Radio
On wolves and saints
Michael Vestey
When I returned a call to BBC Television's Breakfast I was asked to be in Wembley the following morning to say why I hated football; it was the morning of England's World Cup match against Brazil. I said I would be delighted were it not for the fact that I was in a little town in Umbria and Wembley was less alluring. Pity, I thought, as my role would clearly have been to annoy lots of football obsessives, something I'm always happy to do.
Mercifully, the town had gone very quiet after Italy had been knocked out. I told the producer that I hoped England, too, would be defeated. In Umbria, at least, we could now return to the important business of consuming pasta and heroic amounts of grappa. Anyway, snatching news about Afghanistan and Africa from the BBC World Service, as well as occasional snippets from News About Britain before WS reception disappeared to another frequency, often mid-sentence, and I had to retune, I resorted to following the Italian news which is so much more colourful than our own.
I noticed with keen interest items about magistrates striking over legal reforms; a pack of wolves eating a herd of sheep in the Abruzzo highlands; the Pope conferring a sainthood on Padre Pio, the mystic monk; 20 per cent of Italian women suffering from depression, according to a study: and the US Congress deciding that an Italian immigrant, Antonio Meucci, had invented the telephone not Alexander Graham Bell, who merely pinched the idea from him in the same US laboratory where they had worked. So it's no longer, I'll give you a bell,' it's 'I'll give you a meucci.'
Returning last weekend, I listened to Broadcasting House on Radio Four (Sunday) to find out if we had any hungry wolves on the loose only to discover the WorldCom scandal which I had somehow missed in Italy — American wolves of a different kind. Anyway, there was a lively dis
cussion on global capitalism between Ruth Lea of the Institute of Directors (wrongly spelt Lee on the Broadcasting House website, Monday), Robert Kelsey, a former banker and author of The Pursuit of Happiness: Ovetpaid, Oversexed and Over There, a novel, and Alex Callinicos, an academic and a contributor to a guide to the anticapitalist movement.
Lea, as usual, put it all in perspective. WorldCorn, Enron and the others were just another bubble that's been bursting for some time, like the dot-corns. She remembered sitting in the same studio three years ago likening the boom to the 1840s railways speculation and, yes, there is excess in the capitalist system but when you look at the alternatives, command economies, it's the least worst system. Kelsey compared it with a game of tennis. One moment the markets are winning, the next, the regulators. Now it's the turn of the regulators to go one set up. He seemed to think globalisation really started in 1989. In fact, since ancient tribes first built boats to sail across the seas to trade there's been a form of globalisation culminating in what we have today.
Callinicos offered the silliest contribution, of course, proposing the need to move beyond capitalism. His movement, he said, was going to create an alternative model, coming up with a much more rational way to run the world. And guess what it was: 'Far more public investment, far more state direction.' I think it was called communism from distant memory. Goodness, I thought that argument had gone away with the fall of the Berlin Wall but it's just popped up in a different guise, anti-Americanism. I think I'd rather learn more about why so many Italian women are depressed; they don't look it to me. Perhaps they need more capitalism so they can go shopping.
The Australian novelist Kathy Lette followed this item with a few witty thoughts of her own on the Queen's expenditure which the puritans had been moaning about. She thought that if you had a monarchy it should be much more fun. 'For example, the Queen spent £24,000 on flowers last year,' she said. 'Elton John spent £300,000. You can't have a queen outshining the Queen.' The royal family, she added, think optimism is an eye disease. 'What's the point of inheriting palaces if you can't throw parties?' She wondered what the Queen could be unhappy about. 'You're on the postage stamp. You get licked all day. Now, that's what 1 call job satisfaction.'
I think we should hear more of Lette on the radio; she certainly cheered me up. The only other thing I would say about the improving but erratic Broadcasting House is that it's time the programme dropped the 'Donald Rumsfeld Soundbite of the Week'. One of its producers presumably has to listen to Rumsfeld's weekly news conferences to pounce on one bit of mangled syntax. I thought it might have outlived its usefulness by my return but, no, it's still there, rather pointlessly.
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