Rewriting history

Twenty minutes is reckoned by psychologists to be the most that any of us can concentrate without the mind wandering, the legs becoming restless, the eyes gently closing, the head dropping slightly towards the chest. It’s also just about the time needed to serve a hall-full of people gin-and-tonics and tubs of ice cream, and to roll on the piano for the second-half concerto, ‘Heeeeeave-hooooo!’

The Proms are back on Radio Three for the summer season, and, with them, the nightly interval talks, rebranded in recent years with their own running title, Twenty Minutes, as if in celebration of the happenstance that necessity is in this case matched by perfect timing. The 20-minute interval talk has always been a staple of the Radio Three schedule, born of the need to fill the gaps in ‘live’ performances, or to create the illusion that what you are tuned in to is actually taking place as you listen. In September 1946, when the station was reopened after the war, V.S. Pritchett gave a talk on Gogol in the middle of a concert by the Paris Conservatoire, while listeners to a live broadcast from the People’s Palace in London (a concert conducted by those three giants of the scene — Adrian Boult, William Walton and the Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly) heard a selection of ‘Border Ballads’ in the interval, read by the inimitable John Laurie.

This week Twenty Minutes ranged from a short story by Rose Tremain to the far corners of the British Isles. Several played with one of the themes of this year’s Proms, Shakespeare: what inspired him and what in turn has been inspired by him. In ‘The Lady of the Loch’ (Tuesday evening) a band of Scottish historians visited St Serf’s island in the middle of Loch Leven to figure out the identity of the real Lady Macbeth.