Favoured few

The only good thing about being stuck in crawling traffic at 9 a.m. on Monday morning was that it gave me the rare chance to tune in to Andrew Marr’s Start the Week on Radio Four, and even better to listen to it full-on instead of with my attention half-drawn to a weekend’s worth of emails or the previous night’s washing-up. It’s years since I’ve heard a whole edition of the programme, having got tired of its relentless plugging of the latest books. Hype usually backfires on me as the more I hear about something the less I want to read it. There’s nothing worse than deflated anticipation. But the programme is an illustration of the immutability of Radio Four’s favoured few (those programmes which have survived any number of schedule upsets) and shows us why it’s achieved this status: by undergoing a total and brilliant makeover.

Thirty-seven years ago when it first went out on air, on 6 April 1970, it featured a discussion of pigeons (can this really be true?) and a cookery slot, aimed at all those housewives, left at home while their menfolk were out at work. The Radio Times billed it as an opportunity ‘to meet some of the people for whom this is a special week’. (Two new histories of the network by David Hendy and Simon Elmes, published in celebration of Radio Four’s 40 years, are stuffed full of such nostalgic details.) On Monday, Andrew Marr chaired a round-table discussion with a cast of heavy-hitting academics and writers who would, the Radio Four website promised, ‘set the cultural agenda’. Their concern was not so much to plug their books, as to talk about the ideas behind them. Listening while stuck on a dank and misty morning in the outer reaches of London gave me the weird sensation of the outside part of me being behind the wheel of my car while the inside bit of me was in a restaurant, dark and candlelit, wishing I was on that table over there where they were having such a fascinating conversation.