When did you last hear something on the TV that was so true, so direct, so resonant that it keeps popping back into your mind? If you’re anything like me you’ll have a struggle to remember anything.
When did you last hear something on the TV that was so true, so direct, so resonant that it keeps popping back into your mind? If you’re anything like me you’ll have a struggle to remember anything. But change one word in that question from ‘TV’ to ‘radio’ and you might well be faced with another problem: too many moments of positive connection. On the Today programme last week, Captain Sully Sullenberger, the pilot who miraculously landed his US Airways plane on to the Hudson River, saving 155 people from certain death, gave extraordinary witness of his character. What struck me was not so much his calm, measured reflection on what happened that day but his understanding of how he had managed to react with such cool-headed precision. He said he felt fortunate that he had found his passion early on. He cared about his work. He cared a lot. He was willing to ‘work very hard at becoming expert at it’. ‘I never thought I would be tested like this,’ he told us, but he knew as his professional responsibility ‘I had to remain vigilant, never knowing whether I would be tested in this way or not’.
The interview sparked a discussion later in the week with Alexandra Shackleton, the granddaughter of the Antarctic explorer, and the defence correspondent Robert Fox on what it is to be a hero. Neither would accept that in our post-chivalric times we might need to change our understanding of the word. Both believed it should be distinguished from courage and used only when someone has by conscious choice put themselves in a position of extreme danger for someone else. Shackleton thought it ridiculous that a young child had been hailed as a hero for calling an ambulance after discovering their mother unconscious from an epileptic fit. This is not heroism, she claimed. I wonder. Her grandfather’s dangers were all of his own making; he chose to be an explorer. That child has had to learn very young a level of responsibility and self-denial many adults would shy away from.
On Broadcasting House on Sunday (edited by Joanna Carr) we heard of the quiet heroism of Cyrus Thatcher, a young rifleman who before going off to serve in Afghanistan left a letter for his family. The letter was discovered by his brother on the day before Cyrus was buried after being killed in a roadside explosion. ‘You can read this,’ he writes, ‘and hopefully you will all get through.’ He doesn’t want anyone to cry or mourn him. Rather he has written his letter to inspire his friends and family to ‘fulfil a dream and at the end of it look at what you have done and feel the accomplishment’. To write this at 19, to look death straight in the eye and not be afraid, and to want to share this insight with those whom you love, shows rare quality. Cyrus’s words were so cleverly interwoven with the thoughts of his mother as she read what he had written they had real impact without being at all mawkish.
I almost missed Baroque and Roll last Tuesday, in spite of the incessant trailers on Radio Four, because I thought I knew all I ever needed to know about Pete Townshend and The Who. But it was on at lunchtime and I caught it while heating up my soup, or rather it caught me. ‘It went straight into my body and has stayed there ever since,’ was how Townshend described hearing Purcell’s incidental music to The Gordian Knot Unty’d for the first time. Cut to the darkest, most dramatic section of Purcell’s music and you could see exactly what he meant — and how it had influenced him. A rare gem of a programme — produced by James Hale.
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