Michael Vestey

When I heard of the London explosions last Thursday — I was rung shortly before leaving to catch a train to London, which I had to abandon — my first thought was, why did it take them so long? We knew the manpower was here, either coming in as bogus asylum-seekers or by using false passports, easily accomplished since the government gave up preventing entry. Whether the bombers came from their ranks or are brainwashed, resentful Muslim youths born here — and at the time of writing it appears they were born here — only the investigation will reveal. I assumed the reason bombs hadn’t been used before was not the lack of people who were willing to do it but the difficulty of finding or bringing in explosives, a problem they’ve now clearly solved.

It was something of a shock to hear the first episode this week of Radio Four’s adaptation of BBC television’s popular 1950s series Dixon of Dock Green (Wednesday). Were policemen ever like the bluff, wise, shrewd and avuncular constable George Dixon? As a child watching the series, I thought they were, and we expected them all to bend their knees and say, ‘Evenin’ all.’ Audiences also believed it, as the series, written by Ted, later Lord, Willis, ran for 21 years. By the time Jack Warner, who played Dixon, retired, he was 80 and hardly looking like a police constable, let alone being able to bend the knees. Even if Dixons really did exist, they certainly don’t today.

It’s always useful to be reminded of the remarkable stoicism and bravery of the generation of people that lived through the second world war. It’s hard to imagine it being repeated today. I felt it this week listening to Coming Home, a five-part series celebrating the 60th anniversary of VE Day. Charles Wheeler, who in 1945 was a Royal Marine crossing into Germany from Holland, examined how people saw the ending of the war in Europe and how the conflict had altered their lives. Across the BBC as a whole, the occasion is being marked by a plethora of programmes. The depravity of those involved in the fall of Berlin was remembered: the raping and looting by Russian soldiers, and the SS killing those Germans who flew a white flag from their buildings.

When you are so addicted to writers’ works and feel bereft after finishing all their novels, you become restless and fretful. It happened to me last year with the Aurelio Zen detective novels of Michael Dibdin, as I lamented in The Spectator Diary column. Zen is the Italian policeman who is sent to different parts of Italy to solve crimes sensitive in nature; he’s a louche, corner-cutting cop with a hopeless domestic life. When I’d read the last novel, I wondered listlessly what I’d do until the next Zen book, which I surmised would be in two years’ time. And so it is: another is promised for August. Bit of a sad case, you might think; yes, probably, and I’m not, as a rule, even a particular fan of the genre.

When you’ve seen how much vilification Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles have endured from the tabloids and the republican broadsheets over the years, you wouldn’t have been surprised to see or hear the Prince’s muttered comments about the BBC’s royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell in Klosters last week. Witchell, known inexplicably among his colleagues as the ‘poisoned carrot’, is in fact one of the more respectful of the reporters who follow the royals. But the seemingly innocuous question he threw at the three princes — how were they feeling about the forthcoming wedding — was not as bland as it first appeared.

When I spotted that the conservative American writer and wit P.J. O’Rourke was giving two 20-minute talks on Radio Four, the first on Easter Sunday, I rubbed my eyes thinking there must have been some mistake. Or maybe a printing error. How did he get past the Guardianistas at the BBC? Did he slip in the back way disguised as a delivery man? He even gained access to a microphone and spoke into it. Twice! Well, I suppose as listeners we can be tossed the odd crumb or two now and again to keep us quiet. Whether Islingtonian listeners can tolerate it we’ll have to wait to hear in the next Feedback season. O’Rourke was on fine form, too, as he reassessed transatlantic relations. When younger and living in a basement flat in Maida Vale, he admired Britain.

Occasionally, one stumbles across something delightfully quirky on Radio Four that one knows would never be aired anywhere else; such was the case with The Reichsmarschall’s Table, produced by Dennis Sewell and tucked away on Monday evening last week. The table in question was for the Nazi general Hermann Goering in the 1930s and 40s at Berlin’s renowned restaurant Horcher’s, named after the family that owned it. It was here that Goering courted industrialists for their support for the Nazi cause while, at another table, members of the German resistance were plotting to arrest Hitler to consign him to a lunatic asylum. The plot failed, because the day Hitler was due back in Berlin, Neville Chamberlain chose to visit him in Bavaria.

On the whole, Radio Four has had some good controllers over the years, the better ones being those who introduced gradual change. The two who were the least successful in my view both tried to rearrange the furniture after moving in; I’m thinking of Ian McIntyre in the late 1970s who, one felt, wanted to return radio to the 1950s, and, in the 1990s, James Boyle, who, enslaved by focus groups, brought in many pointless changes. He was succeeded by the successful Helen Boaden and last year Mark Damazer replaced her. Wisely, perhaps, he hasn’t said much about his plans for the network, though he does have a few in mind.

I’ve long been intrigued by the language of EU-fanatics, particularly when they ascribe motives to those opposed to the EU constitution and the euro. There’ve been some fine examples on the radio recently. On Today on Monday morning, for example, Roger Liddle, a former Tony Blair adviser now working for Peter Mandelson in Brussels, suggested that opponents believed that they were ‘holding back the threatening hordes’ from Europe. At least Liddle was more honest about the nature and importance of the new constitution than any government minister, but it was a curious interview in another respect: apart from some anodyne questions from the Brussels correspondent Tim Franks, Liddle was allowed to speak without being challenged.

Apart from a strange and silly piece on Today accusing Sir Winston Churchill of being a racist over his attitude to India — he was, after all, a product of the age of Empire — it was a good week on Radio Four for our greatest prime minister. To mark the 40th anniversary of his death, the network broadcast several programmes commemorating his life, among them a repeat of Playing for Time — Three days in May 1940 (Saturday), a drama about wartime Cabinet disagreements, previously reviewed here, and later on in the evening The Archive Hour: Farewell to Winston, which looked back to his state funeral.

For many, the workhouse, particularly the Victorian variety, still conjures up in the popular imagination an image of dread and fear. I remember being taught about them at school and shuddering at the evocation of the Dickensian horror of these institutions. Everyone remembers the vivid experiences of Oliver Twist from either the novel or the film. For my grandmother’s generation they were still the unmentionable places of shame, the frightening last resort that beckoned if all went wrong. The workhouse was bad enough for what were called the labouring classes, but too much to bear for the more aspiring lower middle classes who’d fallen on hard times, as indeed it was possible to do throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

No time is right to announce job losses, but picking just before Christmas seems to be favoured by many companies. One can’t help wondering if there’s sound business sense behind it or if it can be attributed to the streak of sadism that runs through British life. When last week the BBC director-general, Mark Thompson, chose to unveil his plans to remove up to 5,000 people from its payroll, I imagine a number of Christmases were blighted. Assuming this figure I’ve quoted is correct. I’ve seen several different totals and interpretations: 2,900 actual losses from mainly administrative departments, such as marketing, training and human resources, with another 2,400 staff ‘outsourced’ when some BBC commercial areas are sold or become joint ventures.

Someone asked me the other day whether or not I listen regularly to Desert Island Discs on Radio Four. I told her I don’t, and she asked why. All I could say was that quite often I am simply not sufficiently interested in the studio guests to hear about their lives or listen to their choice of music. Occasionally, when I tune in, someone’s life grips me, but not often. Last Friday morning, I forgot that the repeat of the previous Sunday’s programme was on, and thus it was that I found myself listening to the glottal stops of Tracey Emin discussing what she does for a living. I don’t call it art. I’ve long felt there needs to be another name for the rubbish which the art establishment persists in calling modern or contemporary art.

Did the BBC’s creation of its Radio Four-type digital radio network BBC 7 force the commercial digital station Oneword to close? The report last week investigating the corporation’s move into digital radio seemed to think so. Tim Gardam, a former BBC and Channel 4 executive, whose report it was, said that the BBC ‘was basically unconcerned about the potential effect of BBC7 on Oneword’. The Oneword ‘assumption that it would be allowed to pursue this market alone was scuppered’ once BBC7 was launched. He thought the station’s collapse might have been avoided if the BBC had been willing to share its renowned archive with it. It is a pity that Oneword, the digital radio station that resembled Radio Four, closed.