It’s all in the voice.
It’s all in the voice. Whether or not the person speaking is seeking to engage the listener, or just saying what comes into their head without much thought of what they are trying to get across, or of who they are talking to and why they might want to listen. I reckon it’s not easy. Clare Balding has a gift for it, taking us along with her every step of the way as she walks the country for her Ramblings series on Radio 4 (Saturdays). Dominic Arkwright and his guests on Off the Page (Thursday) never got further than the studio mike.
They were discussing what it means to be ‘foreign’, that feeling of being a stranger — not unwelcome, just different. When did you first realise that not everyone was like you? Arkwright asked Joe Queenan, Amanda Mitchison and Elvis MacGonagall (not his real name but a pastiche devised for his comedy act). The discussion could have become quite metaphysical — after all, it takes us to the heart of that mysterious process in childhood when we start thinking like an adult, and realise we are part of a wider world. It would have done so under the guidance of the professor of the airwaves, Melvyn Bragg.
The trouble with Off the Page lies in the format. Arkwright asked each of his guests to talk on the subject one-by-one, rather than getting them to converse with each other. Joe Queenan gave us a mini-speech about his childhood in Philadelphia as an Irish-American, and the exotic aura of the Italian delis in his neighbourhood. But it felt as if we were being harangued rather than informed and I switched off from what he was saying almost immediately. It was too prepared, too thought-through and not spontaneous enough.
Instead of a round-table discussion, what we were listening to was a group of people talking to themselves without ever connecting. There was no spark, no electricity, no sense that ideas were being formed as they talked — and so there was nothing for us to catch hold of, to set us off wandering through our own ragbag minds.
When Bragg gathers guests round his table to discuss ‘big ideas’ for his In Our Time programme, he also asks one of them to introduce the subject with a mini-lecture before throwing open the conversation. His guests, though, are so confident of their subject they can usually talk for five minutes without preparation and without interruption (hesitation or deviation), taking us along with them as if we are being given a private one-to-one tutorial.
What was missing in Arkwright’s programme was an awareness of us out there listening in, not as eavesdroppers but as active listeners. No one invited us in to share in the conversation, not by speaking but by thinking along with them.
Clare Balding took us with her all the way as she walked the Long Mynd with members of the Malcolm Saville Society. That name will resonate with anyone who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s and were members of the Lone Pine Club. Saville wrote 90 books, mostly for children, and mostly set in Shropshire; stories of adventure, discovery, delicious freedom, tramping the hills with nothing but a bottle of pop and a paperbag of sandwiches stuffed in a canvas bag.
Balding and co. set off to discover the real places that lie behind the stories — the farm where the children stayed, the dell on the hillside where they pitched their secret camp, the lone pine standing sentry on the horizon. Turning a corner, they came across a view, standing in the exact spot where Saville himself once stood, seeing exactly what he once saw and captured in words on the page.
It’s a surprisingly powerful feeling, to catch a fleeting sense that you are walking where someone whose work you know well has walked before you, whose mind you have looked into through reading what they have written. It’s not the power of a familial memory, that blood bond thing, but something to do with the imagination and the powerful connections it can make.
Did Saville’s books shape your life? Balding asked one of the walkers, as they left behind the forest path and came out into open countryside. Not so much shaped, she replied, but the stories have always been at the back of my mind, somewhere to go back to and remember what it feels like to look at the world through the eyes of a child.
Balding never forgets that she’s got an audience, but she has the knack of making us feel that she’s talking to us alone, and asking the questions that we would have asked if we’d been there too. She invites us in, tells us where we are and encourages us to share in her enthusiasm. These hills are made for walking, she said, which sent me off looking for a map and my boots immediately.
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