It must be a fix, surely? The list of tunes voted online ‘by the nation’ as the eight favourite ‘discs’ we would like to be marooned with on a desert island is the dullest, most unoriginal, least controversial combination we listeners could possibly have come up with.
It must be a fix, surely? The list of tunes voted online ‘by the nation’ as the eight favourite ‘discs’ we would like to be marooned with on a desert island is the dullest, most unoriginal, least controversial combination we listeners could possibly have come up with. The organisers of the poll as they studied its results must have been rueing the meeting when they came up with the idea of turning Desert Island Discs into an internet quiz. If the list is a reflection of Radio 4’s listener profile, then it’s scarcely changed since DID began 60 years ago. Put it another way and it’s a salutary revelation of just how limited the reach of Radio 4 across the country really is.
Vaughan Williams comes out top of the poll with his ‘The Lark Ascending’. It’s a beautiful tune, haunting, pastoral, poignant, but headily nostalgic and quintessentially belonging to the home counties, not even to Britain as a whole. Elgar is voted on twice (for Nimrod and for the Cello Concerto), followed by Holst (The Planets) and Handel (German originally, but claimed by the English as their own), with a touch of Beethoven (the ‘Ode to Joy’). Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and a Pink Floyd number I’d never even heard of, ‘Comfortably Numb’, are the ‘rock’ representatives — classic midlife-crisis choices by suit-and-tie representatives of the middle classes. Where are the ‘foreign’ composers? The bands from Jamaica or Jakarta? The sense of danger, of risk, of stretching the imagination to take in all those World Music artists we are now supposed to be so closely acquainted with?
This poll could be the death-knell of DID; a sign that its days are numbered. We need waking up — if Radio 4 is to fulfil its Reithian remit to inform and educate, as well as entertain. Why, for instance, did Handel end up in London? Because at the time the best singers in Europe were all flocking to the British capital where the audiences were more appreciative of their talent, their ‘different’ European sound, their alternative musical heritage. Instead of DID, perhaps we need a regular dose of eight tracks chosen by the ambassadors to the Court of St James’s; eight tracks that would represent the best of their country’s musical (and poetic) output?
Fresh winds are blowing through Radio 4 under the aegis of its new Controller. This week many programmes have been attempting to draw together what we so far know about the uprisings in the Arab states. Can it truly be described as an ‘Arab Spring’, a ‘Jasmine Revolution’? Are there connections between what happened in Tunisia at the turn of the year and what’s now going on in Libya, in Syria and Yemen? The special correspondents, Hugh Sykes, Andrew Hosken, Owen Bennett-Jones, who’ve been living in these states for the past few months, have witnessed how daily life is being affected by what’s going on and are well placed to feel the mood. They can spot those telling details, such as the way ‘Facebook’ is the most frequent graffiti on the walls around Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
On the World Service this week, the documentary slot, Heart and Soul, which explores ‘different experiences of spirituality’ from across the globe, took us to Vietnam and the legacy of the violent jungle war that ended almost 40 years ago. Even now its people bear the scars of the invasion by foreign troops, of the civil war, the deaths of millions. Two thirds of its population is under 30, the older generations wiped out by the violence. This itself is a horrifying statistic, a degree of damage that will take decades more to repair. But added to this is the spiritual dimension of that horror. Millions of the war dead were buried in unmarked graves, far from home and family. Their spirits, the Vietnamese believe, are forced to wander through eternity, hungry, lonely, cut off from what they know, and very angry.
In Wandering Souls, Cathy Fitzgerald talked to survivors of the war who are still being haunted by their long-dead relatives. The life of one woman she met, a confident, successful businesswoman, is being blighted by the spirit of her elder brother, missing in action, who repeatedly wakes her in the night with his cries of agony. She not only hears him but also shares his pain, clawing at her chest with her fingernails until she bleeds as she undergoes with his spirit the terror of his death in the jungle.
Fitzgerald talked to an American anthropologist who has been studying the Vietnamese worship of their ancestors and the individual stories of sons, sisters, brothers and wives who are now being terrorised by those who died too young, and too painfully. Are these hauntings psychosomatic? she asked.
‘It’s rather demeaning for an outsider to suggest it’s not really happening,’ replied the anthropologist. ‘And that the Vietnamese are just not smart enough to realise this.’ There are things over which the intellect has no control.
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