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Friday 9 January 2009

Eyes wide shut

Kate Chisholm on Radio Five Live's coverage of diving at the Olympics

Vassos Alexander talked us through what Daley and Aldridge would be trying to do as they fell through the air so that I now know what a pike is — one and a half somersaults, rotating either forwards or backwards. Karen Pickering, a former world champion swimmer, then took us poolside. Not that 1.5 seconds, which is all it takes to complete the dive, gave her much chance to say anything. She didn’t need to. You could tell by her tone of voice that all was not going well. It’s compulsive listening, with all the drama of The Archers, the intellectual underpinning of In Our Time, and the tingling excitement of almost being there.

Paddy O’Connell made fun on Sunday’s Broadcasting House of the BBC’s obsession with Beijing 2008, every programme on the schedule taking up a sporting theme (The World As One; Something Understood: The Rules of Synchronised Swimming; Desert Island Discus.) But thank heavens we have got the Olympics this year to take our minds off this dismal summer. And it’s not all sport. On World Routes in China on Radio Three (Saturday), Lucy Duran took us to Shanghai and Suzhou in search of what’s left of traditional Chinese music after the combined assault of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and the new economic boom. In Suzhou, surrounded by a concrete shopping mall, she found a beautiful old theatre where two female singers were entertaining a crowd of OAPs with a performance of the ancient Pingtan narrative.

At first the atonal wailing was really alien to my Westernised ears, but when Lucy Duran started explaining that this was just part of a narrative that lasts for 15 days and takes the audience on a journey through all the big human emotions you could really begin to understand why it works. The sound of the two voices, an extraordinary cross between recitation and singing, is so penetrating it stops all thought, setting the mind at rest. A wonderful release from present circumstances.

Duran also took us to a tea house in Shanghai to hear the strange, ethereal music of the ancient guqin, a stringed instrument like the zither, with seven strings made of silk. Sometimes it sounded bell-like, at others you could almost mistake it for a rock guitar. The performer was banned from all music and exiled to the country from the Shanghai Conservatoire during the Cultural Revolution, after which he discovered that he had forgotten how to play, ‘my fingers couldn’t move’. When he told Duran that he found the guqin much easier to play after a few drinks, his music suddenly made sense.

More articles from: Kate Chisholm | this section

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