Bbc radio 4

Raw, earthy, ear-piercing. It’s hard to decide which was more terrifying and unsettling: the roar of the elephants in Living with Nature on the World Service, or the screaming women and men who we heard letting rip in Garrett Carr’s Radio 4 documentary, The Silence and the Scream. The elephants were recorded by sound engineer Chris Watson, and his producer Sarah Blunt in northern Kenya in the first of their new series in which they use sound as their tour guide and listening as their way of experiencing the landscape. We couldn’t see the golden orb of the sun rising over the miles of flat grasslands peppered with acacia groves and rocky outcrops, but the soundscape created by Watson and Blunt took us there in spirit.

There’s been a lot of fuss and many column inches written about levels of pay at the BBC, as revealed in its latest Annual Report. Who gets too much? Why are women presenters still paid less than their male counterparts? What can be done to create more equality at the BBC? But all this controversy about money and gender is a red herring, diverting attention away from what we should be far more concerned about. Quietly, without fanfare, the BBC has been changing the way it makes and delivers its programmes.

When did you last take the bus? If you don’t live in London, probably not for ages. In her two-part series for Radio 4, Mind the Gap, Lynsey Hanley set out to demonstrate just how difficult it is to access public transport outside the capital. In Skelmersdale, billed in the 1960s as a place of opportunity, a new town where everything would work better to make life easy for everyone, rich, middling and poor, no rail connection was built into the plan and now there are very few buses to get around. So bad is it that the council has had to set up a subsidised taxi scheme (euphemistically known as ‘the demand responsive transport system’) so that workers without cars can get to those offices, shops and factories no longer on a bus route.

It’s been a heavyweight week on Radio 4 with the start of the annual series of Reith Lectures and a talk on empire by Jan Morris, and thank heavens for that. We need serious, we need facts, we need to think in these trying times, beset as they are by Love Island and persistent presidential tweeting. As it happens, both talks were given by women, and I can’t help wondering whether their gender has something to do with the way neither of them plugged a definite line but instead suggested there are more ways than one of looking at things. On Wednesday morning Morris looked back at Britain’s imperial past in her own inimitable fashion, calling her programme The British Empire: An Equivocation (produced by Gareth Jones).

I don’t know which day Rod Liddle travelled down from the northeast and found nothing but women’s voices cluttering up Radio 4, as he wrote about in last week’s magazine. But his description is not one I recognise. If anything we still hear too much from male commentators, male presenters, male writers, male comedians. In recent years, for instance, the gender-balance of contributors to the Today programme has improved from the 18 per cent of female guests just a decade ago, but there’s still a long way to go before we need to apologise for wanting to hear more from women. Very often they speak truth to power (because not in power themselves) as did Vera Brittain in her searing account of the impact of the first world war, Testament of Youth.

Headlines announcing that Radio 4’s flagship Today programme is losing its audience while Radio 3’s Breakfast has put on numbers got me up and listening extra early to find out which of all the presenters is most likely to keep me tuned in. Why have the efforts to brighten up Today, with longer interviews, more arts coverage, puzzles and news items from the web, not gone down well? What’s been happening on 3 to encourage more people to tune in first thing? And, further afield, how’s Classic FM doing, or those other breakfast stalwarts, Nick Grimshaw and Chris Evans? Evans was off-duty when I tuned in to Radio 2 one morning last week, but Sara Cox sounded as if she was loving every minute of being in his chair. Evans had better watch out.

One sphere that podcasts have so far not much penetrated is drama. Audible.co.uk is itching to develop its own brand but so far has limited itself to producing audiobooks read by a galaxy of stars. Recording plays is expensive, requires an understanding of studio techniques and a cast of actors who have learnt how to play to the microphone, not an auditorium. Only the BBC has as yet the necessary experience and resources, with its own repertory company and team of spot-effects experts and sound designers.

‘Do you ever imagine your audience?’ was a question thrown at James Ward, creator and presenter of The Boring Talks podcast, at a recent seminar on podcasting organised by the BBC. ‘I try not to,’ Ward replied.‘I wouldn’t want to meet them.’ Such antipathy is all part of Ward’s alternative persona. The Boring Talks’s USP is to explore those topics usually considered too dull to explore, let alone talk about for half an hour. It’s become very popular, emerging from the Boring Talks conferences that have been held annually now for eight years. But his comment was very revealing. You can really tell when listening to his show that he doesn’t care about us.

The timing of the Today programme’s series about hospices could not have been more apt, coming as it did so soon after Tessa Jowell’s death was announced with its array of tributes and the poignant interview with her husband and one of her daughters. In themselves such personal testimonies are not always that helpful — everyone’s situation is individual and the actual outcomes necessarily different. But what Jowell’s family said about her last hours and their evident acknowledgment and acceptance of their situation gave a real sense of purpose on Monday to Zoe Conway’s report from the North London Hospice. This was part of the Dying Matters campaign, urging us to think more about death and end-of-life care.

Now here’s a series that would make a brilliant podcast but is also classic Radio 4 — they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, why can’t podcasts be more like Radio 4? Programmes where the presenter’s role is to draw out the knowledge of experts, and the pace is measured, allowing the fascination of what’s being revealed to make an impact before leaping on, and where there’s no background music except when it adds to the timbre, the meaning, the purpose. Each episode of Classified Britain (produced by John Forsyth) is only 15 minutes long, so not too demanding of one’s time, and yet a lot of information is packed into that slot without it seeming too hectic or over-enthusiastic.

It was a provocative decision by the producers of Archive on 4, 50 Years On: Rivers of Blood (Nathan Gower and David Prest) to base their programme around a full exposition of Enoch Powell’s infamous 1968 speech on immigration, all 3,183 words of it, spoken by an actor (Ian McDiarmid) as if he were giving the speech in front of an audience. Why give further publicity to a speech that gave such offence at the time, and so dangerously expressed such inflammatory opinions? But the explosive reaction to the Radio 4 programme on social media, even before it went out on air, explains and justifies their decision.

Like a breath of fresh air Martha Kearney has arrived on Radio 4’s Today programme, taking over from Sarah Montague (who will now host the lunchtime news programme formerly presided over by Kearney). Her presenting style is just so different, less confrontational, more investigative, perhaps developed by her because at lunchtime the mood is different, less rushed, more ambulant. The tone on the World At One was always much more reflective than reactive, Kearney pondering events rather than racing through to the next interview, butting in, hustling, flustering her guests. On Monday morning’s Today, she interviewed the author of a book on ‘elastic thinking’.

To Herne Bay in Kent for the UK International Radio Drama Festival: 50 plays from 17 countries in 15 languages broadcast over five days to the festival audience. It’s an opportunity to find out what radio plays sound like in other countries, but also to experience a different kind of listening. About 25 of us were invited into a suite of rooms furnished with flock wallpaper, floral sofas and armchairs to take us back to the great age of radio listening in the 1950s. A kettle boils in the background; buttered scones on a tiered rack are sitting ready for us to pounce on at the next pause between plays.

It’s a tough listen, Paradise Lost on Radio 4 at the weekend. In bold defiance of the demands of a broad audience, Milton’s 10,000 lines of high-flown, complex verse runs for two-and-a-half hours (broadcast in two parts on Saturday and Sunday). You need to concentrate and take in every word, not be busy with something else, ears half-cocked to gather the general meaning. But, if you stay with it, the majesty of the subject, that galactic struggle between good and evil, and the mighty flow of words will ensure that all foolish thought is thenceforth banished (at least until the next Trumpian tweet or fallacious Facebook rumour).

‘Close your eyes and be absorbed by the storytelling,’ urged Jon Manel (the new head of podcasting at BBC World Service) as we settled into our chairs. We were just about to hear the ‘world première’ of the latest podcast from the BBC World Service, launched dramatically in the Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House in front of a packed, expectant audience, with full surround sound, every raindrop magnified (and there was a lot of it). It was odd to realise quite how far podcasting has already transformed radio.

It feels like a long time since the launch of Home Front on Radio 4 back in June 2014, retracing day-by-day events of 100 years ago as Britain went to war. It is a long time. Yet still the violence in Europe rages on while back home the families of the men and boys in trenches carry on as normal, putting on plays at the local theatre, selling toys, running art classes, working the trams. A new season (number 13, with two more to go before the series ends on 9 November) starts up again on Monday. It may be an everyday story, says its editor, Jessica Dromgoole, but it’s most definitely not a soap. Every episode has been recorded for broadcast in the same studio in Birmingham where The Archers is made.

This week’s edition of Ramblings with Clare Balding did all the usual things: a walk in the country (cue breathy conversation as we followed her up hill and down dale), braving the elements (there’s always rain at some point) with a dog in tow, and in the company of someone for whom the walk has some meaning. But then the programme took off into something quite unexpected as her walking companion, Christina Edwards, began to explain why this particular ramble, in the heart of Northamptonshire, was so familiar to her, and why they were retracing her steps not in daylight, when the rolling hills and gentle fields could best be appreciated, but as darkness fell.

Some of us grew up worrying about reds under the bed, which was perhaps not as foolish as all that if a report on Saturday morning’s Today programme on Radio 4 is to be believed. Amid a cacophony of weird-sounding bleeps and disembodied voices, Gordon Corera, the BBC’s security correspondent (always clear, calm and collected, no matter the brief), told us about the ‘number stations’ that proliferated in the Cold War and are now being brought back to life. Anyone can tune in to them, but only those in the know can understand what they mean, and although the source of the transmissions can be traced it’s impossible to pick up those who are listening in to them, which is why they have come back into use.

Last year was a bit of a year for Radio 4 anniversaries; maybe most notably, Desert Island Discs celebrated 70 years on air. But oddly enough, so did another show. Round Britain Quiz, which you may remember vaguely from your childhood, or possibly your parents’ childhood, also reached 70 in 2017. There have been one or two breaks, but this abstruse and, let’s face it, unashamedly smart show has survived the slings and arrows of outrageous Radio 4 controllers. Every year we fret and worry, hoping beyond hope that it will be recommissioned. Every year, I’m glad to say, it is. I say ‘we’ because, for the past few years, I have been part of the merry crew that makes the programme. It’s one of the very best jobs in the world.