Kate Chisholm

‘Censorship,’ shrieked Hanif Kureishi after discovering that his short story, ‘Weddings and Beheadings’, was not going to be read on Radio Four as part of the National Short Story Competition (organised with various organisations including Prospect magazine, Booktrust and the Scottish Book Trust to promote the skill involved in writing short stories). The five shortlisted stories were all meant to be aired last week on Radio Four, but Kureishi’s was withdrawn at the last moment on the orders of the Controller, Mark Damazer. Damazer stated firmly that the BBC was ‘not censoring’ the story, just ‘postponing transmission’.

It was not so extraordinary in September 1946 when the Third Programme began broadcasting that its schedule should include a weekly discussion of the ‘visual arts’, kicking off with the then director of the National Gallery in conversation with the painter William Coldstream. Radio was still the Queen Bee of the BBC and television a young upstart whose potential was not yet fully understood. The ‘alert and receptive’ listeners of the Third Programme were expected to pay attention and work at their listening so that they could conjure for themselves flickering images of what was being talked about on air.

It sounds like a really bad idea — Lenny Henry, the black comedian, devising a set of radio sketches to celebrate (oops, I should have said ‘commemorate’) Abolition. You can imagine the scene. Early one morning in late November 2006. An emergency Radio Four planning meeting high up in Broadcasting House on Portland Place. Big table. Lots of coffee. A group of worried-looking producers, scriptwriters, the sound-effects team, all wielding spring-clip noteboards covered with last-minute scrambled ‘ideas’. ‘Tony Blair’s just reminded us that we’ve got this 200-year anniversary coming up next March. It’s going to be really big. A march from Hull. Questions in Parliament. A service in Westminster Abbey.

I wonder whether Cameron and co. in their attempts to stir up worries about climate change, carbon emissions and the future of the planet ever spend much time listening to nature in the raw. Of course, to understand what’s happening on a global scale might well require expensive flights to the far reaches of the planet. But there are other, cheaper ways of appreciating and understanding what’s going on in what’s left of our green and verdant land. A few hours doing nothing, absolutely nothing, in the company of warblers and wigeon, pike and teal, godwits and hairy dragonflies, just watching the weather and tuning in to the antics of these alternative communities, can restore not just goodwill but also a sense of perspective on the scale and impact of human endeavours.

The pity of war has been well documented ever since we as rivalrous, destructive human beings developed pen and paper. But this latest British conflict against Iraq is the first in which the new possibilities of internet communication have really taken off. Blogs, emails, the YouTube and MySpace websites have given the soldiers out in Basra and Fallujah an unprecedented opportunity to tell not just us back home but the whole world exactly what it’s like to be out there, almost as it happens. Just switch on your computer, key into Google and type ‘Iraq soldier blogs’ and you’ll come up with any number — bootsonground.blogspot.com, justanothersoldier.com — or at least you could until a number of them were shut down by the military authorities.

‘Keep your angels about you,’ was the inspiring advice given by William Blake in Peter Ackroyd’s Drama on 3 (Sunday), based on ‘the story’ of the visionary poet and artist who was born 250 years ago in 1757 and who is famous for giving us ‘Bring me my bow of burning gold’ and ‘Tyger tyger’. It was stirring stuff. And particularly apt for the Christian season of Lent, which so often is depicted as 40 days (or rather, as those who, like Eddie and Lilian on The Archers, have given something up for the duration will have calculated, 46 days) of painful penance for sins past, present and future.

Sometimes when listening to Radio Four you can have the odd experience of spiralling downwards into your very own time warp. Lying in the bath on Sunday morning, for instance, with the radio warbling in the background, you could almost pretend you were back in the 1970s (except that the cork tiles and avocado finish will probably have been swapped for upmarket granite and stainless steel, and the miniature transistor for a digital Bose). At ten, there’s The Archers omnibus edition (floruit 1954), followed by Desert Island Discs (fl. 1944) and Just a Minute (fl. 1974).

By the time you read this, the new Radio Three schedule will be up and running — more jazz, more words, fewer ‘live’ broadcasts (as opposed to live recordings) and Choral Evensong switched from Wednesdays, where it has been for decades, to Sundays. There was a terrible hoo-ha at the time these changes were announced back in the autumn, from the listening press as well as from the station’s cohort of Friends. ‘A bullet through the heart of Radio Three,’ warned the Daily Telegraph. But where’s the victim?

Bob Dylan on Radio Two? Sounds like an oxymoron to me. His Bobness, the hippie troubadour and Voice of Sixties America on the Light Programme, the station for Hooverers and flu-sufferers? But Radio Two has been transforming itself in the past few years, sneaking in Jamie Cullum and Suzi Quatro alongside Cliff and Terry, Ronan and The Organist Entertains. While Bob Dylan, at 64, is rather weirdly, like all those other ageing rockers, turning into a reluctant wrinklie. Back in March last year, the American satellite station XM lured Dylan into DJing for them by promising him ‘total creative freedom’ and a national radio audience with hour-long sessions that would not suffer the indignity of being broken up by commercials for Viagra (XM is a pay-radio station, from $13 a month).

You won’t yet have made your New Year resolutions but one thing you might want to add to your list is Join a Choir. It’ll be much cheaper and so much less boring than going to the gym, and yet all that hard work breathing in the right places and struggling to hit top C or gravelling about in bottom G will pump up your cardiovasculars just as effectively. There’ll be no need to sign up for a post-Christmas diet because instead you’ll be learning how to strengthen your diaphragm (and what flops over it). And the challenge of hitting all those notes dead-on while standing in front of an audience of hundreds is enough to satisfy anyone’s hunger for competitive sport.

I wonder whether Tony (‘Education, education, education’) Blair or any of his cohorts in the Education Department were listening to the BBC World Service’s School Day 24 last week. Children from around the world were brought together in live link-ups as part of the BBC’s Generation Next week of programmes designed to give young people, aged from 12 to 18, the chance to air their views, dominate the agenda, talk to each other across religious and ethnic frontiers. Mr Blair might have questioned the success of those ‘literacy hours’ after hearing the kids from a school in north London alongside those from New Delhi and Dar es Salaam. It was not that the English teenagers were lacking in confidence or self-expression.

The death of Nick Clarke, The World at One, Any Questions and Round Britain Quiz presenter, jolted many commentators — and listeners — to bewail the loss of a news broadcaster noted for his courtesy, his integrity, his ability to ferret for ‘the truth’ without being provocative or volatile. It says a lot about how much the world of broadcasting, and news reporting in particular, has changed that these qualities are now deemed so unusual. This is not to denigrate Nick Clarke’s achievement — he was an endearing broadcaster, with a wonderful ‘radio’ voice that was bold and authoritative and yet also easy-on-the-ear. You felt that he was talking directly to you, not at you. I don’t think I ever heard him bellow down the microphone.

‘The medium needs glitz, it needs glamour, it needs an ego,’ read an ominously worded column in this week’s Radio Times, accompanied by a glamorous head-shot of its author, the director of Channel 4’s new online-only radio station. A shiver ran down my spine. If we in radio want to compete with TV, says Nathalie Schwarz, then we need to start loving ourselves. Anxious to find out what this group hug might involve, I rushed to my laptop and attempted to sign on to www.channel4radio.com. But my antiquated telephone line was unwilling to make a connection with this ‘edgy, bold, mischievous’ medium and refused to log me in.

‘It’s a potential social menace of the first magnitude,’ declared John Reith, founding father of the BBC, in an interview with Malcolm Muggeridge in 1967. He was horrified by the way that his single broadcasting station, set up in 1922 by a group of techie engineers who were looking for ways to market their newly developed wireless sets, had expanded into a huge corporation with four radio and two television channels. Far too much time, he thought, was already being spent listening to a small Bakelite box. What would he make of our 24/7 access not just to radio and TV but also to the baffling new world of webcasts, podcasts, streaming and downloading?

Stiletto heels, a baby’s dummy, Spice Girls ephemera and glittering embroidery — the predictable paraphernalia of womanhood is all on show in What Women Want. But the latest exhibition at the enterprising Women’s Library in the East End of London is underpinned by some surprising revelations. So we have a 1972 edition of Spare Rib magazine (which I had thought always prided itself on being a feminist alternative to Good House-keeping) advertising an article by ‘Georgie Best’ on sex. Another case of books, diaries and postcards contains Married Love by Marie Stopes, opened at the title page to reveal that it was first published in 1918 and that it was subtitled ‘A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties’.