Top of the pops
Kate Chisholm
Iwas never a fan of The Office, nor did I fall for its doleful star Martin Freeman (the mole-like antidote to Ricky Gervais), but I was intrigued to find out why he had chosen the Staple Singers for the first of his The Great Unknowns (Radio Two, Tuesday nights). ‘Majestic,’ he called them. ‘A bit of a spearhead for the cause’ — but ‘unknown’?
I once saw ‘Pops’ Staple and his daughters performing at a summer gig on the Green at New Haven. It was a long walk from their glory days in the late 1960s and 1970s, when they were a vital force at the head of the American civil rights movement (‘I look in the mirror and what do I see/A brand new image of the same old me’). And rueful to think that as a young man Pops would not have been welcome on those lawns. By then he was in his early eighties and white-haired, a ‘legend’ on the music scene and still rocking to the beat of his delta blues. And yet his presence up there with his daughters did not seem at all incongruous (which is more than can be said for most ageing rockies).
‘Not much to say about this one,’ said Martin in his flat-toned estuary English, ‘because it’s just a tune.’ In fact he said very little about anything, which at first was really unnerving. When’s he going to tell us why he likes this stuff so much? But I was hooked by the music, gospel without that unnerving falsetto, lyrics that have the rhythmical beat of a biblical incantation, and there was something about Martin Freeman’s low-key style that was in the end rather compelling. It’s not his voice that’s seductive, it’s his utter lack of ego. It was like having an old friend call round on a rainy afternoon to give you a personal masterclass on the favourite tracks in his CD collection. What we heard was Pops and his daughters, pure and simple and unadorned. Ego, of course, is what has made Desert Island Discs (Sundays) such a staple of the Radio Four schedule. Much has been made of its new presenter, Kirsty Young, who’s deserted television news, like her predecessor Sue Lawley, to take on the heady task of ensuring the survival of those dratted seagulls. I’ve always preferred Radio Three’s version, Private Passions (also on Sundays), presented by Michael Berkeley. Although he never tries to weasel out personal intimacies from his guests, who are invited just to talk about the music they have chosen, you usually end up with far more insight into what they would be like to meet in person. But this week’s guest, the novelist Kirsty Gunn, fell into the trap of trying too hard.
‘So dainty. So very appealing. It’s continually satisfying, that movement down the chromatic scale,’ she said of her choice of a Chopin Prelude (Op. 28 no. 4). Only to be warned by Michael Berkeley, ‘You know of course that you share that enthusiasm with Barry Manilow.’ The other Kirsty’s first ‘castaway’ was Quentin Blake, the illustrator and children’s writer, most famous perhaps for his collaboration with Roald Dahl on books like The BFG. Things began rather ominously with Quentin declaring that he was ‘musically illiterate’ and Kirsty asking confidentially, ‘And what kind of pen do you use?’ But Quentin proved equal to the challenge of outmanoeuvring Kirsty’s desperate desire to show off her (it has to be said) exhaustive research.
At one point she described to him in detail the house in Kent in which he had lived as a child before and during the war. ‘That’s not bad,’ agreed Quentin, sounding understandably rather surprised.
He told us how he had once been given a vulture’s feather and had fashioned a quill out of it, which he had then used to draw a whole series of vultures. ‘It was wonderfully scratchy and a little bit unreliable.’ But this was not the kind of revelation Kirsty had in mind.
‘Your books often feature a solitary, perhaps slightly eccentric character attempting to cope?’ she asked after record number seven, by which time Quentin was probably breathing a sigh of relief that so far he had managed to say nothing about his preference in underwear.
‘Is that you?’ she pounced, like a cat who has spent 40 or so minutes circling her prey.
Nervous laughter and a slightly hysterical ‘No, no, no!’ from Quentin.
‘I hope I’m not being rude,’ said Kirsty, sotto voce, and somewhat shamefacedly. Well done, Quentin.
And yet you have to hand it to her. She knew about the crocodile’s teeth, the BFG’s shoes and the Boots toothpick. It’ll be intriguing to see how many of her future victims succeed in standing firm against such an onslaught.
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