A few weeks ago I was in Chichester, reviewing a fine revival of Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables and suddenly experienced a great ache of nostalgia for the period immediately before my birth.
A few weeks ago I was in Chichester, reviewing a fine revival of Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables and suddenly experienced a great ache of nostalgia for the period immediately before my birth. Rattigan’s play, first staged in 1954, portrays a post-second-world-war England in which emotions are essentially private, polite small talk largely prevails, and upper lips are worn stiff — in public at least.
Of course, the dramatist was in many ways critical of this. Yet though Separate Tables undoubtedly depicts a world where small-mindedness and meanness of spirit can flourish, its final scenes present a moving triumph for English decency, compassion, courage and restraint.
In the interval I confessed to my nostalgia for the buttoned-up times Rattigan depicts to a colleague and he told me I was bonkers. Living in the Fifties would have been hell, he said — rotten food, endless class snobbery, primitive dentistry and a grim, drab desire to conform.
Yet the older I grow, the more I miss the stoicism of those times, the innate sense of decorum and dignity. The vulgarity and emotional incontinence of 21st-century Britain, where ignorance is worn like a badge of pride, and so many seem willing to wash their dirty laundry in public, especially if the price is right, hardly seem an improvement.
All of which perhaps explains the fury of my reaction when I heard that Chris Evans was to replace Terry Wogan on the breakfast programme on Radio Two. Yes, I know Wogan is Irish, but he’s worked here for most of his career and received a knighthood from the Queen. He’s one of our greatest national treasures and the relaxed wit and whimsy of his broadcasting is an unflagging delight. When you listen to him, you feel you are in the company of an eminently civilised, splendidly entertaining friend.
Chris Evans in comparison is New Britain writ large. Though time has worn off some of his rougher edges, and he no longer spends much of his time going on benders with Gazza, there is a brash, self-regarding egotism about him that I find repellent. The idea of waking up to his inane babble is a nightmare. But Evans certainly isn’t in the same league of awfulness as Jonathan Ross, whose continuing employment by the BBC, as the saintly Charles Moore never tires of pointing out as he pluckily withholds his licence fee, is an affront to us all. I stopped listening to Ross when he started talking about anal sex one Saturday morning and I almost drove off the road as I ferried my then 11-year-old son to a music lesson.
But there are reminders of a more salubrious age on Radio Two where old values and classic standards, moral as well as musical, still prevail.
Is there anything more heartening than Brian Matthew, now in his eighties, welcoming us ‘avids’ to Sounds of the Sixties on Saturday mornings, which under the helm of a new producer has taken on a brighter sparkle, full of unfamiliar tracks and fascinating information? I remember Matthew from his Saturday Club days in the early Sixties, and even then he sounded like a kindly uncle rather than a thrusting hipster. His refusal to kowtow to the winds of changing fashion, and to abandon his plummy voice in favour of something more fashionably classless, strikes me as entirely admirable.
Bob Harris still caters for old hippies like me, as well as trying to keep us up to date with newer stuff on his Saturday night into Sunday morning programme. There’s no one better at creating a late-night mellow vibe and an atmosphere of relaxed enthusiasm, and his show brings back happy memories of listening to him in my study after lights out at boarding school accompanied by tepid coffee and Players’ Number Six.
Sunday evenings offer an especially good run of Radio Two shows. Paul O’Grady, the former Lily Savage, is proving a splendidly warm and welcoming newcomer with a superbly eclectic playlist and, though I mourn the departure of Malcolm Laycock, Clare Teal is doing a great job with big band jazz, dance and swing on Sunday nights. And while his fey whimsicality is sometimes tiresome, I’ve developed a surprisingly soft spot for Alan Titchmarsh. His programme mixes show tunes with light classics, brass bands with novelty numbers. Last Sunday we had a peculiarly ghastly little girl singing A.A. Milne’s ‘Vespers’, in which we discover Christopher Robin saying his prayers. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Listening to these programmes on Radio Two makes the BBC seem once again like a benign and comforting companion rather than an arrogant monolith of the modish, the dumbed-down and the politically correct.
Charles Spencer is theatre critic of the Daily Telegraph.
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