Radio Valerie Grove
Muriel Spark’s centenary was unavoidable on Radios 4 and 3, under the umbrella title, The Vital Spark. Alan Taylor’s Appointment in Arezzo was
Book of the Week; novels were dramatised and discussed; and Open Book replayed an interview, so we heard her 1930s Morningside voice: ‘I like to ridicule, where ridicule is due.’
I, too, once had an appointment in Arezzo: a hot August day. Dame Muriel was dressed entirely in orange, from her cape to her little socks, one of which read ‘Hot Stuff’ and the other ‘Teen Queen’. Small, bright-eyed and inquisitive, she and her companion, Miss Jardine, arrived in the Alfa Romeo bought with Dame Muriel’s £30,000 award for literary excellence given by David Cohen, ‘an awfully nice doctor in Hampstead’.
She talked as she wrote, in vignettes, with diversions caused by hardness of hearing. When I asked, ‘Are you a political animal?’ she replied, ‘Oh yes, I love animals.’ She said that if anyone else used one of her fountain pens, she threw it out of the window. She always wrote on lined exercise books from James
Thin of Edinburgh: I said I hoped they no longer charged her. ‘Oh, they do,’ she said. ‘They’re Edinburgh people.’
Memento Mori (1957) became a Saturday afternoon drama – perfect oldie fodder: slightly dated but still apropos, being about that timeless subject, Death, in the form of an anonymous nuisance phone caller who says, ‘Remember you must die.’ Spark (aged 41) identified with her oldies’ fears, denials and afflictions.
Godfrey: ‘Would you like me to read you the obituaries, dear?’
Charmian: ‘Well, I should like the war news.’
Dame Lettie: ‘The war has been over since 1945.’ Comic brilliance. The BBC’S pay inequality is indefensible, but a first-world problem. There’s never been literal equality in journalism, anyway: editors can easily find ways to lavish sums on their passing fancy of either sex. Carrie Gracie’s name was unnoticed until she took her stand. Like Rosa Parks in Alabama, she is now immortalised by a gesture that may encourage women. Having said which, Gracie was well remunerated. And the much more famous household name John Humphrys, about six times as well remunerated, might have desisted from his locker-room ‘joshing’ with Jon Sopel about it.
But heavens, who expects their office chat to be broadcast to the world? The surveillance culture in offices makes one glad to work at home where I can (and do) say anything I like about anyone and everyone – loudly. And I hate being expected to judge people by what they earn and whether they deserve it. One ends up hating them all – going along with Howard Jacobson (in A Point of View): ‘Whatever happened to misanthropy?’ When Humphrys had the nerve to remind Katharine Viner, Guardian editor, that she is paid less than her male predecessor, she replied that she is happy with her pay. That’s been the traditional, dangerous response of women anywhere on the literary coalface. Say, ‘I enjoy my work’, and the response is ‘So why pay them at all?’
As for the Me Too and Time’s Up campaigns triggered by the Weinstein watershed, I propose another slogan: ‘What fresh hell is this?’ covering every social media idiocy, every obvious fiscal blunder – Trump, Toby Young, Carillion. Talking of men and their dreadful habits, Meryl Streep, armed with her wisdom and good voice, and her scorn of Twitter, did some straight talking in an excellent interview on Woman’s Hour. At the end, Jenni Murray had to make a bold link: ‘Well, from erections on the subway to Mamma Mia.’
And finally, congratulations to Gillian Reynolds, who recently took PM listeners on a tour of the plastics in her kitchen. She is getting (I hope) a pay hike at 82 by moving to the Sunday Times, which promises extra space for radio. Good.