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An English malady

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 5th March 2008

The Poet Unwound (BBC Radio 4); The Museum of Curiousity (BBC Radio 4)

All this in a brief half-hour conducted by the comedian Steve Punt. If you can listen to programmes like this, who needs psychiatrists or Prozac?

Even better I’ve at last found myself laughing at a Radio Four comedy programme, transforming that 6.30 graveyard slot, which in recent years has become synonymous with smutty jokes and banal innuendo, into something a little different. The Museum of Curiosity (Wednesdays) is a bit like Paul Merton’s Room 101, but without the ego. John Lloyd and Bill Bailey draw in a team of ‘experts’ each week to help them fill their imaginary museum with intriguingly different exhibits. ‘Nothing is too insignificant, too abstract or too huge for inclusion’ in this baroque folly; less a store of desiccated artefacts than a haven for long-lost values, ideas, bits of everyday history. Last week we heard Fran Beauman, Professor Gary Sheffield and Ben Elton giving vent to their passions — the pineapple, the Anderson shelter and ‘privacy’ — in the hope that Lloyd and Bailey would allow them precious space in their storehouse of things lost or in danger of being so.

Fran Beauman has spent the past ten years writing a history of the pineapple, which first arrived in Britain from Brazil in the 1650s. It was presented to that bile-ridden melancholic Oliver Cromwell. One wonders what he made of it. Somehow one can’t imagine him with luscious juice dribbling down his grimly chiselled chin. By the 18th century they had become so prized (and were so difficult to grow, taking three years to fruit) that a single fruit was worth as much as £5,000, which makes our own obsession with designer handbags a little less absurd. Pineapples, of course, are in no danger of extinction; quite the reverse. They’ve become so freely available that we take them for granted. Not any more.

Elton’s contribution, in contrast, was a bit of a rant. Did you know, for instance, that there are now 32 CCTV cameras within 200 yards of the flat where George Orwell wrote his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-four about the dangers of totalitarianism? His hero Winston Smith, created out of Orwell’s imagination in 1949, is horror-struck to find a camera in his room. And yet we have coolly allowed five million of these wretched things to be dotted round the country. Five million! It’s about one for every 12 people, said Elton. And that’s not counting all those hand-held cameras in mobile phones. Or the shots on MySpace and Facebook. Never before has our every movement been so scrutinised, and by so many. And what for? That’s the big question. Any answers, Mr Brown?