Even the great Alan Bennett sounded out of synch with the times as he read from his new short story ‘The Shielding of Mrs Forbes’ for this week’s Book at Bedtime (Radio 4).
Even the great Alan Bennett sounded out of synch with the times as he read from his new short story ‘The Shielding of Mrs Forbes’ for this week’s Book at Bedtime (Radio 4). His peculiarly English brand of wit, mordant, slightly sinister, a touch supercilious, grated on the nerves. No one else on radio can put together a character with such economy and yet such excruciating vividness. But in the light of the events of last week his characters sounded a bit jaded, a little worn out, too caricatured to gather us in as listeners.
What we needed instead, perhaps, was something more bracing and unexpected. Not 15 minutes in the company of the comforting but too knowing Bennett, but a new voice, coming straight from the heart of the communities most affected by what has happened.
Such an extraordinary shift has occurred in the social contract that it’s impossible to make valid immediate comment. All that can be done at the moment is to observe, to bear witness. But of course the panel on Any Questions (Radio 4) is deliberately primed to comment, opine, provoke. Perhaps when the programme began, more than 50 years ago, to comment was also to illumine. It’s possible. Politicians may then have had a broader understanding of their rightful place in the big scheme of things. No such luck now when so few of them have ever done anything else except breed political aspirations and dispense their own particular brand of socio-political wisdom.
Friday night’s programme gave us the worst kind of panel, chaired as always by Jonathan Dimbleby. As Sayeeda Warsi, co-chairman of the Conservative party, and Harriet Harman, deputy leader of the Labour party, slugged it out over police numbers, the criminal justice system, standards of parenting, unemployment and the cruel game of chance and hope, their increasingly dogmatic exchanges were given extra fuel by the provocative journalist Peter Hitchens. Only Julia Unwin, who directs the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (a charity which ‘seeks to understand the root causes of social problems’), spoke with the calmness born of the realisation that what’s going on is far bigger than any of us can hope to understand, at least for a while until the embers have burnt themselves out.
By some strange coincidence one of the questioners on that programme was Mrs Sentamu, whose husband the Archbishop of York had appeared the night before on the panel for the television version, Question Time, chaired by the other Dimbleby, David. It would have been intriguing if the Archbishop had been obliged to reply on air to his wife, who asked whether there is an underlying ‘moral deficit’ in our society, and whether this was the cause of last week’s public disorder.
Instead Harriet Harman succumbed to the temptation to lay the blame for the crisis on the current coalition government, and its prospective cuts to the education maintenance allowance and other benefits for the young and deprived. When we were in government, she insisted, talking about the Blair years, the number of kids from Camberwell who studied at university doubled. There is, however, a much more telling statistic, which Harman failed to highlight, and which we should all be really troubled about. Almost one third of teenagers leave school, in Camberwell and elsewhere, with inadequate literacy and numeracy skills.
In another strange reversal of accepted truths, the TV version actually gave us a much richer understanding of the problems we are facing, and so left a hopeful, rather than a bitter, taste. It was reassuring, somehow, to see the studio audience in the flesh, not just to hear them harrumphing in the background as you do on Radio 4, and to realise that they appeared to represent many different walks of life and points of view. Some of them were predictable in their views, some overheated, but many were full of the wisdom of lived experience. The panel, too, which was represented by three of the four estates of the realm (the Archbishop, our own editor and Lord (John) Prescott), was for the most part anxious not to appear too dogmatic or combative — with the exception of Lord Prescott who as usual spoke first and thought later.
There was a dawning sense on the programme that a gradual peeling away of the facts is required if we want to get to the heart of what happened. This was perhaps engendered by the presence on the panel of the formidable but keenly perceptive Camilla Batmanghelidjh, founder of the charitable foundation Kids Company. She spoke with extreme caution, unwilling to pass judgment, yet always acting as an advocate for those young people she sees every day as part of her work.
Watching, looking, observing the demeanour of the questioners and the responses of the panellists, was on this occasion far more instructive and insightful than listening. For once, radio lost out to TV.
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