Michael Vestey

It is with great sadness that we heard of the sudden death of Michael Vestey on Friday. For more than ten years, he had been The Spectator’s radio critic — indeed the first and only one. His column was perceptive, authoritative, witty, sometimes caustic and opinionated, but always immensely readable. We asked him to file his column early this week because of the Bank Holiday and, professional to the last, he did. It follows below. Michael will be much missed. I’m glad Radio Four had the good sense to mark the centenary of the birth of John Betjeman as I feared the BBC might overlook it. But the network did and some fine programmes have resulted. The one I liked most was Doubts and Demons: The Inner John Betjeman (Monday), presented by A.N.

It must be a nightmare when you spend weeks making a current-affairs programme only to find that days before it’s broadcast the subject you’ve been exploring is turned upside-down. That’s what happened to Radio Four’s Inside Money, the sister programme to the excellent Money Box, almost a fortnight ago (Saturday, repeated Monday last week). The producers had put together a programme about the government’s ludicrous Home Information Packs, the HIPs, that are due to come into force next June, only for the crucial home inspections paid for by the vendors to be scrapped overnight as unworkable. We all knew that but at least this hopeless Labour government woke up to it in the nick of time. So what did Inside Money do?

What really goes on between world leaders at summits? Sir Christopher Meyer, former press secretary to John Major and later ambassador to Washington, told us in How to Succeed at Summits (Sundays, repeated Wednesdays), an entertaining two-part series on Radio Four. Meyer told us that, for example, when President Bush made a jokey reference to Tony Blair using Colgate toothpaste at Camp David, assembled journalists wondered how on earth he knew: did they share a bathroom? In fact, Meyer knew that all the bathrooms there were supplied with this particular brand because he was part of the entourage. Summits remain a secret world because quite often two world leaders will meet in private without their officials present, and only an interpreter, if one is needed, will witness it.

Listening to The Archive Hour: Down Your Way Revisited on Radio Four (Saturday) made me wonder why the network got rid of the programme in 1995. It had been running since 1946, with a simple formula of interviews and music, the idea of a producer called Leslie Perowne. It visited towns and villages across the country, and in its heyday attracted an audience of ten million a week. It avoided controversy and looked for the good in people and places, and while some thought it bland and cosy, most liked it. It occurred to me that when the awful Home Truths on Saturday mornings is eventually replaced, Radio Four could do worse than reviving it.

Listing page content here Although I don’t buy it often, I’ve always liked the New Yorker magazine, not only for its good writing but also for the humour. The cartoons are consistently sharp and amusing and the owners have cleverly marketed them as greeting cards, as The Spectator did recently.     The magazine has somehow survived for 81 years, and, as Naomi Gryn, the presenter of Inside The New Yorker on Radio Four (Saturday), told us, it now sells a million copies a week. She spent a week at its offices at 4 Times Square talking to staff and contributors. I suspect it takes itself a little too seriously, but most American quality journalism does and it doesn’t seem pompous like the New York Times, for example.

Although writing a biography of John Osborne can’t be the most difficult task as Osborne left voluminous and laceratingly honest diaries Although writing a biography of John Osborne can’t be the most difficult task as Osborne left voluminous and laceratingly honest diaries, as well as the two volumes of autobiography, I thought John Heilpern’s new book about him, A Patriot for Us, the Book of the Week on Radio Four last week, was quite compelling. Abridged by Robert Evans and read by Gareth Thomas, the book made it clear that Osborne was incapable of self-censorship and that, as Heilpern put it, his life was governed by ‘self-disgust and unconquerable clenched fear’. As the playwright wrote, ‘It is fear. I cannot rid myself of it, it numbs me.

With the government and the opposition flogging peerages to raise money for party funds, Radio Four decided to look back at the 1920s master of this practice, the former Liberal prime minister David Lloyd George, and J. Arthur Maundy Gregory, the crook he used to negotiate prices (The Man Who Sold Peerages, Easter Saturday). Matthew Parris told the presenter Shaun Ley that it was one of the three worst political scandals of the 20th century. We don’t know for how long the present government has been doing this and the exact going rates it charges, but back then a knighthood would set you back £10,000, a huge sum, more than £25,000 for a baronetcy and goodness knows what for a hereditary peerage.

Since I first became aware of it, I’ve always loved Broadcasting House in Portland Place.

Radio Four listeners have been complaining about the John Humphrys ‘interview’ with David Cameron on Today a fortnight or so ago. So they must have been even more irritated to hear the programme’s deputy editor, Gavin Allen, defending the encounter on Feedback last week (Friday, repeated Sunday), even going so far as to describe it as a successful interview in which he thought Humphrys didn’t interrupt too much. The presenter, Roger Bolton, put it to him that according to the head of radio news even Humphrys didn’t think the interview had gone as he intended. Allen doggedly stuck to his line that he wasn’t at all disappointed by it. Obviously, there’s a need to defend your staff but, really, no one can honestly say the interview was successful.

The astonishing removal of Charles Kennedy for having been a heavy drinker confirmed my long-held belief that the Liberal Democrats are by far the nastiest and most ruthless bunch of all. It was frustrating to see gullible people regarding them as the nice party when I knew differently. Their dirty tricks in election campaigns are legendary and probably gave Alastair Campbell ideas in the first place. I heard a real stinker of a poisonous viper on Today during the campaign to oust Kennedy: former MP Jenny Tonge, who is now apparently ‘Baroness’ Tonge. All Liberal Democrats need to hear now is that Menzies Campbell and Simon Hughes are secret cross-dressers who like nothing better than cavorting in frilly pink frocks.

The distaste for torture and abuse of prisoners or detainees has never been shared by everyone in this country, though on the whole we’re better than those in many other countries. We have our own sadists who somehow end up in charge of others as well as those who, under pressure to provide results, overstep the mark. Document: Recruiting the Reich on Radio Four this week (Monday) uncovered some examples from the post-war period which, needless to say, were covered up. Using the Freedom of Information Act, the presenter Mike Thomson examined documents alleging abuse and even torture committed by Intelligence officers after the war, and he wondered if it had been widespread and systematic. I suspect neither but one can’t be sure. It was certainly an interesting investigation.

The good end-of-year news was that Home Truths on Radio Four (Saturdays) is to be taken off the air in the spring. Unfortunately, it seems likely to be replaced by something similar. The new show, says Mark Damazer, the network controller, ‘will continue to feature the sometimes extraordinary experiences of its listeners’. Damazer explained that the late John Peel’s ‘unique personality’ was bound up with Home Truths and now it was time to look for a different programme. I must say I hated it when Peel presented it and I don’t feel any differently now.

Concern for the English language is one thing but diehard pedantry is another. It seems that Stephen Fry has started shouting at the radio when Radio Four listeners write to or email Feedback to complain about grammatical errors and solecisms they’ve heard on the network. There are certainly more mistakes than there used to be, particularly in news. Fry has a point about absolute pedantry but he gives the impression that for him anything goes — which for someone who speaks and writes impeccably is rather strange.

I suppose if I had to name my favourite children’s author it would have to be Richmal Crompton and the William stories, followed not far behind by Anthony Buckeridge and Jennings, and Enid Blyton with the adventures of the famous five. There are numerous others, of course, but I enjoyed reading these three the most when I was a child. Buckeridge, who died last year at the age of 92, was the subject of The Archive Hour: Fossilised Fish Hooks! Jennings at the BBC on Radio Four (Saturday), an affectionate tribute as well as an exploration of Buckeridge’s influence on radio comedy.

As we’ve seen in the past week, the full cost of providing services that no one asked for, digital radio and television, will fall on the licence-fee payer, with the BBC demanding annual increases of 2.5 per cent above inflation. It wasn’t entirely obvious in the early days of digital promotion that this was something the government was pushing hard for; the BBC case was based largely on how vital it was that broadcasting should become digital, as this was a superior form of broadcasting to the existing analogue signal, and our lives would be immeasurably improved if we all went digital. Does anyone, apart from the BBC, really believe that now?

America, more than any other country I can think of, encourages such extreme opinions that it’s sometimes difficult to analyse why such views are held. There are rigid anti-Americans, of course, who variously dislike its capitalist and free-market system, its silent majority’s lack of sophistication, or its military and technological might. Much of this is just plain envy. Others define the country through its president. At the moment Bush-haters are in the ascendancy, hence the gloating tone of much of the broadcasting coverage of Hurricane Katrina. It was, as the mad Michael Moore put it, all the fault of George W. himself. I dare say Moore is already finding ways of blaming Bush for the Ice Age.

News of England’s Ashes victory spread rapidly though Cortona’s ancient streets last Monday evening, as those with satellite TV rang the mobile phones of friends and families to pass on the momentous news. It was not, of course, Italians calling; Tuscans observed uncomprehendingly as the holidaying English roared at the result; and one resident Englishwoman let out a primal Home Counties scream of joy in a clothes shop, unnerving the proprietor. Only those with Channel 4 were in the know; the BBC World Service, I was told, boringly reported football results. Mysteriously, Test Match Special on Radio Four long wave doesn’t seem to be available abroad and, as we know, for the next four years Test cricket will be on an expensive Sky subscription channel only.

The Document series on Radio Four is often an absorbing pursuit of information triggered by the discovery of one document which leads to another. The sleuthing involved can be revealing about an historic event and occasionally is of some importance. But not always, it seems to me. This week’s programme, A Right Royal Affair (Monday) — the second in the current series of four — began without a document, namely the will of the Queen Mother, who died three years ago. The Queen succeeded in having her mother’s will sealed, its contents remaining a secret. This puzzled the presenter of Document, Mike Thomson, who told us that he’d always understood that wills were public documents available to anyone who wished to see them.