Tom Stoppard’s Pink Floyd play gives Radio 2 a dark side

How many listeners, I wonder, actually tuned in to Darkside as it went out on air on Radio 2, after dark, curtains closed against the pale moon waning? One listener for sure at 10 o’clock on Monday night was David Gilmour, Pink Floyd’s guitar man and co-creator of the band’s mega-successful ‘concept album’ The Dark Side of the Moon, which inspired the play. Gilmour told the playwright Tom Stoppard that he wouldn’t listen ‘until it was actually going out on radio’. He wanted to catch ‘the extra vibe’. He may be a rock superstar but he’s still in thrall to radio: ‘There it is being listened to at that moment by all those people.’

Stoppard agreed. ‘Dave’s on to something there,’ he told us on Front Row last week. ‘It adds something to the experience to listen to it while it’s going out on air.’ It’s true. There is a loss of impact when listening via iPlayer; as if the contacts are a bit fuzzy, not quite so crystal-clear. You lose a sense of immediacy, of instant communication between the voice on the air and the thoughts racing around in your head.

Stoppard (and it appears Pink Floyd’s guitar man) is a real radio man, appreciating the experience of being taken elsewhere on a soundwave. Wireless unleashes the mind in a way that’s very different from any of the visual media. It’s a bit psychedelic, in fact. When Radio 2 asked Stoppard if he would write something to mark the 40th anniversary of the album’s release in 1973, he was hooked immediately, relishing the chance to reflect in words the album’s strange, surreal quest for meaning. But then he discovered that Radio 2 reaches almost 15 and a half million listeners every week.