The need to know

Simon Cowell spent the weekend bemoaning Britain’s lack of talent.

Simon Cowell spent the weekend bemoaning Britain’s lack of talent. He obviously doesn’t listen to Radio 4. As Cowell should know, there are other kinds of talent, more useful in these gloomy economic times and more durable, which have no requirement to cake on tubloads of fake tan and sing along to Celine (or Whitney). What about our engineers and R&D cohorts, for example? We also have more than our fair share of extraordinary scientists, thinkers and communicators of big ideas. Just listen to Neil MacGregor for 15 minutes once a day for a week and you’ll acquire not just the facts of history behind some of the objects he’s gathered from the British Museum, but also that vital sense of context, setting, connections and relationships-between. His series A History of the World in 100 Objects continues to demand admiration for the way he wears his knowledge so lightly, placing our island history within a global story that is at once accessible, entertaining, illuminating and, above all, inspiring.

Early evening is not the best time for such concentrated listening, and I must confess that I have been known (more than once) to turn off the radio at 7.45 as soon as I’ve heard those haunting chords announcing the next mini-lecture. At that time of day it’s just too difficult to take in the full measure of what MacGregor and his cleverly selected band of experts are saying, while at the same time attempting to put together something halfway edible from the few mouldy mushrooms and squashed tomatoes at the bottom of the veg box. What we need in that pre-dinner slump is the latest instalment of a P.D. James classic with just enough meat for the imagination to work on, but not too much.