Listen with mother

Once upon a time, Big Toe was a major part of the BBC7 schedule, with regular daily slots and plenty of opportunities for children to get involved through schools initiatives and studio visits. The idea was that this would be the home of children’s radio once Radios Two and Four abandoned their commitment to involving children in their programming. Now, though, budgets have been cut back and cut back so that Big Toe is reduced to just one slot a day, and even then can be heard only on a digital station that’s available in less than one third of homes.

Younger listeners have their own ‘audio’ version of CBeebies, but that’s exactly what it is: CBeebies without the moving images. There’s no sense of it being an ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin’ kind of experience. Everything is served up with a noisy soundtrack of electronic burps and grunts, as if stories simply told are not enough to keep the children engaged and entertained. You might as well be watching TV for at least you then look at the pictures on the screen as a distraction from all the noise.

Hold on, though. Radio Four did give us a bumper-sized Christmas cracker in a version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda by the award-winning playwright Charlotte Jones which was played in two parts as a Sunday-afternoon Classic Serial. This was a beautifully clean-sounding production (by Claire Grove); no extraneous background music and just enough sound effects to help the imagination conjure up Dahl’s wickedly funny characters.

Matilda is a child prodigy who develops psychokinetic skills as a defence against her horrible Mum and Dad, and the terrifying Miss Trunchbull. Lenny Henry was brought in as an all-knowing, all-seeing narrator, and the action took place in a genuine primary school, adding an authentic sound as Miss Trunchbull was finally trounced by Matilda and her classmates. Also on Four at Christmas was a radio adaptation of that seasonal stalwart, The Wizard of Oz. Cut back to just an hour (the Judy Garland film runs for an hour and three-quarters) it was difficult to follow what was happening to Dorothy and her motley bunch of fellow travellers on the Yellow Brick Road. Did I care whether the Tin Man found a heart? Or Dorothy ever found her way back home? Not really. The production was if anything too sophisticated, too cleverly put together. What we needed was a much more direct and less tricksy telling of the story.

Narrative, the linear unfolding of a story, is how we make sense of the world and our place in it. The best of radio flexes these story-listening, creative skills, which are all about translating words into pictures in the mind in a logical sequence. Once mastered they give us techniques for figuring out more theoretical problems by being able to visualise and create mental pictures of quite abstract thoughts. But who will be listening to radio in 10, 15, 20 years’ time? It’s a skill, a habit you have to learn when young. Give children more radio is my campaign for the coming year.