Radio
Golden oldies
Michael Vestey
One thing that surprised me the other night when I went to see Peter O'Toole in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell at the Old Vic, ten years after I'd first seen it, was the enthusi- astic presence of young people in their early twenties. They packed the upper cir- cle, many of them standing throughout, to see an older man playing the part of anoth- er older man who had been addicted to drink, cigarettes and gambling, and who was now dead.
I'll leave aside the pure genius of O'Toole in this role, and it's not a word I ever use lightly, to wonder why the young were flocking to the revival of Keith Water- house's wonderful play (based largely on Bernard's own columns in The Spectator). After all, are we not brainwashed to think that only the young matter nowadays? And yet the young loved O'Toole playing Bernard.
The play, as many of you will know, is set in the Coach and Horses in Soho in which Bernard has been locked overnight. Coinci- dentally, a few days later I found myself locked in my local pub, the less louche but similarly gargoyled Benett Arms in the vil- lage of Semley. It was the afternoon and the landlord, Joe, had to leave his post to attend to a serious domestic problem. The keys had been left with one of my compan- ions, but there was always the hope that he might mix them up and we would not be able to get out until opening time at six. It was during this happy imprisonment that I fell to asking why the young were so keen on Bernard and O'Toole.
The reason was that I had just heard that the BBC had dropped Fred Trueman and Trevor Bailey from the Test Match Special team on Radio Four which they had graced, between them, for 58 years – a typi- cally stupid decision which was annoying me more than, perhaps, it should have been. The answer from my friends was sim- ple, it seemed: the intelligent young like old people, especially if they're characters. The young drink too much, smoke too much and they are amazed to find that amusing older people are still doing it at an age when they themselves expect to be bank managers, chartered accountants, entrepreneurs or editors and thinking of their pensions. And yet, the popularity of Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell among the young goes against every advertising and media assumption.
Nowhere more so than in the BBC which under John Bin t has, with a few notable exceptions, banished the over-fifties from all levels of production and presentation in the past ten years. The idea that younger listeners will begin switching on Test Match Special because Trueman and Bailey have been replaced by younger pundits is so pre- posterous that only a BBC executive could believe it. The decision was made by, pre- sumably, the head of sport, itself a mis- nomer and oxymoron, as the BBC through its incompetence has lost much of its sport, including the rights to enable Test Match Special to commentate on overseas cricket tours. Both Trueman and Bailey were in sparkling form this summer when they were allowed to appear and I, for one, will
miss their presence in the commentary box.
One of the exceptions that somehow escaped Birt's ageist cull was Derek Coop er who has, for the past 20 years, presented Radio Four's The Food Programme. In its investigative mode it has exposed some of the awful rubbish that goes into our foods, and when it is appreciative the programme has managed to evoke the very scents of the table. Cooper's deep voice helps; it sounds as if some malt whisky and oysters have just slithered over his vocal chords, helped down by smoke from the odd cigar.
Last Saturday night he looked back over the highlights of these distinguished pro- grammes in The Archive Hour: Derek Coop- er's Food Programme Memories, and came up with a gem from 1982, a visit to the Walls ice cream factory. He asked the firm's technical director Eric Swindlehurst what the ice cream was actually made of. You're eating frozen, aerated emulsion, the principle ingredients of which are fat, sug- ars, milk solids, nut fat and then the minor ingredients . stabiliser or emulsifier . How much air is used? Cooper asks. Half of the total volume. So when I'm paying £1 for an ice cream, I'm buying 50 pence- worth of air. Swindelhurst demurs. How would you put it? urges Cooper. I'd say you were getting the air for free and were buy- ing £1 worth of ice cream.
No wonder the greatest food writer of the century, Elizabeth David, sitting no doubt wild-eyed by her radio at home, felt moved to write to the producers. At this stage the programme was beginning to sound like an exchange between Beach- comber's immortal Mr Justice Cocldecarrot and Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter. . .
Like so many of the BBC's archival com- pendiums, this was a terrific programme and one that could easily be repeated. Per- haps the young should be told; they'd be tuning in to hear Cooper in their thousands.
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