This is a gem of a book for Radio 4 lovers, particularly those of us who work out which day of the week it is by who’s speaking on the station at 9.02 a.m. Published the week that Midweek was abolished for ever, it is Libby Purves’s story of the programme she presented for 33 years. In this brief memoir she has not only immortalised the distinctive flavour of the ‘And now for some lively conversation’ Wednesday-morning 45 minutes. She has also reminded us that Radio 4 is ‘basically, a marvel’: for many people, it is ‘their university and their friend’.
All presenters, Purves writes, are aware that they are obsolescent. ‘One day, you know perfectly well, the management will look at you with the kind of amazed horror that one feels on opening a forgotten kitchen drawer, bin bag in hand.’ But it came as a shock that both she and the programme were to be axed at the same time. Midweek managed to survive the 1990s when radio departments came under the ‘dark wing’ of television executives who didn’t understand radio. ‘Cain has been given the key to his brother Abel’s life-support machine’ was how Purves summed up that dire situation. And the programme survived — until last month — the constant pressure for BBC producers to come up with ‘exciting new formats’.
With its unshowy presentation of four disparate guests sitting round a table chatting live on air, Midweek had ‘a perfectly simple chemistry’. A 9/11 firefighter would find himself beside an inventor of word games; a surgeon next to a cabaret artist, and so on. Lord Denning appeared with the newly crowned Miss UK, who asked him, ‘how long does it take to get your judge kit on?’, which led him to talk about the putting on of tights.
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