Pipeline power
Kate Chisholm
How easily we forget! Who, for instance, was the first of the world’s major leaders to talk to George W. Bush after 9/11? No, it wasn’t Blair. Or the democratically elected leaders of Canada, Australia, France, Germany or Denmark. It was Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the new President of Russia. He was staying at his villa on the Black Sea when, like the rest of the developed world, he watched the satellite pictures as the Twin Towers came tumbling down. His response was to phone Bush immediately and to tell him that at such a time his Russian government would not just talk about being helpful but would also take action to be supportive. He would personally request the Central Asian governments (and former Soviet satellites) of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to allow the Americans to set up military bases in their territories. Not only that, he would travel himself to Washington and Texas to create a unique photo opportunity: Putin and Bush with jackets off and smiles applied not with Araldite but Velcro.
Now, of course, six years later, the talk is once again of a Cold War, a breakdown of communication between East and West, a miscomprehension, a potential for conflict. Putin is feared by Washington as an exKGB man; a non-believer (in the American way). In return Putin and the Kremlin feel as if their philanthropic intentions after 9/11 have been ruthlessly rebuffed. The Americans want to establish bases not as protective devices, but rather as aggressive spying machines designed to keep an eye on what the Kremlin is up to.
In Dancing with the Russian Bear (Radio Four, Monday nights, and the World Service), Tim Whewell reminded us that, while our esteemed leaders have been fiddling in Afghanistan and Iraq, Putin has been looking for ways to rebuild Russian hegemony — through Pipeline Power. With prices from the Middle East no longer so attractive, and our own natural gas supplies coming to an end, it’s becoming more and more economical to pipe gas and oil for thousands of miles from the extremities of Russia and across the Ukraine to Europe. And guess who’s in charge of the state-owned gas company, Gazprom (which now supplies 25 per cent of the European Union’s gas requirements)? None other than Dmitry Medvedev, shortly to become Putin’s successor as Russian president.
This is a fascinating series, focusing on a vital piece of the geopolitical jigsaw, but it’s been somewhat chaotically put together. There was no sense of narrative structure, or of an unfolding of ideas. In fact, I couldn’t help wondering whether Whewell, who also reports for BBC2’s Newsnight, would rather have made the programmes for TV. He gave us so little time to take a breath and catch up with him as he darted about from the inner sanctum of the Kremlin, where he took afternoon tea with Putin’s chief foreign policy adviser, to the streets of Kiev to find out about the Orange Revolution of 2004.
Glenn Gould, in contrast, lovingly prepared his documentaries for CBC (the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) specifically as radio pieces, for listening only, preferably while lying down in a darkened room, eyes shut and all attention focused on an electronic transistor enclosed in a small plastic box. In Gould’s Mind (Radio Four, Saturday) the veteran producer Piers Plowright resurrected some of Gould’s archive recordings.
Born in 1932, the Canadian pianist was of the first generation to grow up listening to the radio, and when he gave up performing in public (hating what he called ‘the blood sport’ of live performance) he turned to radio almost as if it were another way to make music, excited by its audiophonic possibilities. For The Idea of the North, a celebration of the Canadian wilderness, he took five people on a journey by train into the bleakest landscape, and then multitracked their free-flowing monologues about the silence, the solitude, the emptiness of that experience. Hundreds of hours were spent by him and his producer in the recording studio whittling the interviews he had made down to exactly the right pulse, the right beat, the contrapuntal harmonies that he heard continually in his mind and wanted to make real.
Gould was way ahead of his time — making a drama out of documentary material, using the spoken word as a musical instrument like today’s hip-hop artists, taking the new technology to its limits to see what it can do for our perceptions of the world. And Plowright’s celebration (produced in its turn by Michael Surcombe) echoed his innovative techniques, weaving together Gould’s own words with Joplin’s ‘Mercedes Benz’ and a Bach suite for violin and cello. It was like being taken on a weird journey through Gould’s mind as we burrowed into his strange programme about Petula Clark (in which he suggests that she’s the unlikely heroine of the Sixties’ pop scene) and his demolition of the Beatles: ‘the indulgent amateurishness of the musical material is surpassed only by the ineptitude of the studio production method’. I wish I’d heard that in 1967.
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