Unsung talent

So why are we all becoming radio addicts, listening to an ever-greater variety of stations for more minutes each day? Could it be a yearning for something simpler, more direct, less tricksy than the constant visual stimuli that persist in assaulting us wherever we are, via the internet, TV, DVD and cinema? It’s the immediacy and the fact that you don’t have to wait those endless seconds while the wretched machine boots itself up, ready to perform, which make radio so much more appealing. With a soon-to-be-abandoned analogue set (though not, alas, my smart new digital boxes) all you have to do is press your preset button and be taken straightway, between heartbeats, to another dimension of experience.

For the past few Sunday nights I’ve happened upon a fascinating mini-series on Radio 4’s The Film Programme, which has been talking to women in the business who’ve been crucial to the success of certain films but whose talents we never usually hear about. A couple of weeks ago Angela Allen, who worked with John Huston on The African Queen, The Misfits and Freud, told us about her life in the 1950s and 1960s as a ‘script supervisor’ or ‘continuity girl’. It was her voice that gripped me. She was obviously not young, yet you could still tell from the timbre, the variety of tone and virility of expression that she was an indomitable character, a woman I would love to meet.

While everyone else succumbed to dysentery when filming on the Queen upriver in the Belgian Congo, Angela Allen was left doling out the pills to Bogart, Hepburn and the crew and getting them back to health and the film back on budget. Afterwards the film company sued East African Railways for supplying the boat with polluted water.