Radio Valerie Grove
I love dramas based on the recent past. An afternoon play on Radio 4, Talk to
Me, was about Ayn Rand: familiar name, but who was she? Cited as the ‘favourite author’ of a man who doesn’t read (Trump); co-founder of a selfish capitalist philosophy.
What we got, in this ingenious concoction by Mary Ward-lowery, was an improvised documentary – a treatment she has used previously for Thomas Hardy and Karl Marx.
It’s a labour-intensive process. Ward-lowery conducted ‘interviews’ with Ayn Rand, her film-star husband Frank O’connor (they met in Hollywood on a Cecil B De Mille set) and Rand’s sister, Nora, from St Petersburg,
the city Ayn (Alisa) left for New York in 1926.
Diana Quick, always diligent when preparing to play a part, was a remarkably convincing Rand; Rupert Wickham wonderful as her husband Frank. The entire cast sounded extraordinarily natural. Without a script. How? Ward-lowery and her writers supplied documentary evidence, and then met the cast on Zoom to discuss each character. A framework was knocked out. The interviews were individually recorded on computers from the actors’ homes. Dazzling proof of the intuitive intelligence of actors when they truly inhabit a character. Who needs lines?
I did not warm to Ayn Rand, though. By contrast, Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts, is my hero, and Simon Bovey’s play, Franklin, was a moving reflection of this inspiring, gentle man, played by Trevor White. It told how, in 1968, after Martin Luther King’s assassination, a mother wrote to Schulz, suggesting it might be helpful if the Peanuts strip were to include one little black kid. Schulz was advised not to by some. The black kid would have to be flawless to avoid causing offence. And Schulz would lose syndication in papers south of Dixie.
Schulz – self-effacing and goodhearted – wanted to do it, but agonised: would he appear patronising? The answer – a little boy called Franklin who helps Charlie Brown build a sandcastle, and whose dad is away fighting in Vietnam – was perfectly judged. The director was Marc Beeby.
On a wet and wintry Wednesday morning, when the news couldn’t get much worse, came a moment of instant cheer from an unlikely source: Today. It was the inimitable sound of Tom Lehrer singing The Elements, to the tune of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s Modern MajorGeneral. Bliss! The story behind this, as Francis Beckett writes on page 32, was that Lehrer, at 92, is waiving the royalties from his brilliant lyrics for five years.
They played snatches of favourites –
The Vatican Rag, Poisoning Pigeons – but neglected to play the muchdownloaded, Covid-appropriate I Got It from Agnes, which he would perform in 1950s nightclubs. And now I can quote, without The Oldie’s having to pay a fee, the opening quatrain:
‘I got it from Agnes. She got it from Jim,/ We all agree it must have been Louise who gave it to him. / Now she got it from Harry, Who got it from Marie,/ And ev’rybody knows that Marie… Got it from me.’ Watch it on Youtube and be reminded how Lehrer personifies charm in performance. Andrew Neil, John Pienaar’s stand-in on Times Radio that week, asked the vital question: how long are song royalties collected? Answer: lifetime plus 70 years. Many thanks to Tom.
There are no newspaper editors like Harry Evans any more, passionate about upholding truth, ‘attacking the devil’ in the words of his Northern Echo predecessor, W T Stead. Nobody moved across a newsroom (or a tennis court) faster, and no editor was more approachable, eagerly intent on getting the story. This Archive on 4 was a repeat from Harry’s 90th birthday in 2018 and it was good to hear his stories again, prompting peals of laughter from Razia Iqbal, who told him, ‘You’re one of the reasons I became a journalist.’