Radio Review
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by Camille Guy
Oh dearie me. The scales have fallen from my eyes (if only …) and I see National Radio for the cheapskate, fob-off broadcasting for middlebrows that it is.
What happened was that I made a three-week visit to my daughter in London. “How plucky those young people are,” the Edna Everage in me mused, “as they Mind the Gap and shop at Tescos when the young possums could be back home setting up the barbie to the sound of cicadas.”
Not plucky myself, I avoided picking my white-cane way through those challenging streets and did radio, instead.
It was like eating from the tree of knowledge. Now, this will sound like deplorable cultural cringe, but, crikey, in this area the Poms just do it better.
Even commercial radio was perfectly acceptable. The advertising ratio was way better than we have to endure. Less ego-driven hosts seemed to do briefer stints than here, often only two hours. They managed to be witty, personal and entertaining while still treating their callers with respect.
Some talk radio came close to blogging. It was like overhearing a bunch of journos around the water cooler, sounding off about the day’s news and about themselves and one another in equal measure. It is a hard act to pull off, but several London LBC broadcasters were as good as any stand-up comic.
The BBC seemed to have at least five stations, but Radio Four hooked me. Its format was not that of having one hapless host occupying the entire morning, doing a series of live interviews on news-driven topics. That familiar format boasts one stand-out virtue: it is dirt cheap. Instead, Four runs a series of small but perfectly formed docos, interspersed with excellent drama (not counting The Archers, which I just did not get). I heard a discussion about Georgian wine glasses that morphed into the disclosure that Georgians, both rich and poor, were drunken sots. The same slot included a doco about Norman Gunston, a searching look at the Glycaemic Index, and an examination of why wild animals might have anticipated and escaped the tsunami.
During my stay, I heard four programmes that were of riveting interest to the partially sighted: an entertaining chat between two journalists with eye problems similar to mine about whether they disclose the matter and what happens when they do, a GP interviewing patients and staff at Moorefields Eye Hospital, an anthropologist talking about a tribe that relied on sound more than sight, and some palaeontologists discussing whether the evolution of the eye may have triggered the Cambrian explosion of life forms.
Unfair, I know, to compare well-funded radio in a large-population country where journalists have access to brilliant sources with our meagrely resourced one, but there you go. Sometimes we need to know just what we are missing out on.
