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BBC as saviour

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 14th May 2008

Afternoon Play (BBC Radio 4); World Play (BBC World Service)

While the TV chiefs squirm with embarrassment, exposed for misleading the public in the phone-voting scandals, radio has had a brilliant week. Not just an announcement that 34.22 million listeners have been listening each week to BBC radio (let alone all the commercial radio stations, digital and online) but also endorsements from two people not normally mentioned in the same breath. Pete Doherty, the badly behaved rock star, told reporters on leaving Wormwood Scrubs that he’d spent the last few weeks with ‘a lot of gangsters and Radio Four’. Radio Four? Not Radio One? Or BBC6? What a coup for Mark Damazer, Four’s Controller (and his station’s just won Gold at the Sony Awards, radio’s Oscars). The shambolic, baby-faced rebel confessing that he’s been tuning in to the station formerly known as manna for the middle classes.

Meanwhile Harold Pinter revealed in the Guardian how the Third Programme (as it then was) saved his writing career in 1958 after his play The Birthday Party was savaged by the critics and pulled from the theatre after only eight performances. ‘Around the same time,’ he told the paper, ‘an actor friend, Patrick Magee, contacted a BBC radio producer, and said, “You’ve got to give this man a job, since he’s about to give the whole thing up.”’ At that time, there was an active department at the BBC developing play scripts for radio and Pinter was given lots of scope.

Two of those early works for radio, Landscape and The Examination, could be heard last week on Radio Four’s Afternoon Play in newly made recordings. It’s a shame Doherty had been released from jail two days earlier otherwise he might have learnt from Radio Four something about putting words together, about the sheer power of language, about the authority of discipline. Landscape has two characters, Beth (played by Penelope Wilton) and Duff (Pinter himself in a very rare appearance after his experience of throat cancer). But this is not so much a dialogue as a duologue; two characters in need of rehab. They’re both

recollecting a long-lost past, but are they talking about each other? Were they lovers? Married? Why are their recollections so different? As Beth wanders into a dream-like reverie, Duff spits out the truth.

I’ve never much liked Pinter. His insights are far too uncomfortable, especially about gender differences. Who really wants to hear the truth? But what craft and savage power were here displayed. Not a word wasted on trifles; not a moment spent on self-pity, or self-delusion. And to hear Pinter himself playing one of his own characters, punching out the lines as if throwing us a ball that we could catch, or let drop, was extraordinary.

Over on the BBC World Service, the LA Theatre Works company hosted this week’s World Play, the annual series of dramas selected from radio stations around the world. The production was of an early work by David Mamet, The Shawl, first heard in 1985 but now restaged in front of an audience and starring John Mahoney (who played Kelsey Grammer’s dad in the TV series Frasier). A rich young woman (played by Mamet’s wife, Rebecca Pidgeon) is trying to get in touch with the spirit of her dead mother; Mahoney is the medium she hopes will enable her to do this. But he’s on a mission of his own: to con enough money from her to impress his new, acquisitive boyfriend.

Mamet, who has acknowledged his debt to Pinter by dedicating one of his plays to him, is also an acquired taste. He’s such a bullying, over-confident and inescapably masculine writer, pummelling us with words until, meek with submission (and aural exhaustion), we give in and admit, ‘Yes, you are brilliant!’ But afterwards you can’t stop thinking about what’s been said. ‘We fear that thing which we wish does not exist. But we know it exists. Don’t we?’ says Mahoney’s character. It’s troubling, discomfiting stuff. Not easy to forget.

Neither Pinter nor Mamet create dialogue that we might wish to remember; it’s the disturbing thoughts, sensations, feelings that they arouse which linger unwillingly in the mind. But as John Sessions reminded us on Sunday afternoon on Radio Four, one man, living in the early 18th century, was responsible for a whole galaxy of phrases that have become inextricably part of our language. ‘To err is human, to forgive, divine’, or ‘For fools rush in where angels fear to tread’ and ‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast’.

The life of Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was celebrated in a programme whose title was taken from another of his telling snatches of thought, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. At less than half an hour the programme was far too short, and too chaotically organised, to give us more than a frustrating flavour of Pope’s work (which included ‘The Rape of the Lock’ and a translation of the Iliad). But it did remind us that his poetry inspired Elvis and Dylan. Are you still listening, Pete?

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