Daisy Dunn

Next week marks the centenary of the pips. On Monday at 9 p.m. a documentary will be broadcast on Radio 4 debating whether the six little tones which ring in each hour ought to be axed as obsolete or preserved for tradition’s sake. Some contributors will speak of them as annoyances – ‘the cockroaches of broadcasting’ is a memorable phrase – and others will ask what could possibly replace them. By the end of the programme, whatever your view, you will have the pips lodged firmly between your teeth. If we so worship the pips, ought we not to have some worthy shrine to their existence as well? The first pips, which represent the Greenwich Time Signal, were transmitted at 9.30 p.m. on 5 February 1924.

Anne McElvoy is on the road again, exploring the state of modern Europe. Following her Radio 4 programme, The Reinvention of Germany in April, the Politico journalist has travelled to Padua, in northern Italy, where reactions to the rise of the right-wing populist Giorgia Meloni appear to vary. Is the 46-year-old PM a breath of fresh air – the best chance Italy has for a future – or a hypocritical dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist? The reinvention (or rather restoration) of Italy is very much Meloni’s goal. Clinging to the familiar principles of faith, flag and family, she has eschewed measures that would allow those born in Italy to define themselves as Italian, ostensibly believing that to be Italian is to have Italian blood.

A recent Sunday Feature on Radio 3 contained some of the best insults I have ever heard. Contributors to the programme on the early music revolution were discussing the backlash they experienced in the 1970s while reviving period-style instruments and techniques. Soprano Dame Emma Kirkby remembered one critic complaining that listening to her performance was ‘as about as interesting as eating an entire meal of plain yoghurt’. Another critic, writing in Gramophone, pronounced the strings of the new ensembles ‘as beautiful as period dentistry’. Those strings were mostly made of animal guts. There was, as one of the musicians interviewed recalled, ‘a DIY atmosphere’ to the movement, which developed alongside a spate of others in 1973.

The first episode of George Osborne and Ed Balls’s new podcast, Political Currency, opened with an old clip of the pair arguing across the despatch box. Osborne had described his latest Budget as ‘steady as she goes’ and Balls was having none of it. ‘What kind of ship does he think he’s on, the Titanic?’ If producers hoped that the duo would bring something of this, er, biting dynamic to their podcast, they were in for a surprise. The opening number saw little in the way of sparring between the former opponents. Seated in a studio in east London, they spent most of the time doing what so many in their milieu are doing at the moment, chummily sharing their views and frustrations and trying to squeeze some entertainment out of it.

The Immortals, which begins on Radio 4 this week, is not for the faint-hearted. While it professes to be about the human quest for longevity and the elusive ‘cure’ for getting older, it focuses largely upon the transferral of blood plasma from healthy young people to reluctantly ageing people, or, as anyone with good sense might put it, the desperate descent from vanity to vampirism. I was on the verge of switching over to something more anodyne when a 46-year-old tech entrepreneur began talking about being injected with plasma from his 17-year-old son.

The playwright Carlo Gozzi marvelled at ‘The spectacle of women turned into men, men turned into women, and both men and women turned into monkeys’ in 18th-century Venice, and Jan Morris, visiting in the 1950s, did likewise. It would be more than a decade before Morris went under the knife, but already he was contemplating a transition more permanent than any he observed at carnival time. The Venice Conundrum, which aired on Radio 4 on Sunday, knitted together Morris’s most famous travel book with Conundrum, the story of his sex change, completed in the 1970s. I had my doubts about how well these two works would sit together, but the dramatisation was not only beautiful, but also hugely illuminating of Morris’s psyche as a traveller caught between two worlds.

I’m listening to John Cleese talking to Justin Welby in the new series of The Archbishop Interviews when the thought occurs to me that he might unwittingly be comparing himself to Christ. The comedian has just been discussing the failure of the literal-minded to comprehend sarcasm and irony, and the inanity of tabloid headlines, when he circles back to the topic of religion. Though not a believer himself, he is troubled by literal-mindedness in the reading of scripture. ‘Christ taught in parables,’ he notes, ‘and parables are not supposed to be taken literally.’ One can almost feel another headline coming on. Cleese has been waging a war against the wokerati for years.

Welcome back to Room 101, which has returned to the radio – after nearly 30 years on TV – and reverted back to its one-to-one format with presenter Paul Merton. The programme sits comfortably within that peculiarly British corner of the landscape that champions The Archers, the Proms, Rich Tea biscuits and knitted dog coats. And its success makes sense. A nation of good-humoured grumblers is arguably more likely to be excited by a list of common grievances than by, say, an overly jubilant selection of Desert Island Discs. Why listen to someone talk about what makes them happy when you can witness a guy losing it over the incomprehensibility of parking signs? Merton indulges this demographic by channelling the spirit of I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue.

As the owner of a radio alarm clock, I could theoretically start listening to the Today programme before I’m even awake, but I rarely do. I tell myself it’s too much for first thing; that it’s bound to put me in a bad mood with some interview or other; that Today can wait until tomorrow – or at least until I’ve had my breakfast and a blitz of the somewhat jollier Times Radio. The levée, I say in a Bertie Woosterish sort of way, demands something light. When you crave something thought-provoking but also comforting, nothing beats a few minutes of prayer But then I find myself waking up unintentionally early, switching to Radio 4 and discovering that Prayer for the Day is about to begin.

Ask a member of Generation Z where in the world they would most like to live, and chances are they will say South Korea. K-pop and kimchi have made it indisputably fashionable, and if the Instagram account of one of my Korean friends is anything to go by, life there is really quite idyllic, provided you can forget who your neighbours are. It would take the average worker more than a century to save enough money to purchase an apartment  A recent episode of Crossing Continents on Radio 4 presented a very different side of the story. John Murphy, a superbly enquiring producer and presenter, went to visit some of the residents who are suffering as a consequence of the country’s financial success. The Republic of Korea enjoyed an average of 5.

One of the lesser-known schools of modern philosophy is the Philosophy of Moomin. Like Cynicism or Epicureanism, it is difficult to pin down precisely, but subscribers speak of the importance of the individual, of liberalism and acceptance, and of the life-affirming joy of feeling. In the words of Moominpappa: ‘Just think, never to be glad or disappointed. Never to like anyone and get cross at him and forgive him. Never to sleep or feel cold, never to make a mistake and have a stomach-ache and be cured from it, never to have a birthday party, drink beer, and have a bad conscience… How terrible.

Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford does not take the idea of a labyrinth too literally. It does not lead you through galleries to dead ends, nor are you left searching, like Theseus, for a ball of thread to find your way out again. The real enigma of the exhibition revolves around the Bronze Age civilisation at its heart. The Minoans, who occupied Crete between about 3,000 and 1,100 BC, remain some of the most mystifying people ever to have been stumbled upon in modern times. It is uncertain where they came from, what they believed, how they were governed and why they chose to paint things the colours they did in their dynamic works of art. They traded widely, including with Egypt, but the direction of cultural influence is not always clear.

Can you ever truly know a poet? The question arises every time one publishes a collection that looks vaguely confessional. Is it real, we ask, or is it all persona? My Sylvia Plath, an Archive on 4 programme to mark the 60th anniversary of Plath’s death this month, presupposes that poets are to some degree unreachable. The ‘My’ belongs to Emily Berry, a contemporary poet, who knows that her Plath is different from another’s, is different from Plath’s own Plath, and so on.  Unexpectedly, given the emphasis on many Plaths and the gap between a writer and their verse, the framework of the programme is intensely personal. It comes as a shock when Berry reveals, some way in, that her own mother committed suicide when she was seven.

Whenever I listen to Great Lives on Radio 4, which is often, I am reminded of the gulf between fame and achievement. How is it that some people do so much, yet remain obscure, while others seem to be carried forward with perpetual momentum after doing just one thing? A good many of the lives dissected on the programme over the years have been completely unfamiliar to me. I’ll spend the half hour puzzling over why they are not better known. Where would we be without Great Lives? There is minimal appetite in trade publishing for books about esoteric figures. And just imagine pitching a biopic of Hertha Ayrton, Eleonora Duse or Jayaben Desai to Hollywood today. Radio is probably the only place left for forgotten souls.

‘The Age of Anxiety’, W. H. Auden’s book-length poem, has always been described as strange, and difficult. It is an eclogue, but set far from the countryside, in a bar in New York, in the middle of the second world war. It looks like a modern script on the page but metrically it sounds more like Old English. The text flits between conversation and inner thought and is steeped in Jungian philosophy, mysticism and mirrors. Puritanism has bred the assumption that ‘good people’ do not need free speech When I first read it in my twenties, I gave up on trying to understand it and simply allowed the words to wash over me. It’s an approach I recommend taking while listening to Robin Brooks’s haunting new dramatisation of the poem on Radio 3.

Elizabeth the First is a ten-part American podcast series that isn’t about Elizabeth I at all. The assumption of its producers seems to be that the Tudor monarch was all right – a bit of a trailblazer, one might say – but not really worthy of her title. The real ‘Elizabeth the First’ was actually Elizabeth Taylor. The series aims to present the actress as the first ‘influencer’ the world has ever known, even though poor old Taylor didn’t even know what Instagram was. Taylor did, however, court the media before the word ‘social’ was attached to it. And she didn’t need to take selfies because people were always shoving cameras inher face. The podcast is narrated by Katy Perry, the Californian singer who kissed a girl and liked it and then married Russell Brand.