Kate Chisholm

It seems only right to tune in to programmes about Belief in the week leading up to Easter Day, the holiest day in the Christian calendar. Whether or not you have faith, there’s some point in reflecting on matters of conscience once a year, if only to give your inner self an annual spiritual check-up. It’s a chance to pause and reflect on matters other than the bank balance, the state of the garden, or that irritating person who’s blighting your life at work. For her late-night Radio 3 series this week, Joan Bakewell has been talking to a Catholic, a Muslim, a Druid, an atheist and an Anglican Bishop.

I had to rush into the house from the car so as not to miss a word. Two virologists were talking with Sue MacGregor about their favourite books on last week’s A Good Read (Tuesday, Radio 4), and came up with such unusual choices and spoke with such matter-of-fact appreciation, so different from the usual literary fare, that it made me want to read all their choices immediately. It was an inspired decision by Sue and her producer (Jolyon Jenkins) to invite not just one but two science professors on to the programme in the same week; like giving an Alka-Seltzer to an old favourite after it’s ingested just one too many finely crafted novels.

‘The BBC is a part of public space because the public themselves have put it there,’ suggests the BBC’s DG, Mark Thompson, at the beginning of the report which is recommending, among other things, that Radio 6 Music and the Asian Network be shut down. ‘The BBC is a part of public space because the public themselves have put it there,’ suggests the BBC’s DG, Mark Thompson, at the beginning of the report which is recommending, among other things, that Radio 6 Music and the Asian Network be shut down. The report is all about this virtual concept, ‘the public space’, and claims that it’s an ‘open and enriching experience’, and that ‘in public space, everyone’s as important and valuable as everyone else’.

You can see how difficult it must be for the powers behind BBC Radio. On the one hand, the Corporation is still pumping out programmes that we could have heard 60 years ago. The list is endless but try The Archers and Desert Island Discs for starters, brought together on Sunday (Radio 4) when June Spencer, who plays Peggy Woolley, was Kirsty Young’s guest. (She’s been in the series since the very first episode 60 years ago, when the broadcasts were live and the scripts changing even while they were on air, the producer tiptoeing up to the microphone, seizing the script and cutting lines with a pencil.) Can you imagine the outcry if either of these stalwarts were bumped off the airwaves?

It was really difficult to tell where Paul Robeson ended and Lenny Henry began. The one-time stand-up comic was playing the black singer with the uniquely deep and passionate voice in Sunday night’s Drama on 3. Annie Caulfield’s intense, intimate play, I’m Still the Same Paul, looked at what happened to Robeson (1898–1976) after he came under surveillance because of his outspoken speeches demanding civil rights in America and his dubious enthusiasm for Stalin. ‘Whatever he thought was private in his life, we heard it. We knew it,’ says one of the spies who tailed him. Henry was just brilliant as Robeson; one of the best performances in a radio play I’ve heard in a long while.

After weeks of waiting, it was all over in a matter of seconds. Weeks in which I’ve listened to every episode, just in case. Weeks of enduring night after night the awe-inspiringly-dull Annette and Helen saga. Weeks of wondering how The Archers’ scriptwriters would cope with the death last October of Norman Painting, the actor described as ‘the lynchpin’ of the longest-running radio soap. Would they try to replace him, or simply do away with his character, Phil Archer? Then, when it came, we were given so much advance warning it was as if Health & Safety had visited BH and told the Controller: there’s to be nothing sudden, or too frightful.

Imagine, if you will, that it’s 1922 and you’re living in a small mountain village thousands of miles from Istanbul above the shores of the Black Sea. Imagine, if you will, that it’s 1922 and you’re living in a small mountain village thousands of miles from Istanbul above the shores of the Black Sea. You’re a practising Christian, and there’s a tumble-down cruciform church in the central square, with an icon of the Virgin hanging above the altar. Life until now has been ruled by the Ottoman Turks, but you speak a version of Greek handed down from the days when this part of Asia Minor was ruled by the emperors of Byzantium based in Constantinople.

Thank heavens for Chekhov! Master of the mundane, the boring monotony of daily life, the meaningless passage of time, he actually makes the random chaos, the pointless repetitions of day-to-day survival seem somehow rather beautiful. Or at least he helps us to realise that we’re all enduring the same feelings that life is useless and trivial and dull, so why worry. Just get on with it.  Radios Three and Four have been giving us a feast of the Russian writer (born 150 years ago), with plays, features, monologues. It’s been the perfect antidote to this drabbest of all Januarys, now that the snow has gone leaving behind layers of grimy grit through which a few timid bulbs are struggling to peep.

There’s something about Chris. There’s something about Chris. Don’t know what it is. But his Radio Two breakfast show is so bright, so bouncy, so full of bonhomie, it’s irresistible. I just can’t turn it off — even though I know Evan and Jim are waiting patiently on the other side. By the weekend I was wondering how I’d cope without that blast of high-octane energy to wake me up. Yes, I’m going to have to admit it. I’m a Cog — and proud of it. He’s not, it’s true, blessed with Sir Terry’s smooth, seductive voice. It’s actually a bit hoarse and grating, and the decibel level is far too high for first thing in the morning when it’s still pitch-dark beyond the bathroom window.

Back in the Sixties or Seventies it was TV that made the cultural running, showing off its photogenic qualities to make series that were supposed to change the way we thought about ourselves. Huge amounts of dosh were pumped into Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man as Clark swanned around the Western world displaying gems of creativity, while Bronowski did the same for our intellectual development travelling from Easter Island to Auschwitz and back. Now, though, TV is looking more and more like a blowsy old music-hall star, decked out with cheap glitter but unable to disguise its creaking lack of creativity.

New Year, New Radio. And not just any old wireless. It’s one of the latest digital wonders, which has inside its chic black casing a mini-computer that can whisk me round the world in a matter of seconds to visit tens of thousands of radio stations. For reasons that are as yet beyond me, though, I’ve only succeeded so far in travelling straight to Z, with no idea how to get back through the alphabet, not having a tame teenager on site to show me the way. (The instruction manual can of course only be accessed on computer and is written in a language some way between Urdu and Mandarin.

Just sometimes a radio programme comes along that really changes the way you hear — and interpret — the everyday sounds around you. Just sometimes a radio programme comes along that really changes the way you hear — and interpret — the everyday sounds around you. With perfect timing, on New Year’s Day, Joe Acheson’s programme for the BBC World Service began the year with a startling, pin-drop-sharp lesson on how to listen. Sound of Snow and Ice took us to Finland in midwinter, to the Jyväskylä School for the Visually Impaired. The temperature in my study seemed to plummet as an extraordinary rasping noise echoed through the room, the sound of boots crunching on deep, deep snow.

‘Television makes your eyes go square,’ reports Will, one of my three nephews, avid listeners all. ‘Television makes your eyes go square,’ reports Will, one of my three nephews, avid listeners all. They’ve already got the radio habit (having had, of course, absolutely no pressure from their interfering aunt). They’ve discovered for themselves that listening to Sherlock Holmes’s ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ is far more scary than watching Doctor Who. Radio, pipes up Tom, lets you paint the pictures in your head. Television just tells you ‘that’s how it’s got to be’. To get any pleasure from radio, though, you have to make an effort, focus attention, follow the plot. You have to learn how to listen.

If you haven’t spoken to anyone at all for 24 hours, not even the newsagent or supermarket assistant, it can be odd trying to find the right words, and the right voice, to make a human connection. If you haven’t spoken to anyone at all for 24 hours, not even the newsagent or supermarket assistant, it can be odd trying to find the right words, and the right voice, to make a human connection. It’s as if you can get rusty with audacious speed, and that without continual usage the habit of conversation begins to degenerate, like the muscles of a marathon runner who stops running. Radio, though, is a good way of pretending; of imagining yourself in a conversation even if there is no one else in the house.

’Tis the season to be jolly — in spite of the gloom outside and the torrents of rain. ’Tis the season to be jolly — in spite of the gloom outside and the torrents of rain. But how do you banish the winter ghouls, put on a mask of good cheer and go forth beaming into the pre-Christmas crowds? Radio Three has come up with a possible help-all, by launching its Sing Hallelujah! campaign just as the days shorten into dreary half-light. So far the station has signed up almost 350 amateur choirs nationwide who at some time between now and Christmas will be performing Handel’s exhilarating chorus from Messiah. It’s the culmination of the year-long celebration of the composer’s music, marking 250 years since his death in 1759.

‘Show, not tell’ is probably the best tip you can give anyone who wants to write; and the most difficult thing to achieve. ‘Show, not tell’ is probably the best tip you can give anyone who wants to write; and the most difficult thing to achieve. It’s so tempting to stuff everything in, to give away all the evidence too soon or describe every last detail down to the colour of the gunman’s eyes, just to make sure that your readers have followed the plot. It’s an even more difficult technique to master in a radio play, where you might think that ‘telling’ is what matters. How else can your listeners understand what on earth is going on when they have no visual clues?

It’s been difficult enough in this age of instant Googlification to wait even 24 hours until the next instalment of Radio Four’s latest Dickens serial, Our Mutual Friend, is given its 15-minute airing. It’s been difficult enough in this age of instant Googlification to wait even 24 hours until the next instalment of Radio Four’s latest Dickens serial, Our Mutual Friend, is given its 15-minute airing. So how did Dickens’s Victorian readers survive a whole month before the next instalment was published and they could at last discover the fate of Eugene Wrayburn? Or the truth about John Rokesmith?

‘Listeners may find some of the content disturbing,’ said the announcer before the programme began (a warning that was also given in the Radio Times). ‘Listeners may find some of the content disturbing,’ said the announcer before the programme began (a warning that was also given in the Radio Times). You’d have thought we were about to hear a particularly raunchy play, or some horrific accounts of death by torture, murder or old age. Behind Enemy Lines (Radio Two, Saturday) was shocking at times, and needed to be. That was the point. John McCarthy, the Beirut hostage who was held captive by Islamic Jihad for almost five years, talked to others who had been imprisoned not for crimes committed but because of political hostilities and race hatred.