Radio
Hostility in the air
Michael Vestey
Alast, - they've done it; they've wrecked the one radio programme that threw verbal hand grenades through the great metal doors of Broadcasting House, blasting myriad managers and programme- makers out of their complacency: Feedback on Radio Four has finally been recaptured by the enemy.
It says something for radio audiences and this programme that they so rattled the BBC and the present Radio Four con- troller James Boyle. When the presenter for the past 13 years, Chris Dunkley, was sacked before Christmas, it could mean only one thing: they'd had enough. Dunk- ley was never afraid to ask the difficult, penetrating questions sent in by listeners and there were times when .one could pic- ture his victims squirming sweatily in their studio chairs as they tried to defend them- selves and their output. Some thought it an affront that they should be challenged about their programmes and one could sense the hostility in the air. Even when controllers and programme-makers had a good case and the listeners were wrong they couldn't conceal their distaste.
When Feedback, still to be produced by the independent company Test Bed, returns in April, it will be extended to half an hour and will include a section where listeners will be able to carry out their own investigations into programme-making. Presumably, they'll be shown how pro- grammes are made, talk to the presenters and producers and at the end come away feeling flattered at being involved. Dunkley tells me he thinks Feedback will now be as much concerned to represent the BBC's views as the listeners. The great fear is that it will become like BBC Television's jokey Points of View where the viewers were sent up as much as the programmes were. I hope it doesn't take on the jaunty tone of Radio Five Live's The Media Show (Sun- day) or the tameness of Radio Four's The Message (Friday) which is expected to show some respect to BBC personages. When Alex Brodie interviewed, for want of a bet- ter word, the Culture Secretary Chris Smith before Christmas it sounded like a couple of chums together and told us nothing.
The BBC wants to replace Dunkley with Roger Bolton who presents Sunday on Radio Four, the religious news programme, and Channel 4's Right to Reply. Although Bolton is a good broadcaster, I can't quite see him replicating Dunkley's spirited inde- pendence. I hope he doesn't share the haughty view of many in radio that Feed- back's listeners are not representative of the audience as a whole. It seems the new programme will still contain listeners' com- plaints but no doubt they'll be blunted by the new format. Anyway, that was the bad news. More cheerfully, there have been some radio gems during the holiday period. On Boxing Day on Radio Three, Harold Pinter read a story by the writer and Bohemian dandy of the Forties and Fifties Julian Maclaren-Ross, I Had to Go Sick. This was a bleakly comic account of the sheer muddle and incompetence that marked army life for conscripts during the second world war.
Maclaren-Ross was invalided out to return to the bars of Soho where he became the inspiration for Anthony Pow- ell's sword-stick-bearing X. Trapnel in Books Do Furnish A Room, part of A Dance to the Music of Time sequence of novels. I have not read anything by Maclaren-Ross as far as I can recall and this certainly whetted my appetite. If his stories and nov- els are no longer in print, perhaps they should be. Pinter read and acted it beauti- fully.
This year is the centenary of Noel Cow- ard's birth, and on New Year's Eve Radio Four launched a Coward season of drama with Tonight at 8.30 (Thursday), two short plays from the 1936 cycle of ten plays which Coward wrote and in which he and his co-star Gertrude Lawrence played many of the roles, an astonishing achieve- ment which left them both mentally and physically exhausted. The first two were Red Peppers, a sad but funny portrayal of a doomed music hall act, and Still Life about a married couple who meet in a railway sta- tion café, which later became the film Brief Encounter.
The Red Peppers, George (Nickolas Grace) and his wife Lily (Susie Blake), are a third-rate music hall act rowing with themselves and all around them. George can't see that the cinema is destroying their seedy little world: 'Put Garbo on on a Sat- urday night in Devonport and see what would happen to her!' Lily knows, though. `Nobody wants to see the Red Peppers for three bob when they can see Garbo for ninepence.' In Still Life, with Amanda Root and John Duttinez, there is much of the poignancy of Brief Encounter but here the affair is consummated which it wasn't, of course, in the film. The plays were directed in Birmingham by Sue Wilson.
Previous page
