Death in the afternoon

After weeks of waiting, it was all over in a matter of seconds.

On Last Word, also last Friday (Radio Four), Cleo Laine talked about how she and her family carried on with a concert just a few hours after the death of her husband Johnny Dankworth. ‘He would have liked that,’ she told John Wilson. ‘He was trying so hard to make the concert.’ She went on singing until the very end, before announcing to the audience just before her last number that Johnny had died. That must have been incredibly difficult, suggested Wilson. ‘There are certain countries and cultures where it’s OK to wail,’ said the brilliantly valiant Cleo. ‘I wish I could have wailed.’

Death was also the main feature in Saturday night’s The Wire on Radio Three. In Rapture Frequency Michael is a Flight Disaster Analyst who one day thinks, or imagines, that he’s heard something, a sound like angels singing, at the very end of a black-box recording from a flight where everyone dies except one little old lady. Is it static? White noise? A computer virus? ‘It was like something celestial. Up there...All those people terrified. Then they’re calm. It was so beautiful.’ He hears it once, then the recording disappears. Just like that. As if the noise had never been there in the first place.

Michael becomes dangerously obsessed, wanting to capture ‘it’, this mysterious quality of sound. Just one proper recording of it. He starts hanging around hospices, hospitals, scenes of violence, with a microphone at the ready. But whatever ‘it’ was remains elusive, frighteningly so.

What does happen between life and death? Is there anything out there beyond our existence? Or do we end up falling endlessly through a purgatory of absence? Abbie Spallen’s disturbing, discomfiting play raised lots of questions; too many to be dealt with in just 60 minutes. A bit of editing would have helped, and more focus. The tone switched so abruptly from terrifying to farcical and back again. But it’s always refreshing to listen to dramas that require sound designers (Matthew Laughlin, Bill Maul and John Simpson) and at least it was confronting something very real, frighteningly so.