‘We all need to rendezvous every week. It keeps us all as a community,’ said Jane Copsey on the In Touch anniversary programme (produced by Cheryl Gabriel). The Radio 4 magazine for the blind and partially sighted has been around for 50 years dispensing advice and encouragement, hope and cheer. Nowadays it’s been cut to just 20 minutes, but at least it’s still in its Tuesday-evening slot, where it’s been scheduled for decades.
Copsey was arguing for the survival of the programme, even though there’s now an online equivalent, called Ouch! Podcasts, downloads, internet chatrooms can all replicate radio but not the experience of listening in as a community, the feeling that, as you are hearing about how someone is coping with the onset of macular degeneration or the fear of a cataract operation, so there will be thousands of others also benefiting from this shared knowledge, shared understanding, shared optimism. One of Jane Copsey’s first reports for the programme almost 40 years ago was recorded from the back of a tandem cycling through Richmond Park. Peter White, the current presenter who’s been blind since birth, heard it and was inspired to believe that anything is possible, no matter your disability.
It’s hard to define or evaluate this notion of ‘a community of listeners’; worryingly so. As the latest round of cuts to the BBC was announced by the director-general Mark Thompson last week, in response to the global economic crisis and the freezing of the licence fee, Radio 4 looks pretty safe. The cuts are being felt elsewhere (especially on local radio, which is another battle to be told). But minority-interest programmes like In Touch are an endangered species, and will always need defending.
Not so many years ago there was a sister programme, Does He Take Sugar? (whose title betrays its origins before the gender battles of the 1970s). That programme was cut because it was thought to be too narrow, too limited in scope, too paternalistic. In fact, the powers-that-be who have to make these decisions are often too busy to hear such programmes on a regular basis, and so they find it hard to appreciate that anyone and everyone can listen and enjoy them. How valuable it is to be able to hear what it feels like to negotiate the world as a blind person, and to hear this week-on-week, and not just as a one-off documentary. Who knows when you yourself might need to draw on this reservoir of information and insight, built up over years of having listened in each week?
All the presenters and most of the production team of the programme are blind or partially sighted. They rely on Braille, both to type up their scripts and then to read from them. They know just how much harder they have to work than the fully sighted (they might know Braille but it’s another story being able to read from it fluently at 90 words a minute). But they also know how much it is possible to overcome, and are keen to share this conviction, this motivation.
Community may be vulnerable to downsizing, lean thinking and the kind of casual violence we witnessed during the August riots, but it’s often cheeringly resilient. Alan Dein began his new series of Lives in a Landscape (produced by Sara Jane Hall) on Monday morning by visiting Hackney, London E8, in the days after the looting and burning. He met Siva Kandiah, whose convenience store was ransacked and destroyed. Siva, a Tamil refugee from Sri Lanka, lost everything that he had built up over the previous 11 years; his whole shop destroyed in a single night. He had no contents insurance because, after a few years of paying out and never needing it, he assumed it was an unnecessary overhead. On the day the riots began he shut up shop early at 2.30 p.m. and went home. ‘My shop is safe,’ he thought, ‘because my shop is local. My people know me.’ That evening, live on TV, he saw his shop being attacked and rushed out to try to save it. The police wouldn’t allow him anywhere near the scene; nor were they doing anything to stop the looters.
A week later, though, Clarence Road was shut off to traffic for another reason: an afternoon tea party celebrating the local community and reasserting its values. A website was set up to save Siva’s store — by a former customer who now lives in New York — which raised £11,500 in fewer than 24 hours. Many of his regular customers gave him envelopes stuffed with notes, wanting him to reopen as soon as possible.
Alan Dein’s programmes are like portraits in sound, giving voice to Siva and to his neighbour, who runs a Caribbean restaurant. Her business suffered no physical damage, but she’s now taking only about £30 a day. ‘It’s gone so dead,’ she said. ‘People have gone. People are afraid of the road.’
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