‘Get inside the creative mind,’ urges the website of Studio 360, an innovative radio programme based in New York.
‘Get inside the creative mind,’ urges the website of Studio 360, an innovative radio programme based in New York. Set up by Kurt Andersen (of Spy magazine), it offers a weekly magazine programme about the arts, a sort of Front Row crossed with Night Waves. It’s intriguing, thought-provoking and just as good as anything produced by the BBC. The trouble is you have to be a wireless genius to work out how to listen to it if you’re driving through New England and don’t have access to a podcast or computer.
Listening to radio in the USA is a frustrating business. You know there are good programmes out there: This American Life produced in Chicago is another one, or Lost & Found Sound, created by the Kitchen Sisters who are based in California, but how do you track them down on the airwaves? All I seemed to tune in to was 1970s heavy rock or hell-bent Christian sermons. Once upon a time in America radio was huge, with a set in every farmstead, but TV took over and now, although the music stations are big business, as are the hard-right religious networks, you’re only likely to hear them when in a cab or burning up the miles on the Interstate. You’ll be hard-pushed to find a radio set in any kitchen, let alone the bathroom.
Back home and there’s a frisson when you turn on the radio at the same time as switching on the kettle for that first cup of tea. Suddenly, you realise how odd it’s been to live without that constant input of news and info, and also just how important it will be for us to defend the BBC’s licence fee in the coming months (and especially the BBC’s World Service, faced with a 25 per cent cut in its grant-in-aid from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office). Radio broadcasting might seem like a luxury in times of economic hardship but what the BBC provides is something much more — a cheap means of self-education and self-protection against depression. In just a few minutes I caught a discussion about the Miliband brothers, an emotional encounter in Nigeria, an insight into Armenian Christianity, and advice on how to invest my meagre earnings from this column. Invaluable.
Later, I was back on the M25 and desperate for something to make the journey less tedious. One press of the button and I discovered a drama starring Ian McKellen, which turned out to be one of those can’t-get-out-of-the-car-until-it’s-finished moments. Walter, Now, beautifully directed by Claire Grove (Radio 4, Saturday), took a play by David Cook, originally written for Channel 4’s inauguration in 1982, and updated it for radio.
Walter, its hero, is now 30 years older and has just been released from the hospital where he’s been incarcerated since his mother died. Social services have decided to experiment by placing him in a protected house along with three other ‘clients’ with learning disabilities. Walter has until now been considered as mentally deficient, yet as the eldest in the house he grows into the role of father-figure, the key to ensuring that the experiment succeeds. It was simply but so effectively done, with a cast that included two members, Anna-Marie Heslop and Edmund Davies, of Mind the Gap, a project that gives those with learning disabilities training on the stage. Where else would they have got the chance to reach a national audience? And to play alongside McKellen? Where else would we have the opportunity to listen to a well-produced, just-long-enough-at-60-minutes play, with an acting great who also makes a killing in Hollywood?
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