Quiet courage

‘Listeners may find some of the content disturbing,’ said the announcer before the programme began (a warning that was also given in the Radio Times). You’d have thought we were about to hear a particularly raunchy play, or some horrific accounts of death by torture, murder or old age. Behind Enemy Lines (Radio Two, Saturday) was shocking at times, and needed to be. That was the point.

John McCarthy, the Beirut hostage who was held captive by Islamic Jihad for almost five years, talked to others who had been imprisoned not for crimes committed but because of political hostilities and...

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Quiet heroism

When did you last hear something on the TV that was so true, so direct, so resonant that it keeps popping back into your mind? If you’re anything like me you’ll have a struggle to remember anything. But change one word in that question from ‘TV’ to ‘radio’ and you might well be faced with another problem: too many moments of positive connection. On the Today programme last week, Captain Sully Sullenberger, the pilot who miraculously landed his US Airways plane on to the Hudson River, saving 155 people from certain death, gave extraordinary witness of his character. What struck...

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Children in need

‘I want people to feel quite shocked,’ said Professor Tanya Byron in her opening lecture for Radio Three’s annual Free Thinking festival. This year’s theme is the 21st-century family and Byron, the clinical psychologist and presenter of the television series The House of Tiny Tearaways, was addressing an audience in Gateshead where this year’s festival is based. The purpose of ‘free thinking’ is to focus on a subject and take it to its extremes, in the hope that some creative ideas might emerge. Professor Byron’s ‘take’ on the family today focused on the children, and not just any children, but...

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The quick and the dead

His two sons, his grandsons and a family friend all gathered at the mortuary to wash him thoroughly, before his body, simply covered in a shroud, was laid in the ground. His head was turned towards Mecca and wooden boards laid over him to protect him from the clods of earth that would be sprinkled into the grave by those who mourned him. He was an 82-year-old Muslim with a long white beard who had died the previous evening. Tim Gardam, principal of St Anne’s College, Oxford, took us behind the scenes to witness the rituals of a Muslim funeral....

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Yiddish vitality

Schmooze, schlep, schlock — all words that have such an evocative, onomatopoeic meaning and all from Yiddish, a language without a country, an army or a navy, which refuses to die even after one-third of its native speakers were annihilated by the Nazis. On My Yiddisher Mother Tongue (Radio Four, Thursday) David Schneider, whose grandparents, a playwright and an actress, were part of the great flowering of Yiddish culture that occurred prior to the 1930s in Eastern Europe, gave us a potted history of the language and a dose of its inimitable flavour — the comic fatalism, the vibrant emotion,...

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Moment of truth

I wonder how many people still listen to plays on radio now that there is so much competition for our attention from Twitter, YouTube and the hours taken up with Strictly Come Dancing. It’s not just that we’re being taken over by techie gadgetry so that there is less and less time to do anything else. (How many photos have you got trapped on your computer with no time to sort through their nameless numbers and download on to a memory stick, let alone buy the right paper to print them, etc., etc.?) It’s also very difficult to follow the...

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