ARTS
Radio
Tactical tuning
Noel Malcolm samples the BBC's election fare and discovers why phoners-in are seldom satisfied.
For me, the keynote of the election campaign was struck by Brian Redhead during his visit to Berlin for the Today programme. In the course of a varied round of interviews with officials, military men and politicians, he popped over one morning to East Berlin and spoke to the leader of the East German Liberal Demo- cratic Party. This was made to sound, how shall I put it, like a real interview with a real person; Mr Redhead listened politely as the Liberal Democratic leader patiently explained that the East German govern- ment was in fact a coalition of five separate parties.
Many listeners must have been surprised by this information, and may even have started to re-think their own plans to vote tactically for a coalition government in Britain. But it came as no surprise to those of us who have been following Peter Simple's reports of Mr Gorbachev's plans for a general election and the discussions now taking place in the various party headquarters in Moscow about the dangers of a 'hung Duma'. The balanced Reich- stag, as the East Germans prefer to call it, has proved to be a great success, thanks largely to an historic accord between the Pomeranian Irredentist Movement and the Lusatian Sorb Home Rule Party. At one stage it looked as if the Junker Anti Tariff-Reform League was going to pull out of the coalition, but relations were patched up by an astute move on the part of the Liberal Democratic Party, which promised the Junkers that it would step up the production of dreadnoughts.
Meanwhile Mr Gorbachev was visiting Bucharest, keen no doubt to get some tips from the only Eastern leader to have achieved an outright majority in recent elections. To most observers, the secret of Mr Ceausescu's Wallachian Democratic Centralist Party was clear from the mo- ment Mr Gorbachev touched down: the Wallachians have mastered the art of mass-media presentation, and the chanting of the crowds sounded for all the world like a Republican primary. Only Mr Ceausescu himself has failed to achieve complete media penetration, by which I mean that after two days in Romania the BBC's reporter was still unable to pronounce his name. (On the following Sunday the Observer followed the BBC's lead and misspelt it 11 times.) In a single sentence on The World Tonight, Alexander Mac- Leod managed to mispronounce 'Ceauses- cu', 'Bucharest' and 'Magyar'. The second of these came out as the superlative of `Booker', and the third as 'mud-jar'. It is hard to fathom why Mr MacLeod should have decided to use the Hungarian pronun- ciation of 'Magyar', and harder to see why, having made that decision, he then decided to say 'mud-jar' instead.
Back on the home front, I have been marvelling at the range and quality of election fare provided by Radio 4: the excellent series of topic-by-topic 'manifes- to reports' comparing the parties' policies on the Six O'Clock News; the equally exemplary series, The Politics of Choice, on which not a single politician has appeared; the late-night Election Platform of recordings from the hustings; and the virtuoso performance of Sir Robin Day, huffing and puffing from nine till ten every morning on Election Call, Why is it, then, that I have had recourse again and again to tactical tuning, and have not listened to a single one of these programmes without the feeling that I was doing so under duress?
I have no patience at all with the oh-politicians-they're-all- the- same -why- vote-anyway argument. But I do feel that anyone who is interested and thoughtful enough to think about the issues during this period of three weeks will also have been thinking quite hard about them dur- ing the previous four years. I know how I am going to vote, and three weeks of debate about Mrs Thatcher's payment for corrective surgery to her tendons is not going to deflect me now. Anyone who has gone canvassing will know that most people are quite unin- terested in these major national issues; what they talk about is the state of the pavements, the speed-limits, and other issues arising within a radius of a hundred yards from their own front door. This, by definition, would not make good national radio. One canvasser I know tells me that the only national issue raised so far in her ward was put to her by an irate voter who said that he would not vote Conservative because the Tories were not doing enough to promote fox-hunting. As a thoroughly non-floating voter, I find that the only programmes I enjoy are the ones where politicians I approve of are given the chance to say why people should vote for them. The pleasure is not un- alloyed, because sometimes, to my intense irritation, the questioners express a differ- ent point of view. Sir Robin always asks his phoners-in, 'Are you satisfied with that answer?' Invariably they reply, 'No, not really.' Sometimes I am filled with incre- dulity at the stubbornness and ignorance this betokens; at other times (especially when the person who gave the answer was Mr Hattersley) I feel nothing but admira- tion for their plucky good sense.
The ritual hostilities of these program- mes have revealed, however, an important fact. When the politicians are Labour or Conservative, the people who phone in are invariably hostile. When the leaders of the Green party appeared one morning, all the phoners-in were supporters, such as Mr Gilbert from Gloucestershire who rang in to argue that 'We should allow more insects back into our environment.' What this shows is that the Green party is not going to win the election. (Even Sir Robin was so confused that he asked one ques- tioner, in his most challenging manner, 'Mr Evans, what do you say in answer to your question?') Having learned this important truth about the need for hostile questions, I listened with bated breath to the appear- ance of my local candidate Shirley Wil- liams on this programme on Monday. The first three questions were from supporters. I sighed with relief and switched off. To win an election, it is not enough to be likable. You need to be hated too.
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