The death of Nick Clarke, The World at One, Any Questions and Round Britain Quiz presenter, jolted many commentators — and listeners — to bewail the loss of a news broadcaster noted for his courtesy, his integrity, his ability to ferret for ‘the truth’ without being provocative or volatile. It says a lot about how much the world of broadcasting, and news reporting in particular, has changed that these qualities are now deemed so unusual. This is not to denigrate Nick Clarke’s achievement — he was an endearing broadcaster, with a wonderful ‘radio’ voice that was bold and authoritative and yet also easy-on-the-ear. You felt that he was talking directly to you, not at you. I don’t think I ever heard him bellow down the microphone. He had no need. His manner and his quality of mind were such that his interviewees felt obliged to answer in kind — without subterfuge or persiflage.
So what has changed? Or rather what has changed on Radio Four news? Why is the Today programme such a torment to listen to? After about 15 minutes I find myself switching off, worn down by the hectoring tone and the pointlessness of so many of the interviews (the best bits are the five-minute sport or business slots, chats with people who have actually done something rather than merely having an opinion or supposition). The politicians themselves, and especially those in office, are often said to be responsible for this descent into bureaucratese, trained to be like managerial automatons with a learnt-by-rote spiel from which they are too frightened to digress in case they go off-message, or even worse reveal just how far from being in control of the situation they really are. But I’m not so sure the politicians are entirely to blame for this I’m-not-going-to-give-anything-away, Oh-yes-you-are, Oh-no-I’m-not style of interviewing. Nick Clarke did not engage with this kind of relentless battering. Nor does Shaun Ley or Robin Lustig.
Why, too, is there so little actual news on the News? Even Radio Two has longer hourly bulletins than Radio Four. It’s as if we cannot be trusted to hold more than a few bits of information in our heads at any one time, so better not bother us with an item from Lithuania at the same time as a story, say, from Liberia. As a listener, you can’t help feeling that you are being managed, fed what’s good for you (or all that you need to know) without being given the chance to judge for yourself.
It’s often, too, not ‘news’ as we formerly understood it, but speculation. Now that we can hear, watch, download ‘news’ almost as it happens, the news itself has changed, from being a factual, measured account of what’s gone on to hurried, often inept attempts to keep us up-to-the-moment with this new phenomenon called ‘rolling news’. Sometimes this means that the obituaries for a person’s life are begun even before they have breathed their last (I think the first time this happened was with Donald Dewar). And as the news ‘unfolds’ so the ‘story’ itself changes, as infamously and dangerously in the case of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell station in London.
It’s strange how our super-sophisticated technology and access to global information is making us more susceptible to rumour and superstition. It’s as if we are living in the Middle Ages, and subject to those millennarian scares that swept through the towns and villages, fed by pedlars and the human taste for tales of darkness to spice up our everyday lives.
Why, too, are we never brought up-to-date with consequences and outcomes? Whatever happened to Cambodia, for instance, last heard of in 1979 after the fall of the Khmer Rouge (or rather in 1984 after the success of the film The Killing Fields)? Sunday night’s Drama on 3 reminded us of those four years of Terror in which up to two million people died in Pol Pot’s ghastly ‘utopian’ experiment. But rather than a straight drama, The Violence of Silence was a cleverly woven tapestry of words, recorded in Phnom Penh and London (and directed by Kate Rowland).
The weft and warp was provided by Simon Armitage’s poetry (‘Does evil germinate? Does it bloom? Does it seep like gas through keyholes and under the doors of the poor’), over which was threaded the factual reports of those working on reconciliation projects, struggling to blanch the evil let loose by the Khmer Rouge as it rooted out all opposition (which to them meant anyone who wore spectacles and was thus literate and thoughtful and ‘useless’ economically), and a fictionalised family drama written by Marida Chheang and Sotheavy At. In fact, we discovered, the Khmer Rouge still ruled over some parts of Cambodia until the late 1990s, backed by the USA and China (against Vietnam). So why did Pol Pot and his comrades disappear from the news agenda as effectively as those Cambodians buried in unmarked graves?
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