Culture

Even the great Alan Bennett sounded out of synch with the times as he read from his new short story ‘The Shielding of Mrs Forbes’ for this week’s Book at Bedtime (Radio 4). Even the great Alan Bennett sounded out of synch with the times as he read from his new short story ‘The Shielding of Mrs Forbes’ for this week’s Book at Bedtime (Radio 4). His peculiarly English brand of wit, mordant, slightly sinister, a touch supercilious, grated on the nerves. No one else on radio can put together a character with such economy and yet such excruciating vividness. But in the light of the events of last week his characters sounded a bit jaded, a little worn out, too caricatured to gather us in as listeners.

There was a scary moment on last Sunday’s The Reunion when we heard that the derivatives market has ‘exploded’ since the collapse of Barings in 1995. Banking has become more, not less, dependent on the kinds of gambling on future (i.e., virtual) values that brought down Britain’s oldest merchant bank. When Barings fell, just over $1 billion went down the drain. Now, the derivatives market is worth $1.4 quadrillion — a figure that becomes more and more meaningless the bigger it gets, wafting through the ether like a cloud of poisonous gas.

It took just ten minutes for the secret of Nadia Comaneci’s extraordinary success at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal to be revealed. Comaneci achieved the first-ever perfect score when she was given a clean sweep of 10s from all the judges for her performance on the uneven bars. ‘What I remember is the dead silence in the stadium,’ recalls Vera Atkinson, a champion gymnast herself who was reporting on the Games for Bulgarian national television. ‘She flew between the bars, performing so many different things with the human body, before landing perfectly still...Yet the routine took barely 30 seconds.

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. Take Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. She wanted ‘to do something nice for the folks in my home county [Tennessee]. I wasn’t thinking on a larger scale,’ she says. But her idea to send a free book every month to every child enrolled in her scheme from the moment of birth right up until the age of five has now taken off and is reaching children across Australia, America and Canada. Four years ago she arrived in the UK to launch it in Rotherham, south Yorkshire, at the invitation of the local council. From sending out just 2,300 books each month when the scheme began 12 years ago, 700,000 children are now part of Dolly’s library.

‘You have to live. ‘You have to live. You have to find a way to live,’ a Japanese woman told the 15 elderly people who were trapped on the third floor of a concrete building in one of the small towns worst affected by the natural disaster in March. She had gathered them together after the earthquake, and in fear of a tsunami she kept urging them to struggle up the stairs to the third floor: ‘Move up. Move up.’ Then suddenly she saw that the telegraph poles were ‘popping’ out of the ground and a sea of black water was surging towards them. ‘Am I going to die now?’ she thought.

Amid all the chattering about hacking it’s a relief to discover that some things don’t change and yet still, surprisingly in these tainted times, proffer sterling quality. Amid all the chattering about hacking it’s a relief to discover that some things don’t change and yet still, surprisingly in these tainted times, proffer sterling quality. Saturday mornings on Radio 3, for instance, which this week gave us a deconstructed version of Bizet’s L’Arlésienne (or The Girl from Arles) on CD Review. I’ve been listening to this staple of the Third’s diet since long before CDs were even invented. Yet on Saturday somehow I heard it afresh and realised just how much my musical education has depended on this single 45-minute programme.

Is Glastonbury over yet? If not, can it be very soon please? On Jo Whiley’s exciting new evening show on Radio 2, the poor woman can still barely finish a sentence without referring to ‘Glasto’ or ‘the Pyramid Stage’ or whatever it’s called, where everyone who played was brilliant, as everyone always is in Jo’s world. Is Glastonbury over yet? If not, can it be very soon please? On Jo Whiley’s exciting new evening show on Radio 2, the poor woman can still barely finish a sentence without referring to ‘Glasto’ or ‘the Pyramid Stage’ or whatever it’s called, where everyone who played was brilliant, as everyone always is in Jo’s world.

‘To be speaking to you through the BBC has a very special meaning for me. ‘To be speaking to you through the BBC has a very special meaning for me. It means that once again I am officially a free person,’ says Aung San Suu Kyi at the beginning of the first of her Reith Lectures on Radio 4 (Tuesday mornings). That connection between the BBC and the powerful, emotive word ‘freedom’, made by one of the most influential figures of the 21st century, has finally broken through to the politicians who are deciding on the fate of the World Service.

It’s the small things that drive you mad. It’s the small things that drive you mad. Every so often I start worrying about the big stuff — God, or lung cancer or early-onset Alzheimer’s — but a cigarette and a cup of coffee usually puts me right, even if it makes cancer a little more likely. What reduces me to a quaking heap is losing a bank statement or rushing off to work and discovering I can’t find my car keys. Such minor inconveniences make me feel as though my whole life is collapsing into chaos and the universe itself is out of joint. Cue whimpering self-pity. Just occasionally, however, I am able to summon up a manly rage, as happened the other day when I was contacted by the Today programme on Radio 4.

It must be a fix, surely? The list of tunes voted online ‘by the nation’ as the eight favourite ‘discs’ we would like to be marooned with on a desert island is the dullest, most unoriginal, least controversial combination we listeners could possibly have come up with. It must be a fix, surely? The list of tunes voted online ‘by the nation’ as the eight favourite ‘discs’ we would like to be marooned with on a desert island is the dullest, most unoriginal, least controversial combination we listeners could possibly have come up with. The organisers of the poll as they studied its results must have been rueing the meeting when they came up with the idea of turning Desert Island Discs into an internet quiz.

It’s all in the voice. It’s all in the voice. Whether or not the person speaking is seeking to engage the listener, or just saying what comes into their head without much thought of what they are trying to get across, or of who they are talking to and why they might want to listen. I reckon it’s not easy. Clare Balding has a gift for it, taking us along with her every step of the way as she walks the country for her Ramblings series on Radio 4 (Saturdays). Dominic Arkwright and his guests on Off the Page (Thursday) never got further than the studio mike. They were discussing what it means to be ‘foreign’, that feeling of being a stranger — not unwelcome, just different. When did you first realise that not everyone was like you?

It’s a two-way genre, radio, Janus-faced, going forwards while at the same time looking backwards, flexible enough to adapt to the internet world but also still wallowing in the wealth of its archive. It’s a two-way genre, radio, Janus-faced, going forwards while at the same time looking backwards, flexible enough to adapt to the internet world but also still wallowing in the wealth of its archive. Just as the arrival of Radioplayer was announced in an up-to-the-minute presentation at the top of the Centrepoint building in the heart of London, of which more later, Radio 4 Extra launched its new weekday magazine, The 4 O’Clock Show, which sounds surprisingly, and endearingly, old-fashioned.

Diaries and letters tell us a lot about how people lived from day to day yet there’s often something missing. video platform video management video solutions video player Diaries and letters tell us a lot about how people lived from day to day yet there’s often something missing. How did they experience the world through sound? What did they themselves sound like, their voices, their accents? The aural experience of the past is lost to us. Now, though, we have the technology to record just about anything we want.

Whatever lay behind Radio 3’s decision four years ago to reduce the number of live concert broadcasts to a mere handful, it cannot have been the recent phenomenal success of ‘live’ relays from the Met in New York to local cinemas. Whatever lay behind Radio 3’s decision four years ago to reduce the number of live concert broadcasts to a mere handful, it cannot have been the recent phenomenal success of ‘live’ relays from the Met in New York to local cinemas. Even the service of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s has been a hit in this format. The director of the Met says that 6 million people are expected to see his company in action this year via a cinema hook-up.

Best line of the week on radio by a league was Stuart Maconie’s when he said, talking about the pop group Abba, ‘The girls stuck it out, on stage and in the studio, the words of their ex-husbands’ perfect three-minute psychodramas bursting on their tongues like acid bonbons.’ Maconie was turning over the history of the break-up song, not as you might expect on Radio 2, the old Light Programme, but on heavy-thinking Radio 4, home to news, current affairs and ‘radical economics’.

A frock that shocks, a terror-filled red coat and diamonds of seductive power are all promised next week in an alluring late-night series on Radio 3 (produced by Duncan Minshull). Listener, They Wore It gives us five 15-minute essays about clothes. Not a subject I would normally bother with, never being someone noted for my sartorial elegance or originality. But by chance I opened up one of the preview discs and was hooked immediately. The novelist Tracy Chevalier is talking about the impact on her teenage self of Guy de Maupassant’s short story ‘The Necklace’. Chevalier based an entire novel on a pearl necklace so she knows the value of wearing the right beads.