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Special traits

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 6th August 2008

Leonard and Marianne (BBC Radio 4); The Novel that Changed by Life (BBC Radio 2)

It’s a topsy-turvy world at the moment, with New Labour tearing each other apart like Old Tories, and brothers Will and Ed transmogrifying into each other on The Archers. Even Radios Two and Four have been caught up in this changing-character business, with programmes you’d normally expect to find on Four’s schedule popping up on Radio Two, and vice versa. On Saturday morning I thought I must have pushed the wrong button by mistake when I heard Leonard Cohen girning away at ‘So long, Marianne’ on what I thought was Radio Four but then began to think must be 88 to 91 degrees FM. But no, as I continued to listen I realised it was definitely Four. No mistake. The quality of the production (by Alan Hall) gave the game away. I don’t mean to be rude about Two (more on that network later), but 80-odd years of feature-making experience do count for something. On Four, words come first.

Leonard and Marianne (Saturday) seamlessly spun together an old 2005 interview with Cohen, first broadcast on Norwegian radio, and a newly recorded conversation with Marianne Ihlen, the woman who inspired some of his most melancholy odes.They met in the Sixties on the Greek island of Hydra, Marianne first seeing Leonard in the doorway of a grocer’s shop and experiencing one of those moments of recognition that only happen once in a life. They split up after seven years when Marianne realised Leonard’s affair with Suzanne (for whom he also wrote a song) was serious. It all sounds rather predictable when told like this: rock chicks versus an egotistical lover. But it was intensely moving, listening to these two septuagenarians looking back on what had drawn them together, and forced them apart. Not a tear was shed by either side in the telling; there was no trace of cloying sentiment.

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