The changes to the Radio 4 schedule have been in operation for a couple of weeks. Have they made any difference? The extra 15 minutes added to the lunchtime news programme, The World At One, has had the knock-on effect of squeezing the afternoon. Do we need another 15 minutes of current affairs analysis? After all, we already have three hours first thing in the morning, 45 minutes last thing at night after the ten o’clock news, with another hour in the middle at five.
The problem with extending news programmes at a time of budget cuts is that the only way you can fill the extra minutes is to add extra interviews. Anything else would cost too much money. There are just too few resources for in-depth coverage of world events. Where now are the foreign ‘stringers’, who once were paid a small retainer to provide the news network with stories from the inside?
On Monday the only difference to the one o’clock slot was that there were more interviews, mostly by phone. Martha Kearney, the main presenter, did a valiant job of conducting three interviews about the government’s plans to improve the conditions of the housing market for first-time buyers. An appropriate range of opinions was sought from a property developer with a conscience, a spokesperson from Shelter, and the Communities Minister Eric Pickles. But Kearney had to talk to them separately, person-by-person. No real discussion or teasing out of the issues was possible. This does not make for very interesting radio, no matter how highly tuned and perspicacious the interviewer.
There were only two opportunities to look beyond the UK’s problems as Hugh Sykes reported from Tahrir Square on the protests against the unelected military regime in Egypt and Fergal Keane spoke from Cambodia, where three former members of the Pol Pot regime are on trial, defending their actions in those terrible years of the Khmer Rouge. Sykes has been reporting on the Arab Spring since it began; he’s not just flown in to witness the latest repression of political demands. But he was given so little time to develop his story, just a few minutes, that we heard only one voice from the square.
The daily menu at one is beginning to look like a magazine with only one kind of feature. Thumping music and clever graphics — Newsnight’s answer to accusations of dullness — will not work on radio. What’s needed is for the editorial team to sit down and listen day-by-day to the full 45 minutes; not just the single items. Only then will they notice just how monotone the programme has become. We need more colour, more variety of presentation, content, approach, especially on a damp and foggy Monday in November.
As part of Radio 3’s celebration of the Symphony, the Sunday-night feature this week was a repeat of a programme I missed when it was first broadcast in 2006. In Shostakovich: A Journey into Light (produced by Jeremy Evans) the Radio 3 presenter Stephen Johnson travelled to Moscow and St Petersburg in search of an answer to the puzzle of why this Russian composer’s bleak music should be such a consolation. Johnson has suffered three periods of severe clinical depression and through all of them he has found in Shostakovich a way out of the darkness, a solace in times of deep pain.
In St Petersburg Johnson talked to an 85-year-old clarinettist who played in the debut of the Leningrad Symphony, which took place on 9 August 1942, in the midst of Hitler’s siege. The players were so weak with hunger that the first rehearsal lasted for only 15–20 minutes. The wind players no longer had the strength to ‘hold’ their lips in the correct position. But they kept on practising, longer and longer each day, until they were ready for the performance.
Critics now love to argue whether Shostakovich was writing the music against Hitler or against Stalin (he infamously wrote articles in support of the Communist party), but as Johnson remarked, ‘It’s a bit like arguing over the colour of a lifebelt.’ What matters is that the audience at the time were ‘delighted and astounded’ that such music could come out of such horror. One woman presented the conductor with a bunch of flowers at the end; flowers from the heart of terror. ‘It was wonderful,’ the clarinettist recalled, in tears.
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