Kate Chisholm

Has anyone else begun to suspect that The Archers’ scriptwriters have been taken off Prozac? Maybe it’s something to do with the recent bad publicity about the drug, or perhaps the Pebble Mill Health Trust has been given new guidelines on pill dispensation. Whatever the reason, harsh reality has taken over from ‘everyday life’ in the fictional world of Ambridge, and we were confronted with not one but two disturbing storylines that have now begun to unravel with the heart-lurching inevitability of real life. Not once, but twice on successive evenings last week I found myself weeping over a bubbling saucepan.

Melancholy is a peculiarly English malady; almost you might say a national characteristic, born out of our long, dark nights and grizzly, indecisive weather. That dampness of the soul and ambient miserableness is almost like a national uniform; just think of late-Seventies rock or the Jacobean poets, the Brontë novels or Francis Bacon. The Swinging Sixties, those bouncy lyrics and bright, clear, linear fashions, were not a true expression of English character. Quite the reverse; they were an aberration, the exact opposite of what we’re really and truly comfortable with being. The heartless sophistication of that super-hyped new TV series Mad Men, could only have come out of America; our own networks could never have produced such sharp-suited, slick-talkin’ anomie.

Only this column would persuade me to get up at 6.30 on a Sunday morning. Six-thirty! In my other life I pore over the collected works of the 18th-century writer Dr Johnson, who constantly struggled to persuade himself out of bed before noon. He liked the idea of early rising, and each New Year resolved that he would get out of bed by eight, but the bustle of life needed to be in full swing before he could face up to that ‘consciousness of being’ which mornings bring and he would very soon succumb to his incurable laggardliness. The powers that be at Radio Four will have none of that and, no doubt believing that all true nature-lovers must be of the cheerful, up-at-dawn variety, insist on scheduling one of my favourite programmes, Living World, first thing on Sunday.

How easily we forget! Who, for instance, was the first of the world’s major leaders to talk to George W. Bush after 9/11? No, it wasn’t Blair. Or the democratically elected leaders of Canada, Australia, France, Germany or Denmark. It was Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the new President of Russia. He was staying at his villa on the Black Sea when, like the rest of the developed world, he watched the satellite pictures as the Twin Towers came tumbling down. His response was to phone Bush immediately and to tell him that at such a time his Russian government would not just talk about being helpful but would also take action to be supportive.

There was something ironic about a play entitled The Trial and Death of Socrates being broadcast on the weekend that our own great thinker, Rowan Williams, was undergoing what may turn out to be the biggest trial of his career. Maybe he tuned in on Sunday evening to Drama on 3 and heard Joss Ackland as Socrates manfully refusing to kowtow to the tyranny of wilful ignorance by declaring, ‘Would I have chosen this path for myself...if I did not believe I had a duty...to raise you from your complacency?’ Radio, very far from being the dinosaur among the new technologies, is becoming cutting-edge — in spite of the demise of some of the new DAB stations like Oneword and TheJazz.

Why would anyone want to listen to a programme about the Oscars? Surely the whole point is to see those ghastly frocks and gimcrack smiles, effortfully put on for-the-camera-only? And yet Paul Gambaccini was sent over to Hollywood to recreate the ‘magic’ of the Oscars for a new Radio Four series (Saturday), And the Academy Award Goes To...He took us inside the tiny room, in the Roosevelt Hotel, where the very first Oscars were awarded on 16 May 1929; from such small things do Versace glamfests grow. Fascinating enough. But it was just so irritating to hear the sweeping score of Lawrence of Arabia (winner of Best Picture in 1962) without being able to see those stunning images of the desert. There are times when only TV will do.

‘Pakistan is a dysfunctional state,’ said the writer Martin Amis in a debate about ideologies and ideologues in our post-9/11 world on Start the Week (Monday, Radio Four). He seemed curiously unaware that he was in conversation with a woman lawyer from Pakistan, Asma Jahangir, who has just been released from house arrest after defying her own government; with someone who has actually experienced the real impact of the rise of global Islamism, and who cannot afford to agree that her country is in chaotic freefall. ‘Pakistan is not dysfunctional,’ retorted the formidable-sounding Jahangir. ‘People are so resilient that, despite no gas, no electricity, they are still continuing to do their work.

Lord Reith must be turning in his grave. Not with shock and horror, but in amazement that there are still moments on his beloved airwaves when you can imagine yourself back to the beginnings of the BBC, to a world without gizmos and celebrity knockouts and a time when broadcasters were confident enough of their material (and respectful enough of their audience) not to feel that ‘entertainment’ must be added to everything to make their programmes palatable, like MSG or the emulsifier soya lecithin. True, the moments are often buried so deep in the schedules that you’re lucky to find them, or still be awake.

How crazy is this! A huge great whopping oil tanker, 250,000 tons of rust-red steel, sails through one of the narrowest, most beautiful and most populated sea straits on the planet. And it’s not the only one. There are 50,000 of them every year. Not quinqueremes these, or even stately galleons. But eyeless giants, lumbering their way through the sea channel that links the silvery Black Sea with the dazzling blue Mediterranean. Bosphorus Battles on Sunday night (Radio Three) took us through these straits (which curve and wind their way through the Turkish capital, Istanbul) as if we were standing on the bridge of one of these maritime monsters, looking out from on high to that haunting cityscape of domes and minarets.

The onset of Advent in the last days of November is supposed to be the herald of great joy at the jollities to come, but for most of us who have left childhood behind it seems to have become a season of dread. How to get through all that shopping and scribbling of cards with the same old time-worn message, ‘Another year gone and still nothing done’? Worse still, all those dreadful parties, fuelled by gassy champagne and greasy snacks. All I want to do, as soon as the leaves fall and the nights draw in, is to go into hibernation, and it requires a superhuman effort to venture out after dark. (I’ve always suspected that my earlier incarnation was as a dormouse.

It’s not what you think, we were warned by Jenny Uglow, the far-seeing biographer of Hogarth and Elizabeth Gaskell. Those ‘dark Satanic mills’ and ‘mountains green’ of William Blake’s epic poem were never intended as an anthem in praise of England’s democratic virtues. Blake was neither a conservative, nor nostalgic for an imaginary golden past. On the contrary, he was a republican and a dissenter; an ardent believer in the necessity for personal, social and sexual liberty. In the verses that have become known as ‘Jerusalem’ he was provoking his readers, warning them that the England of their time was anything but a pleasant land for the vast majority of its people.

There’s an endless amount of ‘chat’ on radio and TV, but how much ‘conversation’? A recent book by an American, Stephen Miller, reminds us of the difference between them, and how much we have lost by our obsession with argument, obfuscation, self-revelation, or should I say self-deception. Conversation, argues Miller in his thought-provoking book on the subject (published by Yale), used to be regarded as one of the arts. It should be an intellectual adventure, a chance to extend your experience of life, experiment with ideas, flex your wits, improve your understanding, as well as a source of pleasure and delight. It once was. ‘Honest conversation,’ says Dr Johnson, prevents the mind from being ‘empty and unoccupied’.

Sex is never any good on radio. Think of all those excruciating scenes in The Archers — Sid and Jolene in the shower, or, for those addicts with a good memory, Shula on a picnic rug with that seamy journalist from the Borchester Echo. On radio, without the carefully crafted images of a film-maker and instead just the sound effects — splashy kisses and primeval squeals — it’s ludicrous. Worse still, when listening to sexual antics rather than watching them on screen you’re left with space in your head to wonder at the absurdity of a couple of actors standing at a microphone pretending to make all that noise.

Amid all the fuss about cuts at the BBC and how this will affect programme output, I can’t help thinking, why the outrage? For years, there have been dark rumblings among writers that there’s no longer a drama department to nurture young talent and commission new work — the Birtian revolution of the 1990s saw to that, and it did initially cause a sharp decline in standards, especially in the number and range of original drama productions. Over at Radio Three, the Controller Roger Wright has been attacked for not encouraging live performances of new music, but you could say he has brought other virtues to the network. Sometimes a financial squeeze on programme-making can have the effect of a health-ensuring purgative, getting rid of waste.