Radio insomnia

It’s 2.43 a.m. Unable to sleep, you reach out into the night for company: literally. Out goes your arm, towards the radio on the bedside table, and you grope for the ‘on’ button. You bring the radio close to you: a hard, cold, rectangular cuddly toy with an aerial instead of ears, and you turn the volume down as low as you can so that it won’t wake your sleeping companion, if you have one. When a radio is this close to your eyes, you see two of each of its parts.

If Radio 4 is your daytime listening, you’ll find yourself in World Service Land at this time of the night.  The first sentence you’ll hear will be something like, ‘The group is believed to have carried out a number of attacks in northern Nigeria.’ Or, ‘Sierra Leone is in the grip of an epidemic.’ Or, ‘The sticks were half-covered in blood: they’d been used to beat the people to death.’

The reason you’re wide awake in the first place is because you’re an anxious type. This kind of stuff doesn’t help. As you listen, your whole body goes rigid with the horror of it. Unless, that is, you’re the kind of insomniac who is actually soothed by the thought that your own life could be worse.

‘People are having a terrible time in Africa, right now, but it’s not me: I’m just worried about where on earth I put those insurance documents, so I’ll just turn over and get some sleep.’

How many of us, as we listen to  ‘Sailing By’, with its consoling-but-sad ascending and descending scales, wait with dread for the rallentando at the end, because that means that the end of the Radio 4 day is in sight? If ‘Dogger, Fisher, German Bight’, followed by a lovely presenter wishing us a peaceful night, followed by the drumroll of the National Anthem, don’t get us to sleep, we’ll be thrust into the world of Radio 4’s brash and harsh sister station for four whole hours.

Should insomniacs switch to Five Live and listen to Up All Night instead? Perhaps. I think the Up All Night presenter, Dotun Adebayo, impressively manages to please both insomniacs and truck drivers. He has a gentle, deep voice and an easy manner. How different his long night-time phone-ins are from rushed daytime ones! To fill up the gaping minutes, Shirley from Bexhill is allowed to read a whole poem she’s written. We hear about the poems she used to like, Dotun tells us about the poems he used to like… and you just hope that someone driving an Eddie Stobart lorry hasn’t fallen asleep and crashed into the central barrier.

The reassuring thing about Dotun Adebayo and, indeed, about Shirley from Bexhill, is that you’re all in the same boat. You’re all awake in the middle of the night. But when Dotun is off duty and getting some sleep, the programme is presented by someone who is wide awake — in -Massachusetts.

Rhod Sharp (educ Perth Academy, has soft Scottish accent) broadcasts live from his own studio at the top of his house in Marblehead, Mass, so in order to present the programme he only has to be Up All Evening.  Whereas we benighted souls… it’s not fair.

And the length of time he lets his interviewees talk for! Last week, we had a historian talking for six minutes, uninterrupted, on the subject of whether the bones under the carpark in Leicester were those of Richard  III. Ending with the terrible pun ‘my hunch is that they are’. Again, good for insomniacs, dangerous for truck drivers.

There’s always Radio 3 and Classic FM, if music’s the thing that gets you to sleep. It’s at Radio 3, in the middle of the night, that the wonderful presenter Susan Sharpe is still to be found, introducing the pieces in her exquisite voice. But she hardly says a thing. Out of the six hours of music, from 12.30 to 6.30 a.m., only about five minutes contain the spoken words of the presenter.

As for Classic FM, they have a ‘trucker’s tune’ each night. In the small hours of this morning it was the opening part of the Carmen overture, and you were never going to fall asleep to that.