Culture

It seems incredible now but when the BBC’s youth station, Radio 1, was launched in 1967 there were no female presenters. That’s right. Not a single woman’s voice to leaven the mix of Fluff, Blackburn and co. One-half of the young people the Corporation was hoping would stay tuned beyond Listen with Mother and Children’s Hour were burning their bras and demanding the pill. Yet the world presented to them by Auntie was strictly male-only. It took three years before Annie Nightingale was allowed behind the mike, and several more before she had company.

Out there in the great ether there’s a whole new world of radio beyond the stations of the BBC and the FM dial. This week I found myself listening to a programme in Danish. I know. It sounds mad. But there I was glued to my computer screen reading the English subtitles while I listened to Stig and his helpers chatting away in Danish as they fitted him with a new set of teeth. Stig’s Teeth (produced by Kim Hansen and Rikke Houd) was a runner-up in this year’s Sheffield Doc/Fest, which for the first time had an audio category. Doc/Fest was set up to celebrate the art of making documentaries, of telling stories, but only in film. At last, though, the organisers have recognised that (of course) ‘sound tells the best stories’.

First, a confession. Even an ardent radio addict can enjoy a fortnight away from the airwaves, disconnected, switched off, unlistening. On return even the programmes that are usually ignored because they’ve become so familiar catch your attention. I grew up with Gardeners’ Question Time as a regular weekly slot on Sunday afternoons, snooze time for my overworked Dad, but stopped listening after the great schism of 1994, when the entire panel abandoned the BBC and moved over to the new Classic FM station because they didn’t like the way the BBC was handing over its production to an independent company. The illusion that the programme was a bit otherworldly, not part of the hard-bitten news and current affairs schedules or the argy-bargy of commerce, was shattered.

Much praise has been lavished on Radio 2’s 500 Words short-story competition, the winners to be announced on Friday’s Chris Evans show, live from the Hay Festival. Quite right, too. It’s a brilliant way to encourage children aged 13 and under to explore their potential by inviting them to write stories. But you’d think that since it’s a competition organised by a radio station the prizes might have something to do with listening, the making of programmes, the sheer magic of radio. Not so. The winners will receive a huge pile of books for themselves, and another pile for their school library. But there’s nothing to celebrate the connection between radio and the imagination; nothing to encourage children to take up the radio habit.

Tucked away in the schedules, just before midday, just after midweek (on Thursday), just four lines in the Radio Times, was one of those radio gems. Nothing remarkable on the surface, but every so often sparkling with insight, or a different way of seeing. Woolf in the Jungle (produced by Dan Shepherd) took us to Sri Lanka (or rather Ceylon) in 1904 when a young Leonard Woolf arrived on the teardrop island, with his wire-haired terrier Charles, 70 volumes of Voltaire, and absolutely no political, business or legal experience. He had been sent out to work as an officer in the Ceylon Civil Service, and very soon was posted to Hambantota in the south-east of the island, which he governed, single-handedly, for three years before returning to England.

A rustle of paper as the sleeve is removed. A clunk and click as the needle arm is swung across. The needle hits the vinyl, bringing it to life. At first there’s a lot of crackling in the ether. Then at last the music begins. A sultry saxophone. A few notes on the guitar, slow, low and relaxed. At last the voice enters. It’s not at all what you would expect from that swingband opening. The voice is strong, unmelodic, harsh almost, but so passionate you’re drawn in straight away. We’re told it’s Little Miss Cornshucks. She’s singing a version of ‘Try a little tenderness’ that sounds just as good, if not better, than Otis Redding’s amazing version from 1966. Who is she? You might well ask.

There I was trapped in the bathroom at 10.55 p.m., unable to leave for fear of missing anything. The time it would have taken me to get to the bedroom, touch the screen of the digital radio, encouraging it to dawdle its way into life, was just too long, too risky. Vital information in the story might have been lost. The tension, created by that single voice holding me on a thread, would have been dissipated. It came as a surprise. Book at Bedtime (Radio 4, Monday to Friday evenings) is often such a disappointment these days that the radio gets switched off at 10.51 (after six minutes you know for sure that whatever is being read is not going to get any better).

Did you hear those bloodcurdling screams from Kirsty? Those long-drawn-out wails that echoed horrifically through the ancient walls of St Stephen’s Church last Thursday — in a strange, unwelcome echo of Nigel’s unfortunate descent from the roof of Lower Loxley in 2011? They were enough to make every woman’s blood run cold. Kirsty, the bride-to-be, was not just dumped by Tom on her way to the altar but also left dangling in all her finery at the church gate while Tom (what a waster of an Archer) sobbed his heart out in the vestry. Did you see it coming? (I didn’t.

It’s a shame Dolly Parton has never gone into politics. She’s someone who’s lived her life very much in the public eye and yet has never lost sight of who she is, of her claim to fame as a country singer. You can tell by the way she sings, even now after more than 50 years in the business, that it’s straight from the heart, nothing synthesised, nothing stage-managed. Her voice just ripples out, tripping lightly through those lyrics of broken hearts, feckless men, without ever sounding bored, trite, as if she didn’t really care.

Given the decline of Christian belief in the UK, it’s surprising to discover there’s quite so much about the Easter story on the airwaves this week. You might have assumed that no space would have been found in the schedules for a retelling of the central but yet most difficult Christian narrative. Christmas is easy to sell and to dwell on, with its baby, its joyous arrival, its exotic gifts, but Easter? Who hasn’t as a child in a Christian household bewailed the gloom and doom of Good Friday? Who hasn’t at some point given up on attempting to understand the great paradox of the Passion as it takes us from the triumphant glory of Palm Sunday when Jesus entered Jerusalem to the horrific events of Good Friday fewer than seven days later?

Four could have been dubbed the Frank Radio network this week as the sharp skills of Sue MacGregor, Alan Dein and Fi Glover teased out some stark opinions and revelations. MacGregor was back on Sunday morning with a new series of The Reunion, daring to bring together round the same table in an enclosed studio five people who were closely involved in the miners’ strike of 1984–5. And not just any five people, but five people who at the time were on fiercely opposing sides of the crisis: a Tory cabinet minister, a policeman, a union official who later became a Labour minister, and a white-collar member of the NUM. Thirty years later the gulf between the politicians and the workers, with the police playing piggy in the middle, was as deep and tetchy and irreconcilable as ever.

After a walk in Richmond Park beset by rush-hour traffic, the Heathrow flight path and a strange swarm of flying ants (strange because so early in the year), it was unsettling to come back in and switch on and listen to Kirsty Gunn’s spring walk for this week’s The Essay on Radio 3 (which I heard as a preview but you can now catch on iPlayer). Gunn lives in Sutherland in the far north of Scotland close to the River Brora, and has a view from her back windows that stretches for 500 square miles with no other house or sign of human life in sight. ‘There’s nothing out there,’ Gunn told us, ‘except space and emptiness, light and land — and the weather.

It’s amazing to think that it’s 20 years since the launch of Radio 5 Live. But it was bright and early on the morning of 28 March 1994 (long before Princess Diana’s death, 9/11, the Iraq war, the London bombs, the Asian tsunami, the ‘Arab spring’) that Jane Garvey announced, ‘Welcome to a new network.’ Not an impersonal statement, ‘This is Radio 5 Live’, as you might have expected from the BBC. But an inviting ‘Welcome’. Come in. Join us. We want to hear from you, just as much as you are going to hear from us. Interaction was what gave the station its USP, its distinctive character. Yet this was more than a decade before Twitter, Tumblr, Buzzfeed really took off.

It’s such a simple idea. Take a tape recorder. Hang around at the entrance to a railway station or in the departure lounge of an airport. Look for an intriguing face, an unusual couple, a dashing outfit. Rush up to them (having remembered to switch on the recorder) and ask, ‘Where are you going?’ As Catherine Carr said at the beginning of her programme for the Freedom 2014 series on the BBC World Service at the weekend, ‘Every interrupted journey is a portal into somebody’s life.’ Of course, in Where are you going? (produced by Jo Coombs) we only got to hear from the travellers who had something interesting to tell us, but even so this was an hour of pure radio, with so many vivid snapshots, such compelling stories.

When the BBC proposed to do away with 6 Music a few years ago, the media-savvy fans of the station created such a fuss on Twitter and Facebook that the Corporation caved in. Threat of closure was exactly what the station needed to grow its listener-base, now almost as big as Radio 3, and growing (up to 1.96 million per week in the latest Rajar figures, as opposed to Radio 3’s 1.99 million). The Asian Network, too, has flourished after suggestions that it would also have to be shut down if the BBC was to survive financially in the new digital age. But what’s good for them has now spelt doom for BBC3 (at least as a ‘linear’ channel) and further cuts are forecast. Which station will face the chop next time?

It doesn’t take long for an international event of historic importance to fall off the news agenda. Ukraine is still there, making headlines, but soon it will be forgotten as the political drama in Kiev, Sebastopol, the Crimea is overtaken by an unfolding crisis elsewhere. We who live beyond and outwith the situation are encouraged to move on, gawping instead at another horrifying outpouring of human cruelty and misery. But for those forced to stay on and endure it’s not so easy. For them the terror will linger on long after our sympathies have been translated to another scene, another situation.

‘Phwhoof!’ exclaimed Evan at 8.27, before reluctantly turning us over to the sport report on Saturday morning’s Today (Radio 4). His intense connection with what he had just listened to in the studio (and we had heard at home while slowly waking up to the day) as Gavin Hewitt and Duncan Crawford reported from the centre of Kiev was palpable. Things were happening in Ukraine. The situation was changing fast. What we had been told at 7 a.m. — that anti-government demonstrators were continuing to occupy their protest camp in Independence Square — had become, in fewer than 90 minutes, very much old news. Evan Davies was signalling to us in very audible expression that we were witnessing a moment in history, and he was live on air trying to make sense of it.

What does freedom mean to you? That’s the question the BBC World Service has been asking of us through its season of programmes Freedom 2014. The Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield (whose daily blog from space went viral) gave us a vivid and unusual image of what freedom, or rather the lack of freedom, looks like to him. While circling the earth in the international space station, he noticed that each time he went past the lights of Berlin were two different colours. After a while he realised this was ‘a poignant reminder’ of the city’s history; of its former lack of freedom; of how it had been divided by a wall for decades. The wall has been taken down, but the lights tell a different story.

A double dose of BBC1 drama at the weekend (Silent Witness, Casualty) left me wondering whether there’s a link between the falling crime figures announced last week and the levels of blood and bestiality now showing nightly on TV. With so much violence available at the switch of a button, who needs to create their own? (Bear with me, the connection with radio will soon become apparent.) What surprised me was not just the amount of violence but also the lack of any real motivation. It was all completely unbelievable (in spite of the best efforts of the make-up department) and meaningless, and as a consequence mind-numbingly dull.

When my colleague Charles Moore first began accusing Radio 3 of becoming ‘babyish’, and talking down to us as if we’re too ignorant to understand anything complicated, I had to agree. The constant twittering between items, the gimmicky brainteasers and Classical Top Ten are irritating. Those emails and texts from clever-clogs listeners determined to show off what they know, or have performed themselves, or seen on stage are as annoying and pointless as Christmas round-robin letters. But these are all merely sideshows, not the main performance. The real test for the station is whether our musical palates are still being tested, educated, stretched.

You might think the main storyline in The Archers is all about Helen’s affair with dastardly Rob. (What does she see in him? It’s so obvious he’s a mean-spirited control freak.) Or the new ‘voice’ for Tony, as David Troughton takes over from Colin Skipp, who has played the part for more than 40 years. But actually the real drama in the past fortnight has been swept along by the 94-year-old actress who plays Peggy Woolley and by her younger sidekick Jill Archer played by the 83-year-old Patricia Greene. Together they’ve provided a masterclass on how to act on air, with their distinctive voices, precisely calibrated characters and ability to make us believe in them.

‘It put a lot upon us,’ said Christopher Jefferies’s aunt. ‘The ripples went on and did not stop for a long time.’ She was talking about the after-effects of the media witchhunt that skewered her nephew after his arrest in connection with the death of the Bristol landscape architect Joanna Yeates in December 2011. Jefferies was depicted as being almost certainly guilty because of his long, hippie-like hair, his bachelordom, his love of poetry and ‘culture’, his brusque refusal to speak to the press. Yet his only link with the crime was that he owned the flat in Clifton where Yeates lived. Saturday night’s Archive on 4 (Radio 4) reminded us of what happened to Jefferies and his family, and of some uncomfortable truths.

New year new ideas as we woke up on Monday morning to find ourselves in Lagos with Evan Davies trying to convince us that Nigeria really is undergoing an economic earthquake. It’s part of a week-long campaign by Radio 4 to make us believe that the next economic leaders among world nations will be Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey. These new Mint countries are destined, we are told, to take over from the Bric countries, now deemed passé after just a decade in the limelight generated by the economist fashionistas. It’s stimulating stuff for this hibernating time of year.

Perhaps the most moving programme of all amid the huge range that will mark the coming centenary of the Great War will be on 28 June, the day when in 1914 Gavrilo Princip shot dead the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie while they were on a state visit to Sarajevo. On that night, Radio 3, along with other members of the European Broadcasting Union, will transmit live from Sarajevo a concert by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, marking that first step on the road to war. But the evening will also inevitably reflect on how the aftermath of 1914–18 led ultimately to another war, this time in Bosnia, and to the three-year siege of Sarajevo (the longest siege of a capital city in modern times).

Is it time to scrap the licence fee? That’s a question we’re going to hear more and more about in the next couple of years. Why should the BBC retain its archaic monopoly over the airwaves? Why not abolish the royal charter that grants the BBC the right to collect the fee (worth £3.6 billion a year) when it comes up for renewal in 2017? A change is long overdue, throwing open the broadcasting market, giving the independent production companies more opportunities to succeed and enabling the new digital online stations to expand, build audiences, create more original audio experiences. Or is it? Just imagine what would happen to radio in the UK if the BBC could no longer guarantee its funding.

Just in time for Advent, that season of preparation, of getting ready, of making sure we are in the right mind to weather the excitements of Christmas, the World Service gave us a short programme designed to get us in the mood. In Heart and Soul on Sunday, Jane Little talked to Joshua Dubois who since 2008 has been sending daily ‘devotional’ messages to President Obama. Dubois began writing his emails during that first toughly fought election campaign. He was working for the Obama team in an outreach office, not close to the then senator but close enough to realise how tense and difficult the process of getting elected had become.

As I listened to Robert Peston early last Friday fluffing on about the Revd Paul Flowers and the possible effect of his indiscretions on the future of the Co-operative Bank, I couldn’t help wondering why none of the financial journalists smelt a rat when Flowers took over as chairman of the once-dependable, now-fragile bank. The former Methodist minister, it is now emerging, has made a career out of duping those who employ him. He’s evidently a conman of considerable talent, but even so it’s incredible that none of the BBC’s keen-eyed investigators into the City and matters financial thought it worthwhile to check out Flowers once it was known that the bank was so surprisingly and shockingly in trouble.

A surfeit of anniversaries this week reminded us that on the day of President Kennedy’s assassination, C.S. Lewis (born 1898) and Aldous Huxley (born 1894) also died. Three such different figures are hard to imagine — Kennedy, the wily politician, Lewis, the tortured academic, Huxley the cool intellectual. Lewis is the one whose image and personality don’t fit; a man who appears cast from a different age from Kennedy and also from Huxley, who you can well imagine wielding an iPod and Twitter account. Yet it’s the pipe-smoking, tweed-suited Lewis who has been given the celebrity treatment this week, while the coolly cynical Huxley has been silenced, with not a feature or reading to be heard.