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Jet set

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 16th April 2008

Journey into Space (BBC Radio 4); Broadcasting House (BBC Radio 4)

Saturday’s hour-long play updated the whole space business from an optimistic adventure set in the brave new world of alternative galaxies to a comic skit on how technology has changed us since the 1950s. Back then, when the first astronauts went into orbit, they left planet earth in space modules that were put together almost with pieces of string (as anyone who has visited the space museum in Washington DC will have discovered). How those astronauts got to the moon and back is the Eighth Wonder of the World. Captain Jet, who has single-handedly kept his craft in orbit since a mysterious catastrophe in 1973, sent all his crew into a deep sleep from which they have suddenly woken up, travels with an on-board mechanic and his mate. When they arrive on Mars to rescue the Earth Saviour Operation which is in trouble they are met by a health-and-safety officer, a PR and media person, an IT officer — but no engineers. They can’t believe it. No one in the operation knows how anything works. ‘How do we get this thing open?’ Jet asks Mitch. ‘Don’t know, mate. We’ll just have to crack the hinges, I guess,’ comes the reply. Well, it made me laugh anyway.

It’ll never match the size of audience boasted by the original, but Journey into Space knocked spots off the current rota of comedy programmes filling the 6.30 slot on Radio Four, and we were cleverly left in suspense at the end. Will Captain Jet respond to the planetary emergency his finely tuned radio has picked up through the static?

Next morning on Broadcasting House, Paddy O’Connell introduced an item that in the 1950s would have sounded as unlikely as the manned landing on the moon. Two schoolkids from Croxteth in Liverpool were invited on to the Radio Four current affairs magazine to quiz the Chief Constable of Merseyside about youth crime and the police — and not, as you might have expected, vice versa. Croxteth is the Liverpool suburb where Rhys Jones was killed in a random shooting as he biked home from football practice. Media reports focused on the reluctance of local people to give any information they might have about the murder, which was committed by members of a teenage gang. Our 15-year-old interviewers were annoyed by the coverage and wanted us to know some of the good stories that could be told about the place in which they live. It was such a refreshing take on a story that has become too familiar.