Mercantile madness
Bosphorus Battles (Radio Three), Desert Island Discs (Radio 4)
Try as she might Kirsty Young has yet to breathe new life into Desert Island Discs, which could surely now be dumped from the schedules without an outcry. It’s partly that the format has gone so stale, but mostly that there are very few left in the public eye who have anything very interesting to tell us. Still, I was intrigued to know how Young would handle that ‘Grand Inquisitor of the Today programme’, John Humphrys, and so I dutifully tuned in on Sunday morning (Radio Four). Would we get any insight into how his mind works?
I suspect that he’s rather a bore. It’s not just that his voice is too loud, too rasping, too full of itself. It’s that he’s on a mission. Not a spiritual or even a social one, but a mission none the less. To prove himself. ‘I always felt I didn’t quite fit in,’ he confessed, as if that were not intrinsic to the human condition.
Young did try to quiz him about the ‘office romance’ that led to the birth of his last child, Owen, when he was 57 (not easy having a young child when you have to get up at four to be at the office on time). But after a few nervous giggles (and Humphrys’s admission that it was ‘tricky’) she gave up. Small doses of Ella and Ellington, Elgar and Beethoven were not enough compensation for the absence of any real conversazione. The crucial test: on the evidence of this edition of DID would you choose Humphrys as a dining companion for your very last meal on earth?
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Neil Hart
January 22nd, 2008 11:59amRe: Kate Chisholm's article "Bosphorus Battles". I enjoy the column, but have to point out, in a private capacity, that the Bosphorus along which my wife and I strolled on Sunday had plenty of fish left to catch, judging by the piles of silver-scaled creatures heaped up on the shore... The regurgitation of an argument without reference to (visually) obvious facts is risky, particularly as it may well be that a decline in fish stocks owes more to the trawlers and thousands of amateur fishermen lining the banks than to tankers, which are, after all, a more efficient form of the trading vessels which have plied this waterway for centuries? Nevertheless, the volume of traffic is of concern to the Turkish authorities and the oil industry alike - and accidents have happened in the past - which is one reason why the latter is investing so much in by-pass pipelines for this critical and sensitive area, as pointed out in a recent Spectator article by Richard Orange. Incidentally, raki is clear, and only goes (visually) milky with the addition of water... Sincerely, Neil Hart, Istanbul.