Radio Valerie Grove
Last month I mentioned, only half ironically, being breathless with excitement about the upcoming Archers trial. Would Helen, having stabbed her confidence-crushing husband Rob, be acquitted of attempted murder? The cliffhanger outcome proved satisfactory (Eileen Atkins’s withering remarks to the jury were instrumental) but Rob’s chilling threat to remain in Ambridge, asserting his claims on baby Jack/gideon (‘You haven’t got rid of me. As long as we have a child together, you never will’) means this storyline has legs: it’s going to run and run. For foul-weather Archers listeners like me (who tune in only for scandals and sudden deaths) it was interesting to discover how many of my friends cared a button about it. What a shock: almost all did, even hardened
Archers- haters. But Gillian Reynolds, doyenne of radio commentators and lifelong Archers devotee, complained that the BBC made too much of it – having barristers discuss it as if were real life in Radio Times, for instance. They don’t normally pay that much attention to what’s on radio. ‘I’m angry with the BBC,’ said Reynolds on The Media
Show, ‘for not realising the importance of radio, not recognising how much more it matters to us than television.’ True.
I do ponder the fact that both the outgoing and incoming Archers editors are Eastenders men. Some signal here? But let’s compare the headline-hogging domination of the front pages by three TV programmes – Strictly, Bake-off and
Top Gear. Reynolds is right: none of those overblown TV subjects – strobe-lit celebs twirling in spangles, hapless amateur chefs lamenting soggy pastry, hideous men in cars travelling at stupid speeds – matters a jot. The Archers drama, and the kind of information it imparted along with the entertainment, underlines the superiority of radio.
And £150,000 was raised for women’s refuges (by a listener, Paul Trueman) as Helen’s story unfolded.
Happy seventieth birthday to my contemporary, Radio 3. To celebrate, I’m going to an In Tune recording in the pop-up studio in the Royal Festival Hall, where Sean Rafferty, Suzy Klein and their famous guests will be visible to the passing public, along with the opening scene of Robin Brooks’s play about the birth of the Third Programme. I think if reaching out, Radio 3 should double up with Radio 4 on programmes of tone and quality – such as the recent reading of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis: his letter to Bosie pondering his ruin, caused by ‘our ill-fated and most lamentable friendship’. Stephen Rea was the reader, and the whole thing, a Reduced Radio company production, was quite sublime and utterly heartbreaking.
Our friend Barry Cryer was invited to read out the Saturday IPM one-line news items contributed by listeners. It’s a weird gig, this. What a world! ‘My washing line broke as I was pegging out the last towel.’ ‘My wife doesn’t know I know she’s having an affair.’ ‘I’ve resigned from work to look after my aged father with dementia.’ ‘I am having the worst hangover of my life.’ ‘I’ve just had tea with the love of my life and his wife. I found myself in tears.’ Dearie me. There was another cheating partner, a lost tooth, an autistic child, and a wife whose husband has gone on a business trip sighing, ‘Oh joy – at last!’ Barry, who had never even heard of IPM before, was mystified – like others before him – by having to say such lines in the first person. ‘Perhaps the kind of people who don’t know about comedy think it is a funny idea.’
Quote... Unquote too must wrestle with the modern age where googling makes memorising quotations archaic. I wonder how many listeners got the joke when Nigel Rees mentioned a woman whose husband, reared on Dickens, said if he ever had a dog he would call it Willis, so that he could say: ‘Willis is barkin’.’ (Well, I laughed.)