Today

3 Dec 2020
Daisy Dunn

The genius of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue

I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue has just been voted the greatest radio comedy of all time by Radio Times, ahead of Hancock’s Half Hour and the brilliant Round the Horne. The first two episodes of series 73 (can you believe it?) are also the last Tim Brooke-Taylor recorded before losing his life to coronavirus earlier this year. Brooke-Taylor was part of the original cast of the self-styled ‘antidote to panel games’, which first aired in 1972 with Bill Oddie, Jo Kendall and the show’s deviser Graeme Garden as fellow performers (Barry Cryer joined during the first series and Willie Rushton two years later). When Brooke-Taylor’s voice broke through this week, it was as green as ever, ooh-ooh-oohing the lyrics of ‘The Funky Gibbon’ to the tune of ‘On Ilkla Moor Baht ’at’ in Huddersfield Town Hall.

Thursday

5 Nov 2020
Daisy Dunn

The shocking story of Charles and Mary Lamb: Slightly Foxed podcast reviewed

The Slightly Foxed podcast, like the quarterly and old bookshop of the same name, is almost muskily lovely. It’s the sort of thing you can imagine listening to with a dog at your feet and whisky by your side in a draughty Mitfordesque folly. Ordinarily, you might attribute its homeliness to the fact that it is recorded around a kitchen table. But with the hosts now socially distanced across the country, and it feeling just as cosy, you realise that the atmosphere must derive from something else. In the latest episode, Philippa, Hazel and Gail were joined down the line by biographer Felicity James to discuss the early 19th-century writers Charles and Mary Lamb. Perhaps best known today for their Tales from Shakespeare, the siblings, of whom Mary was the elder by a decade, earned some notoriety in their own time for their bond following a terrible family drama.

The shocking story of Charles and Mary Lamb: Slightly Foxed podcast reviewed

Thursday

8 Oct 2020
Daisy Dunn

Alan Partridge should replace Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour

In the week Jenni Murray left Woman’s Hour, I was listening to Alan Partridge on his new podcast, From the Oasthouse, and imagining what he might have been like as her successor. As I chuckled through half a dozen episodes of awkward Norfolk frippery, it occurred to me that, short of taking him on, the BBC could do wonders for its reputation in the wake of Murray’s departure by taking a leaf out of the Partridge playbook. Partridge, played by Steve Coogan since 1991, has moved with the times. Although he hasn’t changed, his horizons have, and he is doing his best to retain his cringe-inducing record. Ousted from his radio station following ‘an issue with a colleague’, and crippled by the mortgage on his seven-bedroom home, he has down-sized to a mock ‘oast-style’ house from which he is now streaming an 18-part series on his life.

Alan Partridge should replace Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour

Thursday

17 Sep 2020
Daisy Dunn

The gentle genius of Mervyn Peake

To be a good illustrator, said Mervyn Peake, it is necessary to do two things. The first is to subordinate yourself entirely to the book. The second is ‘to slide into another man’s soul’. In 1933, at the age of 22, Peake did precisely that. Relinquishing his studies at the Royal Academy Schools to move to Sark, in the Channel Islands, he co-founded an artists’ colony and took to sketching fishermen and romantic, ripple-lapped coves. He put a gold hoop in his right ear, a red-lined cape over his shoulders, and grew his hair long, like Israel Hands or Long John Silver. The incredible thing was that he had yet to receive his commission to illustrate Treasure Island. By the time the job came through, in the late 1940s, he had been sliding into more piratical souls for more than 20 years.

The gentle genius of Mervyn Peake

Thursday

10 Sep 2020
Daisy Dunn

The Archers is a masterclass in how not to write a monologue

If you’ve been listening to The Archers lately, you’ll know how tedious monologues can be. The BBC has received so many complaints about the stream of soliloquys that has dominated the episodes since lockdown, that Mohit Bakaya, controller of Radio 4, has been compelled to issue an apology. The new format — introduced so that the cast and crew could follow social-distancing rules — has proven especially unpopular because, as some listeners have pointed out, the producers might easily have stitched recordings together to keep the drama going. Instead, they’ve more or less dispensed with dialogue between characters in favour of a watered-down talking heads approach. Given that it’s usually recorded in a dedicated studio with live sound effects, The Archers was bound to be different in the Covid era.

The Archers is a masterclass in how not to write a monologue

Thursday

13 Aug 2020
Daisy Dunn

Hats (and knickers) off to the hosts: The Naked Podcast reviewed

I spent half an hour this week listening to a woman make a plaster cast of her vulva. Kat Harbourne, co-host of The Naked Podcast on BBC Sounds, opened a recent episode by buzzing her bikini trimmer over the microphone before squatting over a British Airways peanut dish. Jenny Eells, her partner in crime, stood close by offering to hold up her dress. ‘I feel a bit like a voyeur, almost,’ she said, as if surprised at herself. ‘Thanks for letting me be a part of it.’ Then the mould-maker, Phoebe, put a porridgy alginate in Kat’s dish, and Jenny thought it looked ‘tasty’. Jenny and Kat are used to seeing each other naked. Most weeks, they invite on a female guest, and encourage her to strip off with them so that they can have a chat in the nude.

Hats (and knickers) off to the hosts: The Naked Podcast reviewed

Thursday

16 Jul 2020
Daisy Dunn

The best podcasts for all your corona-gardening needs

The American diet was probably at its healthiest in the second world war. Fearing interruption to supply chains, Washington launched a national Victory Gardening programme within a fortnight of Pearl Harbor, and saw two thirds of the population heed the cry to fill their backyards, rooftops and window boxes with veg. The scheme was so successful that, by 1943, home-gardeners were producing 43 per cent of all fresh food consumed. ‘Dig for Victory’, the latest episode of Gastropod, a superbly researched food and science podcast, opens with the co-hosts Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley rustling bags of manure as they attempt to plant tomatoes, peppers and ‘urbs’ in a tiny patch of earth in New York. The pandemic has seen a rush on garden centres on both sides of the Atlantic and revival of the Dig for Victory tag.

The best podcasts for all your corona-gardening needs

Thursday

21 May 2020
Daisy Dunn

Adapting Wodehouse for the radio is a challenge – but the BBC has succeeded brilliantly

Everyone knows a Lord Emsworth. Mine lives south of the river and wears caterpillars in his hair and wine on his shirt and has just occasionally written for this magazine. That doesn’t much narrow it down. When you look at him, you understand a little better why P. G. Wodehouse is topping the lists of authors to read during lockdown. It’s not just that the books are funny. With an Emsworth or a Bertie Wooster you’re guaranteed that idling and dithering will land you somewhere. Even if it is in the soup. Adapted for Radio 4 this fortnight, Leave it to Psmith, the second in Wodehouse’s Blandings series, sees the dithering Earl invite a prospective thief into his home after mistaking him for a Canadian poet. Emsworth’s sister, the imperious Constance, has arranged for the Earl and the poet to have lunch.

Adapting Wodehouse for the radio is a challenge – but the BBC has succeeded brilliantly

Thursday

14 May 2020
Daisy Dunn

The author who made a living measuring the legs of lice

Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion, real name Bruce Frederick Cummings, earned his living measuring the legs of lice in the Natural History Museum. ‘To the lay mind how fantastic this must seem!’ he exclaimed in his journal, before enumerating his enthusiasms for Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, names like ‘Mr. Hogsflesh’ and ‘Pickle Herring Street’, and Petticoat Lane on Sunday mornings. The young naturalist had a habit of landing himself in embarrassing situations. He once spotted a pretty woman at the theatre and composed a notice for the classifieds in a bid to find her. The editor sent his missive back supposing he was a white-slave trafficker. Another time, a new mother with a ‘large, red udder’ and an uninterested infant offered to suckle him on the bus.

The author who made a living measuring the legs of lice

Thursday

23 Apr 2020
Daisy Dunn

I’ve lost patience with podcasts and their presenters

‘To be recognised and accepted by a peregrine,’ wrote J.A. Baker in 1967, ‘you must wear the same clothes, travel by the same way, perform actions in the same order. Like all birds, it fears the unpredictable.’ Sitting around in the same old clothes, performing chores in the same order, travelling by no way at all, I’ve found comfort in Baker’s assurance that I may at least prove attractive to birds in my slovenly purdah. Sir David Attenborough read The Peregrine beautifully on Radio 4 just before Christmas, but if you were too busy steaming puddings to listen, you may find this a good time for enjoying the series online. I recommend it because, while Baker’s diary begins in October, when the peregrine soars over the fields and flicks acorns ‘like a potter spinning’, it culminates in the most joyful descriptions of spring.

I’ve lost patience with podcasts and their presenters

Saturday

7 Mar 2020
Daisy Dunn

Every bit as well observed as Rembrandt – and often funnier: Nicolaes Maes reviewed

Nicolaes Maes (1634–93) relished the simple moments of daily life during the Dutch Golden Age. A woman peeling parsnips over a bowl; a young girl threading a needle; a peasant lugging pails of milk to sell on the doorstep. His paintings are sensitive, not showy, and, as you would expect from a pupil of Rembrandt, rendered with the most exquisite use of light. Maes was apprenticed to the Dutch master for about five years in his teens. He returned to Amsterdam later in life, but worked for two decades in his hometown of Dordrecht, 11 miles southeast of Rotterdam. Several of his paintings, including ‘The Apostle Thomas’ and ‘Christ Blessing the Children’, have wrongly been attributed to Rembrandt over the years. But there is no mistaking Maes’s genre paintings.

Every bit as well observed as Rembrandt – and often funnier: Nicolaes Maes reviewed

Saturday

8 Feb 2020
Daisy Dunn

Why do writers enjoy walking so much?

Writers like walking. When people ask us why, we say it’s what writers do. ‘Just popping out to buy a pencil,’ we cry, before tootling along the tarmac à la Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin or George Sand. BBC Radio likes walking, too, to judge by the number of programmes dedicated to the pursuit this fortnight. Some revolve around mental health and the environment; Clare Balding saunters over Berkshire’s Winter Hill in Ramblings with Steve Backshall and Helen Glover discussing wellbeing, parenthood and sewage. More involve the walking writer, with five authors retracing memorable ambulations on Radio 3, and Professor Jonathan Bate taking us on an altogether more dreamlike journey for In Wordsworth’s Footsteps on Radio 4.

Why do writers enjoy walking so much?

Thursday

14 Nov 2019
Daisy Dunn

What really happened at Troy?

Heinrich Schliemann had always hoped he’d find Homer’s Troy. Although he had no archaeological background to speak of, he did have money, and spades, and in the 1870s this would do. Tipped off as to the probable location of the ancient citadel — beneath Hisarlik on the west coast of modern Turkey — the Prussian businessman got zealously to work, pushing through the soil until he struck what he assumed to be the treasure of King Priam himself. In the Iliad the Trojan king lived lavishly. His palace was ‘surpassingly beautiful’. Its 50 rooms were built of ‘polished stone’. The terracotta wares Schliemann lifted from the ground did not quite evoke such splendour. There were fat-bellied pots with nipples and navels and rustic two-handled cups.

Thursday

3 Oct 2019
Daisy Dunn

Did Radio 2 really need to give us four days of the Beatles to celebrate Abbey Road?

This Changeling Self, Radio 4’s lead drama this week, clearly ought to have gone out in August. It’s set — and was recorded — at the Edinburgh Festival and would have been a gift to marketing. ‘I love the festival!’ coos She. ‘All these millions of conversations, listen, listen, oh and stories, lots of stories, the different ways of telling…!’ No one in the real world speaks like this. But it’s just about OK, because she isn’t quite real either. She is a Fairy Queen, come to Edinburgh to spirit away a young pianist named Tam, as in Tamlin, who is a bit wet but really rather nice. The story is a modern retelling by Linda Marshall Griffiths of an old Scottish ballad that couldn’t be better suited to radio. The Fairy Queen, breathy yet exuberant, steals the heart of the gentlemanly Tam (Sacha Dhawan) when she picks out the notes of his song on her violin.

Thursday

23 May 2019
Daisy Dunn

Up Pompeii!

One afternoon in AD 79 an unusual cloud appeared above Vesuvius in the Bay of Naples. ‘It was raised high on a kind of very tall trunk,’ recalled Pliny the Younger, likening it to an umbrella pine tree, ‘and spread out into branches.’ When, finally, the cloud collapsed and the sky grew dark, some people raised their hands to the gods. Others reasoned that ‘there were now no gods anywhere and that the night would last for ever and ever across the universe’. There are corners of the ancient cities that have not seen daylight since they were buried in volcanic debris. While excavations officially began in Pompeii and Herculaneum in the mid 18th century, there remains much to uncover, and still more to restore. Next month, an exhibition dedicated to the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum will open at the Getty Villa in LA.

Up Pompeii!

Thursday

9 May 2019
Daisy Dunn

The write stuff | 9 May 2019

The Mesopotamians wrote on clay and the ancient Chinese on ox bones and turtle shells. In Egypt, in about 1,800 BC, someone even found the space to scrawl on a portable sandstone sphinx. Look closely towards the base of the sculpture and you will find a delicate line drawing of an ox head. Remarkably, this picture reveals the origins of the letter ‘A’. At the first stage in its development, the ox was simplified, so that an engraver could express it with just a couple of lines. An Egyptian seal stone shows the animal’s head in abstract form. Next, the shape was flipped 90º, so that by the time the Greeks had adopted the Phoenician system of writing, in the 8th century BC, it was recognisably an ‘A’. Following some tinkering by the Etruscans and Romans, it was no longer possible to tell what was horn, and what jaw.

The write stuff | 9 May 2019

Thursday

21 Feb 2019
Daisy Dunn

Outsider art | 21 February 2019

If you’re tired of hygge then you’ll like Harald Sohlberg. The Norwegian painter  eschewed the cosy fireside for the great outdoors, eager to see what view might greet him as he wandered the woods and country roads of Norway in the failing light. While his contemporary Nikolai Astrup filled his landscapes with people, Sohlberg preferred to bring nature to the fore, at once unnerved and mesmerised by its power. He excelled at depicting the scene just stumbled upon or left behind. In ‘Summer Night’ (1899), a table is set for two on a veranda overlooking the Kristiania Fjord off what is now Oslo. The glasses are half full, the fruit sliced but abandoned, the door of the house ajar. Have the diners slipped inside? Then look at the sunset they are missing.

Outsider art | 21 February 2019

Thursday

7 Feb 2019
Daisy Dunn

Brightness falls

The little-known painter Cyril Mann (1911-80) saw a lot from his council-flat window. Beyond the parks and trees and red-brick houses was St Paul’s, rising triumphantly through the haze. Mann, who grew up in Nottingham and trained at the Royal Academy in the 1930s, had painted the bombsites around Spitalfields and the streets of postwar London when he finally turned his hand in 1961 to the view from his Finsbury tenement block. The resulting painting was exceptional. He captured the cathedral in the distance with such a swift brush that it seems almost to dance on the horizon. The optimism Mann clearly found in the city skyline reflected his own change in circumstances as much as those of Britain. Financially unstable, he had spent much of the previous decade cooped up in an apartment over a bullion shop with barred windows and no natural light.

Brightness falls

Thursday

29 Nov 2018
Daisy Dunn

Hunter, scholar, boaster, dreamer

The Assyrians placed sculptures of winged human-headed bulls (lamassus) at the entrances to their capital at Nineveh, in modern Mosul, to ward off evil. The mighty lamassu to the right of the Nergal Gate had been on guard for some 2,700 years when Isis vandals took a drill to it in 2015 and blew away its face. Today a copy, crafted out of date syrup cans, stands on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. It wears the oblong beard and proud look of the Assyrian kings. The original sculpture dated to the time of Sennacherib, who ruled Assyria from 705 to 681 BC, and transformed Nineveh into a magnificent metropolis. No stranger himself to violent desecration, he made his eldest son king of Babylon, but went on the rampage when the Babylonians rebelled and had the ruler dispatched.

Hunter, scholar, boaster, dreamer

Thursday

13 Sep 2018
Daisy Dunn

The little cloth dyer who made it big

Tintoretto was il Furioso. He was a lightning flash or a thunderbolt, a storm in La Serenissima of Renaissance Italy, a maverick and a cheat. One of his friends, a fellow Venetian, likened him to a peppercorn overwhelming ten bunches of poppies. More often than not, those poppies were rival artists. He trampled them like an overgrown child. Henry James said that ‘if Shakespeare is the greatest of poets, Tintoretto is assuredly the greatest of painters’. He was at least the most aggressive. A series of exhibitions opens in Venice this autumn to mark the 500th anniversary of Tintoretto’s birth. If they show him to be half as devious as his first biographers described him, then it will be all anyone can do to salvage his good name.

The little cloth dyer who made it big

Thursday

9 Aug 2018
Daisy Dunn

The play’s the thing | 9 August 2018

Nothing was so interesting to Yves Klein as the void. In 1960 he leapt into it for a photograph — back arched, chin raised, spread-eagled. The same year, he took out a patent for International Klein Blue (IKB), a colour inspired by the limitlessness of the sky itself. He even went so far as to stage an exhibition of white walls and an empty cabinet. If there is a less appropriate place to exhibit his work than the lavishly adorned Blenheim Palace, I can’t think of it. Klein was born in Nice in 1928 and learned judo as well as art. In his late teens he visited the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua and marvelled at Giotto’s 14th-century frescoes, particularly the ceiling, which was bluer than the deepest seas. When Klein went on to formulate his own colour in the 1950s, he retained the intensity of the pigment by ingeniously combining it with an artificial resin and petroleum rather than simply oil.

The play’s the thing | 9 August 2018

Thursday

12 Jul 2018

Thursday

31 May 2018
Daisy Dunn

A vanished world

When the German novelist Sophie von La Roche visited Oxford Street in the 1780s she saw watchmakers and fan shops, silversmiths and spirit booths, and a Pantheon that rivalled the one in Rome. Edward Gibbon called the domed ballroom, which hosted glitzy concerts, ‘the wonder of the eighteenth century and of the British empire’, but Von La Roche could not agree. The Pantheon’s architect, she concluded, ‘only half knew what he was about’. The young James Wyatt, who went on to design some of the loveliest college buildings at Oxford University, had apparently given little consideration to the acoustics of his Pantheon, ‘as the sound becomes diffused’. The building caught fire in 1792, was rebuilt and later became an elegant bazaar selling framed pictures and cabinet china.

A vanished world

Thursday

8 Feb 2018
Daisy Dunn

Sea fever

Looking at the sketchbook of William Whitelock Lloyd, a soldier-artist who joined a P&O liner after surviving the Anglo-Zulu War, I’m reminded why I avoid cruises. On board this India-bound ship were: a ‘man who talks a great deal of yachting shop and collapses at the first breeze of wind’, ‘a successful Colonist’, and ‘the victim of mal de mer who lives on smelling salts’. It would be just my luck to be stuck in the cabin between ‘One of our Flirts’, the busty lady with pretty eyes, and what Lloyd affectionately called ‘Our Foghorns (automatic)’ — two bawling babies. By the late 19th century, ocean liners attracted all sorts, from emigrants seeking a new life in the US to curious poseurs. Ever since Samuel Cunard launched his first scheduled passenger steamer from Liverpool to Boston in 1840, the race had been on to provide the most efficient liner service.

Sea fever

Thursday

21 Sep 2017

Thursday

6 Jul 2017
Daisy Dunn

Match made in heaven | 6 July 2017

Tennis is best played with a wooden racket on a shady lawn somewhere close to Dorking. There is no need for trainers, an umpire, or a scoreboard. No need for rules at all. After Wimbledon, the tea-and-jam, grass-stained, Sunday-afternoon scenario from A Room with a View is the only one to emulate. In 1908, when E.M. Forster published his novel, lawn tennis was not yet 50 years old. Although the origins of the game reach back to the 12th century, the version played by Miss Honeychurch and Reverend Beebe and most of us today was said to have been pioneered on a croquet lawn in Edgbaston in 1859. It was patented 15 years later by Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, a Welshman, originally under the not-so-catchy name of ‘sphairistike’ (from the ancient Greek for a skilled ball-player).

Match made in heaven | 6 July 2017

Thursday

20 Apr 2017
Daisy Dunn

Pleasure boats

There isn’t a luxury ship that wouldn’t look better for having sunk. Barnacles and rot bring such romance to the lines, like spider webs in the sea. Even the decay Damien Hirst has applied to his Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable is quite appealing. It crawls over many of the objects that he claims to have salvaged from a shipwreck of the 1st or 2nd century ad. A mouldering Mickey Mouse. A bronze portrait of the artist encrusted in faux-coral. It’s Trimalchio meets Disneyland meets Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It so happens that Hirst’s exhibition at the Punta della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi in Venice (until 3 December) coincides with a search for another wreckage, this one truly ancient. Divers are currently scouring the bed of Lake Nemi near Rome for a pleasure boat once owned by Caligula.

Pleasure boats

Thursday

10 Nov 2016
Daisy Dunn

Order, order | 10 November 2016

The catalogue to Pallant House Gallery’s latest exhibition features a favourite anecdote. It is 1924 and a competition is being held to find the woman with the most pleasing vital statistics. As a paradigm, the judges choose the Venus de Milo. Thousands of women queue up to find out whether their measurements — not only bust, waist and hips, but thighs, calves, neck, wrists even —approximate closely enough to those of the ancient sculpture to earn them the prize of £5. No one thinks to mention that the Venus is missing both arms. Classical myth was all the rage after the first world war. When the world felt like chaos, it was only logical to go back to the beginning. The Greek poets, after all, pictured Chaos not as the end of time but as the original divinity, before whom there was nothing.

Order, order | 10 November 2016

Tuesday

13 Sep 2016
Daisy Dunn

From paper to the £5 polymer: the origins of the banknote

Kublai Khan, said Marco Polo, had ‘a more extensive command of treasure than any other sovereign in the universe’. There were no jangling pockets of coins in Kanbalu. Bark had been stripped from the mulberry trees and beaten into paper notes. The notes carried delicate little pictures of earlier currency — long, frayed ropes weighed down with coins. It was as though they were mocking the old ways. Paper money had been produced in China from as early as the 7th century, but that did not stop Marco Polo from gushing that the Great Khan had discovered ‘the secret of the alchemists’. Back home, there was much curiosity but apparently little urgency. Only in 1661 did the first banknotes circulate in Europe. Sweden led the way, printing white, countersigned ‘Palmstrucher’ notes at the Bank of Stockholm.

From paper to the £5 polymer: the origins of the banknote
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