Stuck in a traffic jam on an icy road I caught most of Midweek (Radio Four, Wednesdays), and was forced by the complete standstill and the sense of white stillness beyond the car window to really listen to what was being said. Libby Purves’s guests included David Attenborough, who will shortly be donning the mantle of Alistair Cooke to take on the Friday-evening monologue. He’ll not be reporting on the state of America, but rather on the condition of the natural world, and judging from his conversation with Libby Purves it will be vintage radio. She was impelled to ask him, after looking back on the archive footage of his programmes for TV, ‘Does wildlife make you happy?’ To which Attenborough replied, ‘Yes…ummm…I think so,’ pausing for a moment to give himself time to think through the real meaning of the question. ‘Happy is not quite the right word. But then I don’t know what the right word is.’
Attenborough recalled a moment in the Australian outback, sitting beside a billabong at dawn and watching the egrets, ducks, crocodiles all busy going about their business and yet knowing that he had absolutely no part in this natural world. ‘There’s an extraordinary feeling of contentment,’ he concluded. To which Purves, still seeking an answer to her original question, replied, ‘Yes. There’s a kind of consolation in that, isn’t there?’
‘Consolation,’ repeated Attenborough. ‘That’s the word I want. There’s a consolation in times of personal trouble. A huge consolation.’
Attenborough has probably spent more hours watching wildlife than any of us; Purves knows and loves radio. Between them they conjured up one of those rare moments on air when you feel as though you’re eavesdropping on a truly meaningful conversation, rather than being fed a diet of overheated chit-chat or green-room gossip.
On the World Service this week (Monday) Lucy Ash reported on a radically different approach to prison sentencing being pioneered in Norway. A group of 115 specially selected prisoners who have all committed really serious crimes have been brought together on a small island in the middle of Oslo fiord to live and work in an eco-prison, eating only what they can grow (and catch). The philosophy behind this rehabilitation programme is that if you can learn how to respect nature, it will help you to respect yourself.
Fresh Start took us round the world looking at innovative ways in which, instead of being locked away, prisoners are brought into contact with the natural world. In Kansas, inmates work on a ranch learning how to tame mustangs brought in from the wild; at a ‘campfire jail’ in western Australia aboriginal prisoners are taken out to the billabong to paint the natural world in front of them. It helps them to regain ‘a sense of perspective’, we were told, and ‘connects them with their land and their history’. It is, you might say, an experiment in consolation.
Radio 1Xtra also took a look at the prison system this week, but from the perspective of young offenders, sometimes as young as ten. Britain is the only country in Western Europe prepared to convict such young children, and the problem is having sentenced them what then should you do with them? A conventional prison is hardly the right place for a child who has not yet left primary school. Izzy Fairbairn on Locked Out (Wednesday) talked to Martin Narey, who used to be head of the HM Prison Service but is now chief executive of Barnardo’s, the children’s charity. Through his first career he became critically aware that most prisoners come from a background of care homes and broken families.
There are schemes to give young people training and to encourage them into employment. But not enough. ‘Why not?’ asked Fairbairn. It costs only £9,000 to put one young person through a one-year package of training and short-term employment (in the hope this will give them enough confidence to develop their first cv), whereas a place in the care of the state will cost at least £35,000 per annum.
Locked Out had real impact because Fairbairn also gave the offenders an opportunity to talk. She asked them how they would punish those who perpetrated crimes against other people. They wanted more youth clubs, more football pitches, more ‘attention’, the single thing most lacking in their childhoods.
All this talk was set against a soundtrack gleaned from the hip-hop, drum-and-bass and garage archives; a thumping beat fuelled by lyrics about going to prison or getting out. Locked Out wasn’t made in the Radio Four ‘style’ but it was so well done it should have gone out on the main earth-bound station because it’s the community at large that needs to listen and resolve to reduce the numbers of children falling off the education system conveyor-belt.
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