It’s business as usual for the BBC’s radio stations. While the boardroom burns, the production teams are busy creating — weekloads of entertainment, information, erudition. The doomsayers love a crisis, and this latest disaster is a devil of a mess, but we should probably remember that the Corporation depends for its survival not on the superiority of its management techniques but on the continuing excellence of its programmes. Once that goes, we should be really worried.
Anyone doubting this should spend the afternoon with Simon Callow and his Tasting Notes programme on Classic FM (Sundays). Sponsored by Laithwaite’s Wine, the programme’s format obliges Callow to match each and every piece of music on his playlist with a suitably blended glass of wine. Why not open up a bottle of Sicilian red, aged in an American oak barrel, suggests Callow, as he slips into his CD player the Sanctus from Verdi’s Requiem? Even Callow sounds subdued by the commercialism, the banality of what he’s being paid to do, his plummy-voiced exuberance toned down almost to inaudibility.
Over on Radio 3 at the same time you could have heard Choral Evensong, live from Liverpool, swiftly followed by Aled Jones’s The Choir and the strange, exciting music of Yantra, a group of three singers who blend Bulgarian throat singing with south Indian ragas and English church music. Their first session singing together was for a Radio 3 Late Junction programme. Out of it came the weird and wonderful sound of the a cappella ‘The Bagpiper’, a Bulgarian folk tune given a shot of staccato basso profundo and wailing raga. Hearing it on the first day of winter, as the chilly night air drew in, was like receiving a shot of adrenaline. Not to everyone’s taste, for sure, but that’s what we pay for in the licence fee: the chance to hear something unexpected, not predictable, out of the ordinary.
On Saturday night, The Wire (Radio 3) took us on an experimental journey in sound and voices. Lizzie Mickery’s drama, Adventures of the Soul, was billed as ‘a contemporary ghost story’ but was just as much an exploration of our ideas about what happens to people when they die. Does the soul live on? If so, what happens when someone steals the identity of a dead person? Does the soul get lost, displaced, removed to Limbo? The spooky bits were created from actual recordings by Raymond Cass of what have become known as ‘original electronic voice phenomena’ (EVP). These ethereal, ghostly crackles, hums, whispers have intrigued the susceptible ever since the first days of crystal sets back in the 1900s. Are they generated by voices from the spirit world? Or are they simply static, stray electricity?
In Mickery’s play (directed by Melanie Harris), Carol, who’s not long separated from her husband, is living in her deceased father’s house. One morning an east European man comes to read her electricity meter, but disappears, simply vanishing from the cellar, without a sound. Carol begins to hear voices, or what she imagines to be voices, although she can’t make out what they’re saying. Is her father trying to make contact? In just an hour, Mickery touched upon the strange workings of sorrow upon the mind, our fears about what lies beyond death, the problems of migrant workers, living below the radar.
On Saturday morning on 4, Sarfraz Manzoor gave us a blast of Bollywood as he celebrated the 70th birthday of the Indian film star Amitabh Bachchan, whose sheer screen presence is like crossing Marlon Brando with Robert De Niro and Clint Eastwood. Bachchan, known to his fans as the Big B, carries off a convincing villain just as easily as an all-singing, all-dancing romantic lead. How does he do it? Probably because he’s ‘infuriatingly humble’, says Manzoor.
Bachchan doesn’t pay attention to his fame, not really taking in how much he has meant to so many people both in India and far beyond. Manzoor remembers as a child growing up in Luton in the 1970s how his father would rent a VHS player so they could see the latest Bachchan movie. It was a chance to stay in touch with the language, and also with Asian exuberance, its colours, its spirit.
In the afternoon we were swept off to Sweden for the first of a series of dramas starring Martin Beck, the Scandinavian detective invented in the 1960s by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. Beck has so far not made it on to UK television, perhaps because nothing much happens. A body is found but days, weeks, months pass with barely a clue discovered, a lead investigated. There’s also very little blood and not much violence. It’s all very humdrum. Yet in that very ordinariness Beck (played by Steven Mackintosh with every glum stereotype in place) and his sidekick Kollberg (a chocaholic Neil Pearson) draw you in, clue by clue, at least in this adaptation by Jennifer Howarth (directed by Sara Davies).
I was soon wandering the snow-swept streets of Stockholm as Beck and Kollberg slowly, slowly circle in on the killer of young Roseanna.
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