The big reveal

Much ado about Radio 4’s latest venture into the new smart world of aural selfies. Reaction Time, on Thursday mornings, is a compilation of mini-recordings by listeners telling us about their lives (overseen by Kevin Core). No tape machine needed or sound recordist. Just a listener with a smartphone and a thick skin. For these stories are not the kind of thing you would tell your nearest and dearest (unless they, too, have an equally thick skin). But rather they reveal disappointments in love, embarrassing date nights, ‘how I met my husband’, things you might unburden to a good friend over a couple of glasses — but would you do the same to almost 11 million listeners?

Gary tells us about his night with Briony, back in the Seventies when he was a gauche student. A night without passion. A lost opportunity. Rita, now much weightier, you can hear it in her voice, recalls her first love, a much older and more sophisticated man she meets as a young Irish girl new to London when he asks her to share his umbrella at the bus stop. Crystal, in triumphant mode, confesses that she has just ‘fired’ her husband after 25 years, but then adds with a twist, ‘I looooove men. I’ve always loved men and their company…’

It’s listener power, for sure, but will it keep listeners listening? To me it’s gruesome, ear-flinching stuff, but then I could never get on with John Peel’s Home Truths, let alone those episodes of In the Psychiatrist’s Chair when Anthony Clare led his subjects to break down on air. The show is presented by Narelle Lancaster, a listener who was invited to read the scripted links between stories after sending in her account of a disastrous date containing the brilliantly awful chat-up line, ‘Your breasts look magnificent in that dress.’