It’s a bit of a surprise to discover that my young nephews are huge fans of radio. Since Radio 4 abandoned programmes designed for children, and CBeebies disappeared from the airwaves, radio has become a kids-free zone. What on earth do they find to listen to? Why, of course, Radio 4 Extra, and especially the comedy classics, The Navy Lark, Beyond Our Ken and The Men from the Ministry. Kids are getting the listening bug from programmes that were created more than 50 years ago. Brilliant. To them, these treasures from the archives sound as weird and fantastical as Harry Potter. As Mary Kalemkerian, Radio 4 Extra’s director of programming, has proved so pertinently in these straitened times, who needs vast amounts of money to be creative?
Her station, which began life in 2002 as Radio 7 (the BBC’s answer to the commercial words-only station One Word), has put on half a million listeners since it was relaunched last year as the archive arm of Radio 4. Another half million and it will catch up with the Radio 3 audience. On an unbelievably tiny budget, Kalemkerian has taken the best of what she and her researchers have discovered in the vast library of BBC classics, mixed them up with a few newly made programmes, and created a schedule designed to appeal to anyone who, like her, did their homework while listening to Children’s Hour. This week, for instance, you could have heard the inimitable Beryl Reid in a 1990s version of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, repeats from that epic 216-episode history series, This Sceptred Isle, and new versions of three short plays by the underappreciated dramatist Shelagh (A Taste of Honey) Delaney.
Kalemkerian retires this month, after a Sony award-studded career. She’s not a household name but should be because she has resurrected so much not out of reverence or misguided enthusiasm but out of passion and creative generosity.
Recycled Radio (Radio 4, Monday) promised to be a classic for the future. Miles Warde took on a theme, which in this first week was ‘failure’, and randomly cut-and-pasted monumental voices from the BBC to see what fun could be had with these apparently meaningless juxtapositions. One minute we heard David Attenborough on the demise of the dodo, the next Gordon Brown was lamenting the state of the economy. Jeremy Paxman ticked off an ignorant student on University Challenge, ‘Groaning won’t get you anywhere’ as Attenborough repeated, ‘The dodo is dead.’
It should have been funny, but it just never took off. The leaps and lurches as one thought, one voice intercut another were just not clever or thrilling enough. In the final couple of minutes, George W. Bush declared victory for the ‘forces of freedom’ over Saddam Hussein as Attenborough advised us, from the story of the dodo, ‘we might take a lesson from history’. It was like being hit with a blunderbuss.
I wish that Jim Al-Khalili had been on air when I was a child. I might then have discovered an enthusiasm for science. His Radio 4 series, The Life Scientific, does that clever thing, making a difficult subject more accessible not by talking down to us but by talking to scientists (and his definition of scientist covers anyone who tries to make sense of how the world works) who are so passionate about their subject that they entice us in, making what they know and work with something that it’s imperative we should know about too. When in the first programme he talked to the psychiatrist Professor Robin Murray, about the causes of schizophrenia, he began by asking us to think about the question, ‘What is schizophrenia?’ Is it a brain disease? Al-Khalili is now not so sure. There’s new evidence about its social causes that makes it less clear that it’s to do with brain chemistry.
By now I’m hooked and want to hear more, even though I have stuff to do. ‘You’ve changed your mind,’ he suggests to Professor Murray. ‘What does that feel like?’ Murray replies, ‘It’s exciting to do a study and you expect to find something, but then your pet theory is not confirmed.’ Al-Khalili reminds me a bit of Cliff Morgan and that Saturday-morning magazine Sport on 4 that I used to love because Morgan always succeeded in making me stay tuned, even when he was talking about football. He adds that human touch, that motivating force.
On Radio 2, Sally Boazman took us back to the 1960s, to the burning of bras and that moment when singer-songwriters such as Sandy Denny and Grace Slick fronted bands like Fairport Convention and Jefferson Airplane. The commentary on When Rock Chicks Ruled (Monday night, produced by Carmela DiClemente) was a bit over-the-top. Did the voices of Denny, Slick and co. really help to make sense of the cultural confusions of that decade? But who cares. ‘Who knows where the time goes,’ sang Denny in that voice which is so pure at the centre and yet hazy round the edges. It could have been yesterday.
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