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
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
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
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
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
‘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
It’s been really hard getting used to the idea that there’s no more Bach at eight on Radio Three. After 48 mornings, I’ve found myself well and truly addicted. The only way to combat the withdrawal symptoms seemed to be an immersion in something completely different, so I dutifully tuned into Radio Two in the
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
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
If you’ve been waking up at 3 a.m. after yet another nightmare about climate change, there’s been a well-timed antidote on Radio Four this week. On The Estuary (made by the wildlife team, Chris Watson as sound recordist, Mike Dilger as naturalist and Stephen Head as the landscape historian), we heard how The Wash on
Seventy-five years ago this coming Thursday the ‘Empire Service’ was born, just in time for George V to announce its arrival in his very first Christmas broadcast to the nation. He sounds remarkably un-pukka on the archive recording. (You can hear a snippet from it on the BBC World Service website: just log on and
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
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.
‘Just relax your fingers. Stick them on the fingerboard around the seventh fret. Bang!’ Jimi Hendrix comes to Radio Three. Even though the stations are slowly morphing into each other, with Michael Morpurgo being read on Radio Two (rather well by Robson Green, apart from his ascent into comically high falsetto every time he has
The blogosphere is threatening to take over the airwaves and even the great Eddie Mair is feeling ruffled. Last Saturday, half an hour of PM, his five o’clock current affairs programme on Radio Four, was hijacked by ‘the people’. Instead of running straight through till six, Mair had to break off halfway through to launch
Solo behind the Iron Curtain (Radio Four), International Radio Playwriting Competition (BBC World Service) ‘I was pretty sure I was being followed,’ he said in that unforgettably sleek drawl. We are in Prague at the height of the Cold War in 1968 and Robert Vaughn, aka Mr Napoleon Solo, is under surveillance. Cue blazing trumpets
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
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
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
The only good thing about being stuck in crawling traffic at 9 a.m. on Monday morning was that it gave me the rare chance to tune in to Andrew Marr’s Start the Week on Radio Four, and even better to listen to it full-on instead of with my attention half-drawn to a weekend’s worth of
