Kate Chisholm

The amazing story of the blind photographer

Plus: David Tennant’s heroic debut on Just a Minute

Perhaps the news that Radio 5 live will be the only BBC station (under the new broadcasting rights agreements) to broadcast ‘live’ golf will ensure that its audience stays above the six million listeners now dreamt of by its controller Jonathan Wall as the magic number he needs for the network to stay buoyant. (Figures announced last week showed that 5 live has lost 10 per cent of its audience after a radical shake-up of its presenting team, losing especially Shelagh Fogarty and Victoria Derbyshire, which had the knock-on effect of turning it even more blokey.) At first the idea sounds absurd —golf on radio. It’s such a slow-paced game, I’ve never been able to watch it on TV, let alone bothered to find out what’s happening at Fort Augustus or Turnberry by tuning in on air. But, then, listening to cricket is pretty off-the-wall, let alone football, tennis, rugby, swimming, horse racing. The art of radio commentating has nothing to do with what’s being commented on and everything to do with the ability to tell stories, to give us in words what we cannot ourselves see, by the commentator’s ability to see what’s going on behind the flight of a ball, the goalkeeper’s save, the tennis player’s meltdown.

On Radio 4 this week we heard from a blind photographer, Rosita McKenzie. Yes, she takes photographs without being able to see what she is taking. On An Image of Sound (produced by Andrew Dawes) she told us how she does it and it was magically convincing.

‘Close your eyes, concentrate more on the sounds and the atmosphere,’ she said as she stood close to Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland trying to envisage the grandeur of the snaking Roman wall, the bleakness of the landscape, the sense of history in that place.

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