Imagine a small room, no windows, institutional cream on the walls. Bare of all decoration except for a circle of cheap chairs and the most basic of recording equipment. A gathering of people squeeze into the space — three young men, a strained-looking couple, an official-looking woman with clipboard and notes, a man in jeans with an earpiece. There’s not much room for manoeuvre, or to opt out of what’s going on.
This is Prison Radio, an outreach scheme that began in HMP Feltham for young offenders in the early 1990s. Two radio producers wanted to do something about the high rates of self-harm, and of reoffending. Why not give prisoners the chance to learn new skills at the same time as providing them with a means to share experience, consolation, communication? It was a no-brainer. The scheme spread, and at Brixton high-security unit it has proved so successful that Electric Radio Brixton has been winning prizes every year at the Sony Radio Awards.
On the Today programme last Saturday morning (Radio 4) we heard a snippet from their latest venture, working with Victim Support to develop listening skills, the use of the imagination. What was said — and the way it was said — just grabbed you by the ear. It made you stop what you were doing and sit down to listen, really listen.
A couple, Ray and Violet Donovan, whose son Chris had been murdered, brutally, for no reason whatever except that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, told the story of what had happened.
First the husband sketched bluntly, graphically, devastatingly the chance by which his son walked up that hill on that night just as a gang of 14 youths were coming in the opposite direction. Then his wife told us what the last ten years have been like for her. ‘You just want to destroy them. To kill them … But I had to deal with it,’ she said, still choking up. ‘I had to learn to forgive …It’s an everyday choice …and I didn’t want to do it.’
The prisoners in the room were asked to give their reactions to what they had just heard. ‘I feel angry for Ray and Vi. I can see they’re still going through the emotions,’ said one. Another admitted, ‘I couldn’t imagine how they could sit down and talk to us like this.’
But the most electrifying moment came when Ray said to the prisoners, sitting face-to-face, eye-to-eye, barely three feet away, ‘You’re very brave men.’ Very quietly, almost inaudibly, you could hear Vi saying, ‘Yes.’
Ray continues, ‘It takes a lot of guts …in a small room like this.’ Again Vi says, ‘Yes,’ so quietly, effortfully.
The night before the programme had been broadcast to every prisoner in the almost 30 prisons that now belong to National Prison Radio. Cell by cell those voices could be heard, those feelings reimagined.
Violent abuse, crimes against the person were also the focus of this week’s Asian Network Reports Special. The comedian Shazia Mirza talked to Asian women who had been threatened because of their work in supporting other women who have been abused, assaulted, attacked simply because of what they do, the choices they have made. With some it’s a refusal to go along with an arranged marriage; others are challenging their families and neighbours by working in professions deemed by strict Muslims to be unsuitable for women, or are daring to look at the Koran for themselves to rediscover an Islamic faith that welcomes female participation.
‘I’m laughing about it,’ says ‘Renu’, who has to check her car every day to make sure that the tyres have not been slashed, the mirrors smashed, a bomb placed underneath, ‘otherwise you can’t function.’ Just talking to Mirza was dangerous for her, let alone allowing her voice to be heard on air.
The Asian Network has had much less support than 6 Music to ensure its survival in this latest round of savage cuts at the BBC. No celebrity campaign. No flood of tweets. The documentaries it produces are very different in tone from File on 4. Less rigorous, perhaps; not quite so polished. But it’s doubtful whether Renu or the other women interviewed by Mirza would have agreed to speak to anyone from Radio 4 on a subject that is now very much part of the fabric of life in Britain today.
Over on 3, we’ve been immersed in Schubert for the past week. You may, by the time you read this, have become thoroughly bored by his music, his life, his story. But as I write I’m still enthralled. It’s just so refreshing to know that whenever you switch on to 3 it will be Schubert. No one else. No other musical palette. That single focus is like going on retreat, cleansing the mind of all the clutter, the bombardment of images, facts, gossip. The imagination breaks free. Thoughts come in. New insights. Old memories. A week like no other.
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