Kate Chisholm

In these dank days of January, the mind struggles to escape the claustrophobia of an English winter, weighed down by heavy grey skies or hemmed in by suffocating mists (pungent with the smell of jet fuel). A couple of atmospheric programmes on Radio Four this week came to the rescue, creating soundscapes so rich in aural texture that it was possible for a while to escape into an alternative life. On Tuesday morning A Voyage on Livingstone’s Lake (produced by Ruth Evans) took us into the heart of Africa, to the lake discovered by the explorer in 1859.

Maybe it was too soon for Saturday night’s Archive on 4 to reflect on George W.’s reign as President of the US of A. After all, there are still three days left of his administration. But Bremner on Bush: A Final Farewell was a missed opportunity. Rory Bremner was presumably hauled in as presenter because of his sharp-witted impersonations of Dubya, a man so easy to lampoon Bremner must sometimes have wondered whether there was any point in making fun of him. But, surprisingly, he gave us very few of those infamous stutters and stammers, and instead we heard from members of Bush’s White House team and a mixed bunch of commentators, creating a very different kind of programme. Maybe that was the problem.

Phew! Normal service has been resumed. No more panto; no more guest editors forcing Evan, Jim, Ed and Sarah into embarrassingly coy interviews with Karl Lagerfeld et al.; no more year-end reviews of the year behind and portentous glimpses of the year ahead. I don’t know why every year we have to go through this rigmarole. Does anyone really want, or dare, to look back even for a moment? As for the future, for once I’m really intrigued and even excited by what lies ahead. No one can say where this economic downturn might lead, or how long it will last. All the experts are just as baffled as us ordinary mortals. I used to worry that I could never understand what the financial experts were saying; now I know I needn’t have bothered. Natural forces have reasserted themselves.

While Ian Hislop went in search of the Three Kings for Radio Four, and surprise, surprise, came up with an English solution to the enigma of the merchants of gold, frankincense and myrrh, World Routes on Radio Three took us to Nazareth to experience the music that might have been heard by Mary and Joseph as they watched their small child grow up. The oud, a long-necked string instrument with a pear-shaped bowl, much like a lute, has been played in the Near and Middle East for about 5,000 years. It sounds sometimes like a guitar, at others like a harpsichord, but always gives off a haunting, meditative air that straightaway elevates and transcends the everyday.

It’s not a job I could do now that I’m supposedly mature, let alone when I was in my twenties. To take charge of a prison full of angry young men plus a team of disgruntled, de-motivated staff officers. But on Radio Four this week and next we heard from four prison governors, most of whom are yet to reach their thirties. In Young Governors Take Control (Monday), produced by Deborah Dudgeon, Clare English revisited four graduates of the Intensive Development Scheme (IDS) run by HM Prison Service whom she first interviewed for Radio Four three years ago. How were they doing now that they had left behind their control and restraint (C&R) training and were spending long hours behind bars, responsible for prisoner welfare, staff morale and public safety?

Talking to my dentist, as one does, we discover a mutual enthusiasm for Radio Three’s Composer of the Week (Monday to Friday) and especially its presenter, Donald Macleod. Talking to my dentist, as one does, we discover a mutual enthusiasm for Radio Three’s Composer of the Week (Monday to Friday) and especially its presenter, Donald Macleod. How does he do it? we both exclaimed. Each and every week he comes up with five hours of elegant, informative, entertaining script, interspersed with carefully chosen nuggets of music from major and minor figures in the classical world. It’s like listening to an audio encyclopaedia.

I really, really wish I could change places this week and become a TV critic. Nothing on radio has quite matched the drama of that extraordinarily necessary BBC2 documentary, The Fallen, which in three long hours commemorated each and every one of the British soldiers who have died in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Or, in fabulous contrast, the sheer laugh-ability of John Sergeant on Strictly Come Dancing. The SCD factor is a throwback to an earlier era, a sequinned equivalent of the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum. It takes families back to the Ovaltineys, when parents and children were pictured sitting round a shiny brown box in the living-room, sharing the moment. SCD is not designed for any age-group, gender, relationship, creed or colour.

Let’s focus for a change on what the BBC does best. Take, for instance, a short half-hour programme on Radio Four, buried in the schedules, mid-evening on a Monday, in which the German historian Rainer Schulz took us behind a bit of actualité to expose an otherwise unheard, unseen aspect. In Belsen after Belsen (produced by Mark Burman) we heard the story of the thousands of Jews who lived in the camp after its liberation from the Germans on 15 April 1945. All the former captives wanted was to start getting on with their lives again. But where could they go? So many died on liberation, as if they had thought so long of freedom that when it came they no longer believed they could attain it.

It happened just before the eight o’clock pips on Radio Two on Good Morning Sunday. One of those rare moments when something clicks on air and you’re suddenly so connected to what’s being said that you feel you’re in a private conversation. It’s just you and the voice on the other side of the microphone — but in that same instant you’re also keenly aware that you’re actually in this conversation with lots of other listeners. You’re alone but at one. We’d just heard the Songs of Prophecy Gospel Choir live from the studio — an amazing sound at seven in the morning, light beginning to break across the sky — and now we were being led to think about what belief might mean to us by the presenter Roger Royle.

‘I couldn’t understand most of it. I mean I could understand each word but not when they were put together,’ says one of the characters in Tulips in Winter on Radio Three on Sunday night. I knew immediately what he meant. There was something wonderful going on in Michelene Wandor’s play word for word, but I’m not quite sure I caught it all in just one sitting. Wandor, a prizewinning playwright with a passion for radio, has been inspired by Rembrandt’s paintings and Spinoza’s works of philosophy to create a drama about the Jews of Amsterdam in the 1650s who were caught up in the trading battles between the Dutch, the English and the Portuguese.

Why do some sounds endure to jolt the memory and take us back to a specific moment in time, like Proust’s taste sensations, while others fade away? The chunter-chunter-chunt of a steam train, for instance, is instantly recognisable even for those too young ever to have been on a ‘real’ steam journey. When they hear it they’re not being taken back to that excitement about travel before motorways and jet planes, before we became so restless for change and the sensation of moving on that we demanded much faster but far less interesting modes of transport. No, for those born post-1960, steam means something else, but what’s so odd is that the steam train is just as evocative to them as if they had been there when the Mallard hit 100 mph.

The BBC World Service’s drama department has been drastically cut back over the last few years and plays, squeezed out by news and current affairs, are difficult to find. But they’re usually worth looking out for on the website, or listed in ridiculously tiny print in the Radio Times. There’s often something a little bit different about them, an outside-the-box atmosphere, created for an audience that might not, for instance, quite understand what the NHS stands for in the United Kingdom, and the traumatic impact of the case of The Good Doctor (broadcast this Saturday evening and repeated on Sunday). It’s ten years since Harold Shipman was arrested on suspicion of murdering one of his patients.

If you’re able to read this magazine on Saturday in an unchanged world, it’s probably safe to assume that Wednesday’s gigantic experiment with particle physics has not brought about the catastrophe that some doomsayers have predicted. Big Bang Day was the moment when the scientists at the great Cern laboratory under the Alps finally switched on the Large Hadron Collider which they have been designing for the last 20 or more years in an attempt to replicate the moment when the universe was created. Billions of particles will be accelerated round a tunnel 27 kilometres in diameter at the speed (almost) of light; what happens when they collide will be detected and recorded.

Weddings! You couldn’t avoid them on Radio Four this week. As if Usha plighting her troth with Alan not just once, but twice, on The Archers Omnibus was not enough, those who were up early on Sunday might have been surprised to find themselves like flies on the wall listening in to the real-life wedding of Steve and Zoe. Instead of the usual hymn sandwich, Sunday Worship proudly presented us with a slice of real-life drama. Actually, it was a recording of a ceremony that took place on 8 August, rather than a piece of radio-verité, so even this bit of ‘reality’ was not quite kosher. We were not really being witnesses to the solemnisation of Steve and Zoe’s marriage, but were rather hangers-on to a bit of radio history.

‘The only way you can help us,’ said the young student on the archive recording, his voice thin and wavering through the ether, as if emasculated by the Soviet tanks that had just invaded his native city, Prague. ‘Don’t forget Czechoslovakia.’ The streets were filled with young people, who were bravely trying to talk with the soldiers, many of whom could not speak Russian but were brought in from the far reaches of the Soviet territories and had more in common with their Chinese neighbours than the Mittel Europeans. But active resistance, they knew, was pointless. ‘We are a small nation. What chances do we have against the Red Army?

It’s not so bad being awake at three in the morning, with an unseasonably chilly wind blowing and the rain lashing at the window, when it gives you the chance to catch up with the World Service. During the day it’s always such a hassle to find the network unless you’re fully converted in all rooms and radio sets to the After Digital age and don’t have to twiddle with the knobs until you arrive at 648 MW. Maybe they should bring the World into Radio Four in the daylight hours? It could be a cost-saving device that would also really transform the home service, creating a truly global outlook in tune with the new world order of the Noughties. World Service programmes have such a refreshingly different perspective, looking outwards rather than in.