderful evocation of her merrily demented mother (who died aged 100). With outsiders, she was still perfectly able to reminisce, and given to ‘piercing insights’. ‘I don’t think she was demented,’ said Erica. ‘I think she was just bored by her children’s conversation.’ Jong told Jane Garvey: ‘The curse of my life is people with no sense of humour.’ Trollope was her usual crisp self, defending ‘domestic novels’. Even if you are ruling the world, she said, you have a domestic life. And remember: 67 per cent of all books are bought by women.
To placate Sandy Macnab, who wrote in to The Oldie defending Chris Evans against my ‘vicious sideswipe’, I have tried listening to Radio 2 in the mornings but Evans is not my idea of ‘a breath of fresh air’. He is cheerful, as anyone should be with £600,000 a year (before he even starts on Top Gear). But he is shouty. He is surrounded by people whooping and laughing immoderately. That is bad enough but he is also banal and not very funny. Wogan was a thinker, likeable, and amused by life, and this was infectious.
However, I must modify my snarks last month about the female Hollywood voice – Drew Barrymore’s interrogative inflections, etc. On Woman’s Hour, two stars, Geena Davis and Meryl Streep, spoke articulately, modestly and with reason about the outnumbering of women on screen. So, mea culpa.
I listened again to several broadcasts by the lamented Lisa Jardine, whose voice was always welcome. Four months ago, she was one of the best guests on Desert Island Discs. Not only her choice of music, but her frank assessment of herself as an ‘obnoxious’ child, and just not up to competing with the men at Cambridge in maths. She was a live-wire panellist (on A Good Read, discussing Greek epigrams, she said: ‘Oh dear, I have an unerring eye for the priapic’), and I loved all her Points of View, especially the one on the power of the colour red (she painted her hair bright red). She did not take herself too seriously and would have had many laughs with Erica Jong.