Radio
Woolly monsters
Michael Vestey
There are 300 wild boar roaming Kent. They were tame before they escaped from farms but now they've discovered freedom we must assume they are pretending to be wild. How the authorities know there are exactly 300 and not, say, 305, I don't know but when I heard this figure mentioned on Farming Today on Monday I found it, like the programme itself, rather reassuring. I like the idea of what the presenter Richard Sanders called 'these woolly monsters' rooting for truffles around Ashford, and watching Eurostar thundering past and possibly wondering how they could hitch a lift to Brussels where they could spread swine fever.
I make it an absolute rule never to believe any statistics issued by pressure groups or government departments about anything at all. They're usually bogus, aimed at catching publicity for a particular hobby-horse or designed to attract more public money for a pet project. When I hear there's a tit crisis, I know perfectly well there isn't. The birds, that is. When told recently I should be worried there were millions fewer of these birds, I merely looked out of the window only to see bat- talions of them darting from hedge to branch.
I also gleaned from Farming Today that there's a body called the Apple and Pear Research Council whose head, a professor, might have to resign because of anti-sleaze legislation. What's going on down there in the orchards? I thought. Scandal among the Cox's Orange Pippins and Confer- ences? No, it seems that the Nolan inquiry has decided that all quango heads can serve only two terms of office, so the fruit boffin currently in charge of apples and pears will have to step down quite unneces- sarily. Either that, or he will have to be shot — or was that the boar they were talk- ing about? I suppose I should have record- ed the programme because I'm not normally very alert between 6 and 6.30 in the morning.
I was only listening in the first place because of reports that Farming Today might have to give way to an earlier start for Today and more financial news for yup- pies guiding their Porsches and Ferraris across London to City dealing-rooms. As part of the new Radio Four Controller's review of the network, the programme might be dropped. Today, it is said, needs to compete with Radio Five Live's 6 a.m. The Breakfast Programme which is attract- ing listeners. I can't see that exciting overnight news of coffee futures will have them flocking back to Today but perhaps the Controller James Boyle has something else in mind.
Five Live's programme, presented by Jane Garvey and Peter Allen, is really quite good. You don't switch on and sit through an overlong and sometimes fruitless inter- view with a politician before catching up with the news. It has its own distinct flavour, shorter items with an emphasis on explanation, and more banter between its presenters which seems to work early in the morning. On Monday, after seven o'clock it led with the decision by a Labour MP to table a private member's anti-hunting bill and a robust defence of hunting by Robin Hanbury-Tenison, followed by Peter Allen live from the EU Amsterdam summit. Although the political editor Robin Oakley in Amsterdam sounded as if he were broadcasting from the central reservation of a motorway, we heard all we needed to know considering that little information was available at the moment about a deal between France and Germany over the sin- gle currency. Oakley was in great demand by the BBC. `Poor Robin,'. said Allen, 'he's probably done 15 two-ways in the past half an hour.' I'm surprised Allen didn't ask him for a few tips for Ascot, as The Spectator's excellent racing columnist was probably wishing he were in Berkshire this week instead of attending an EU summit. The creation of Five Live, the merging of radio and televi- sion and the absorption of the World Ser- vice has meant that reporters spend much of their time supplying a voracious output instead of actually covering the story. There'll be much more of this when BBC television starts up its expensive and com- pletely unnecessary 24-hour news network.
It would be a mistake to make Today sound too much like Five Live. Their dif- ferent approaches offer listeners a choice. Today, I've noticed, has adopted a lighter touch in recent months with more interac- tion between presenters. Five Live news programmes like Nationwide in the after- noons bear the slight resonance of Ameri- can talk radio shows where the presenters chat between themselves. In America, though, there is little substance to them and they have a deliberately surreal quality.
As for Farming Today, I would leave it as it is. Not only does it fulfil the BBC's public service remit, farms and country people, their ways of life under threat from an ignorant, intolerant urban class and its bossy, puritanical government, would miss it and find its departure deeply symbolic.
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