It’s so unnerving, knowing there are going to be two big surprises tomorrow night (2 January) on The Archers, but having no idea what’s in store.
It’s so unnerving, knowing there are going to be two big surprises tomorrow night (2 January) on The Archers, but having no idea what’s in store. Experience warns me that it’s not going to be pleasant. But who’s for the chop? The press release says one half of the double-whammy will play out an existing storyline. That’s easy. I bet we’ll find out that Ian is the secret father of Helen’s baby. For the uninitiated, he’s gay but ages ago wanted to be a sperm donor. Meanwhile, Helen opted for IVF having given up on men — except for her pal Ian. He’s been decorating the nursery ready for the baby’s imminent arrival. Surely that’s a dead giveaway. He must be the father, without knowing it.
This could be the touchy-feely twister. But what about the second shocker? I daren’t predict what it might be, having been so wrong about the cricket. (I should have known that the England team would collapse after a display of such swaggering confidence. It’s just not British to be so cocky.) But, contrary to the sedate image of the rural soap, past form suggests there’s likely to be a violent, tragic and very noisy ending to tomorrow night’s anniversary episode. A huge fire in the village hall as the panto is in full swing? A big bust-up in the Bull? Some ghastly accident on ice to puncture the festive idyll at Lower Loxley?
What a weird way to celebrate 60 years of the radio soap (it’s now the longest-running soap on any station anywhere in the world), terrifying five million loyal listeners with such intimations of mortality. Nothing will keep me from being tuned in for the full half-hour — but I’ll have to make sure there’s a stout shot of brandy at the ready as an antidote.
It’s 400 years since the publication of the King James Bible, an anniversary that Radio 4 will be celebrating rather more sedately with a three-part discussion of how it was created, led by James Naughtie, and a day of readings next Sunday (9 January). Nothing like the King James will ever be created again in this world of internet communication. Back in the first decade of the 17th century, the scholars behind the translation had to beaver away in their separate colleges in London, Oxford and Cambridge, only meeting together at rare intervals. Everything had to be approved by committee — who, of course, could only check whether the translation was correct and appropriate by hearing it read aloud. This gives to the King James its wonderful accessibility, and its enduring power. The sentences could not be too convoluted, the rhythmic cadences were crucial to the meaning.
The readings have been organised in five sections like the hours of a monastic day. Only 28 passages can be fitted in, so let’s hope the day will be repeated throughout the year, an opportunity to recapture an aural tradition that was still widespread when I grew up but has been lost in just a decade or two. It’s the Bible which gave so many of us a love of language and of words being put together in such a way that they delight the ear as well as impress the heart.
As James Naughtie and his team of experts remind us, so much of our everyday discourse is peppered with phrases that come straight out of the Old and New Testaments, carved out of the language to describe historical happenings and eternal truths yet used to apply to immediate, personal travails. ‘Fly in the ointment’, ‘thorn in the flesh’, ‘apple of his eye’, and my favourite ‘lick the dust’ are all phrases that are so graphic, so purposeful, yet so economical. Reading them often is the best training for anyone who wants to communicate their message effectively — which, after all, was the mission behind the King James.
As the daughter of two Methodist preachers, the singer and pianist Nina Simone was schooled from an early age in the language, the discipline and the rhythms of the King James. A two-part biography on Radio 2, Feeling Good (Tuesday nights), presented by her daughter Simone, gives us a rich flavour of Nina’s extraordinary ability to shape a line; never a pause too long, or a note held beyond its natural length.
It’s moving, too, to hear the story behind her transition from a classical pianist of prodigious talent to the nightclubs of Manhattan. She was too black to fit into the Curtis Institute, or the Juilliard, and had to earn her living singing and playing in seedy bars, changing her name so that no one from her home town in North Carolina would track her down. Did we lose a great player of Bach? Or gain a jazz, gospel and blues diva? Hard to say, but the musical world now would be different without her fusion of superb artistry and furious agitprop. Once heard, her interpretation of ‘Strange Fruit’ cannot be erased.
Comments