Radio Valerie Grove
Fairy Gill – aka Gillian Reynolds, doyenne of radio critics, who annually writes her column in panto guise – recently flew on gossamer wings to address the venerable Highgate Literary & Scientific Institution (founded 1839) on the future of radio.
She drew a full house – like most speakers at the HLSI. The following week, it was Henry Marsh, who had to begin his lecture by announcing the government’s momentous Brexit defeat. Gillian’s audience included a former BBC Radio head of comedy, Paul Schlesinger, and also Dame Patricia Hodgson, long-serving BBC Trust mandarin. Typical for Highgate Village.
Gillian instantly checked that her audience were avid radio listeners, like 90 per cent of the population. And that we go for Radios 4 and 3 – not LBC, not Virgin, not podcasts.
Gillian listens to everything and writes at her kitchen table in the warm.
‘I have the best job in the world,’ she told us. ‘There’s too much to choose from, and the space is too short... [ahem, yes] BUT nobody in the arts believes radio is an art, which it is.’
When the Guardian appointed her as radio critic in 1968, it was a sort of in-joke: her husband, Stanley, was its TV critic. They lived in Liverpool, where she later became controller of Radio Liverpool (not a happy episode – ‘I hate meetings’).
Then they moved to London and, over sherry with Bill Deedes at 10am, she was appointed Daily Telegraph radio critic, and stayed 40-plus years. Headhunted by the Sunday Times a year ago, at 82, she cut out of her contract the obligation to do social media, ‘which only encourages bad behaviour’.
She remains ecstatically happy to cover the medium which dominates opinion – ‘You can ring up and rant at Nigel Farage’ – and which uses the best actors and playwrights, presenters and poets. ‘I get tremendously engaged with poetry on radio,’ she told us, having brought along Seamus Heaney’s The Shipping Forecast (as read by Prince Charles on Today). ‘It shows why radio is so potent and exerts its fascination.’
The BBC persists in its fruitless quest for listeners aged 16-25 – ‘but the young listen only to music, as they always did, and not via radio’. She railed at James Purnell for squandering millions on BBC Sounds with its algorithms: ‘Have you ever met an algorithm? My choices are nothing like what BBC Sounds chooses for me.’
She’s gone off The Archers. She approved HLSI’S enthusiasm for 4Extra and the World Service. She offered a prize to whoever could name the new breakfast presenter of BBC 6Music: Lauren Laverne. It was won by a glaringly youthful person.
Gillian’s most shocking revelation: the budget for a year’s supply of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue is smaller than that of a single TV programme. Also, Radio 3, the smallest and much-threatened network, remains the biggest supplier of live music. And Rumpole, Pinter and Lee Hall were launched on Radio 3. She invited us to wonder why Chris Evans and Eddie Mair went over to commercial. ‘“The isle is full of noises” – who said that?’ she asked. ‘That’s right: Caliban, not Prospero. There’s a moral there.’
Amo Amas Amusical was given two prime-time airings on Radio 4; one on New Year’s Eve. Mary Beard told the story of Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer, the work of a Victorian don and clergyman, Benjamin Hall Kennedy. He was a supporter of higher education for women at the first Cambridge colleges, and his daughters Julia and Marion improved their father’s textbook, a bestseller to this day. Beaty Rubens, the producer, used live choral singers before a Radio Theatre audience, including sung Latin translations of the abuse hurled by trolls at Mary Beard for being an educated woman. This was bold stuff – treating the audience like grown-ups.