T urning 41, an anonymous age if ever there was one,
I found myself back at the school I went to three centuries ago — or so it seems. The occasion was a memorial to a favourite teacher. Neil Laing taught English and died young, at 56. The chapel of Epsom College was full of people in various stages of physical collapse whom I realised, on closer inspection, were the same age as me. We never thank our teachers, and here we were, belatedly, thanking him.
He would throw open the windows of his classroom and thunder his enthusiasm for literature and life; a lesson on Paradise Lost would suddenly switch into an appreciation of Erica Roe. He coached hockey and rugby but encouraged the misfits, like me, who were good at neither. Laing was, we were reminded, the only housemaster who gave colours (a striped tie) for things other than sport — unfashionable pursuits like acting or bridge. When a lad told him, in a state of confusion, ‘My parents want me to be a doctor but I just don’t know what to do,’ he advised, ‘It all comes down to one question. Do you want to spend the rest of your life looking at men’s willies?’ Aman rings my Radio Two show anxious to distance himself from so much hardline comment on Gary Glitter. ‘We must not be overwhelmed by the hysteria around this,’ he says. ‘Glitter should be humanely destroyed.’ Among other choice comments is a brilliant shaft of light from Trisha in Ellesmere: ‘The only way to stop all this fuss about animal testing is to try out all new drugs on animal rights protesters.’ Irealise now — and I should have realised it before — that listeners have better stories than we do. For years, newsreaders have ‘pranced about’ (thank you, Mr Straw, for that phrase) as if they know more than the people watching; as if it were their job to know everything. But the image of the all-knowing newscaster has been ripped to shreds by the sheer volume of information which is now moving around unmediated. The best approach we can take in response is to say, ‘Let’s try to work out what’s going on together.’ Under John Birt’s ‘mission to explain’, gimlet-eyed newscasters affected superhuman powers. But nobody believes that stuff any more, and it would be an appalling con for me and three bleary-eyed producers to walk into our office at 6.30 a.m. on a Wednesday imagining that we know more than our five million listeners. So we pool information rather than hand it down. Bring on the ‘mission to explore’.
Staying with my mum and dad, my twoyear-old daughter Martha developed a fear of ice-cream vans. One of them parked outside her bedroom and fired up the ‘Greensleeves’ klaxon with more airpower than Donald Rumsfeld. She now believes that the mobile vending of ice-cream is a sinister undertaking in itself.
Rather than calm her, I find myself developing the same anxieties. I once read an unforgettable poem about competing ice-cream vendors who wanted each other dead, and have always objected on principle to the Raspberry Mivvi. Even more significant, I am still digesting the email that announced, ‘You don’t know me, but I used to work for MI5 and employed an ice-cream van as cover. You nearly blew the operation by climbing in the back and interviewing me for a package on the Today programme 15 years ago,’ which was either God’s honest truth or a terrible cry for help. Either way, I cannot provide Martha with the reassurance she needs in this area.
Anyone heard of a topple tester? This peculiar machine crops up on Radio Two when one of my listeners says it has been used to push over his grandmother’s tombstone. The local council accepts the blame with a confident explanation: ‘We use a topple tester to make sure headstones are stable. Three children have been killed playing in UK cemeteries in the past eight years, and that is too many.’ The story triggers a torrent of response, because councils are apparently pushing over headstones all over the country; one listener emails a picture of a cemetery in the north of England where every single one is lying flat. There is natural audience uproar about our ‘ludicrous’ health and safety culture — until a woman rings to tell us that 20 years ago, while playing in a graveyard, she pushed over a granite cross and killed her best friend.
Imeet my neighbour John in the street and he points up at a roof where the chimney has fallen over. ‘Bogus roofers,’ he says. The pensioner inside was conned by two men who said they were just passing; there were a couple of tiles out of place which they could fix for a tenner. Up they go on their ladder. Half an hour later they have ‘found’ — I am using the word generously — £7,000 worth of damage needing urgent repair. The chimney fell over ‘when we touched it’. They march our neighbour to the bank and he extracts £1,600 as a deposit on work they will never do. If the people who did it are reading this, please could you return to the street where a small mob of friendly residents would like to show you a new way of using Moulinex blenders.
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