Radio
Tearful
Mary Kenny
I have been weeping a lot over the radio recently. I hope this is a sign of how good the programmes are at present, and not that I am heading for an early menopause.
It all started on 11 December, doctor, when I heard Brian Sibley tell the story of. J.M. Barrie in The Boy and the Shadow on Radio 4. James Barrie had a dreadfully sad childhood, suffering from an almost textbook case of maternal deprivation syndrome. His older brother died when a-child, and Barrie's mother went into a melancholic decline, spending all her time mourning the dead son and consequently oblivious of little Jamie. He felt he could never win her love. One evening he was crying himself to sleep, as was his wont, when she wandered absent-mindedly into the nursery. 'Is that you?' she whispered. 'No,' replied the little boy, 'It's not him, it's only me.'
Soon I was at it again after Golda Meir died. Over the airwaves came Michael Elkins in From Our Own Correspondent (Radio 4, Mondays 7.20 p.m. and Fridays 10.05 a.m.) recalling Golda; but not Golda the Prime Minister, but Golda the Jewish Mother. 'Our baby wouldn't stop crying, and there, suddenly, was Golda at the door of our apartment.' And looking like a kind old babouska she gave the child some old wives' potion that calmed him. Sixteen years later she recognised the boy quite spontaneously. 'You're a fine boy, already,' she told him. 'Please God that you eat well.' I paraphrase slightly, but it sounded like that. Yasser Arafat himself might have burst into tears if he had been listening.
However, Radio 4 has lost listeners since its big change over on 23 November so my correspondents in the Spectator tell me; on many transistors, people just can't get it any more. However, folk have been discovering other stations; the charms of Terry Wogan on Radio 2 (normally 9 until 10 a.m., though he's on holiday at the moment) are very pleasant and Radio 2 (the old Light Programme, it will be remembered) can be enchanting in providing the sort of nostalgia that we truly need in these searing days of wage rounds and 15 per cent and everyone being so disagreeable and greedy. I warmly recommend Glamourous Nights on Sunday nights at 7.30 p.m. along with a perfectly adorable rubrique entitled Among Your Souvenirs which is off the air for a few weeks but will return very shortly at 9.02 p.m. on Sundays. Among Your Souvenirs brings one into the world of such charms as 'Floradora' ('Tell me pretty maiden — are there any more at home like you?') 'Early One Morning' and 'Come into the Garden, Maud,'; I hope when it comes back on the air they will play 'Daddy's a drunkard and Mother is dead' — my friend Majorie and I never failed to weep at that one.
There have been some very nice plays on recently. I enjoyed greatly Bryan Will Be So Upset by Jane Poncia on Saturday After noon Theatre last Sunday, 13 January. How interesting to know that unmarried people indulged in sexual intercourse in 1941 —yet so very tastefully. I didn't at all like Listen to the Banned, the compiled programme of records that had been censored on the wireless during, and even after, the good Lord Reith's time. Everyone else seemed to consider it a great liberation that one can broadcast these unattractive ditties nowadays without compunction, but it seemed to me to prove that, generally speaking, one misses very little in the way of talent by disallowing tastelessness.
There is also some enjoyable fiction being broadcast at present. I like very much the current series of Frederic Raphael read ing his own short stories (Radio 4 9.15 p.m.
Monday). The wireless is excellent at introducing one to writers one has not read before; I've always been put off Mr Raphael because of the smarty-boots element of The Glittering Prizes; but he can tell a good story, which still remains the most important thing for me, an average listener, where radio fiction is concerned.
It seems to me absolutely disgraceful the way in which the radio is made to plug television series. I know that David Dimbleby's series on The White Tribe of Africa on BBC-1 is said to be very good and I daresay it cost a great deal of money, but it was shameful how they wheeled him on to the PM Programme on the first Monday that it went out, and then kept plugging his TV programme all evening too. In this week's Radio Times, the radio section is advertising David Attenborough talking about his TV series on Kaleidoscope, the radio arts programme. Radio people should just refuse to do it — until television starts to plug radio programmes. When is Sue Law ley going to come forward on Nationwide and say, 'I now suggest you turn over to Radio 4 where you can hear a spitting episode of Lord Peter Wimsey, and just to whet your appetite we have Ian Carmicheal here in the studio . . . '? When TV does that, then Radio can go back to advertising television. Otherwise, it is a pure and simple death-wish.
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