Radio
Magisterial sounds
Michael Vestey
We were in Venice earlier this month renting, with friends, an imposing high-win- dowed flat on the Fondamenta S. Caterina in the Canerregio district north of the Rial- to. After a day tramping the narrow calle, criss-crossing the Grand Canal on the traghetti, stumbling across yet another Tin- toretto in a church unfamiliar to us, cruci- fixion fatigue would set in and we would return through the fading milky light of the early evening for a drink and the news on the BBC World Service.
The rousing strains of Lilliburlero, the most famous of all call signs, heralding the start of the news, would echo through the spacious piano nobile and no doubt drift along the Fondamenta to startle a passing boatman or two. It is played 17 times a day on the World Service and, wherever I go in the world, it remains powerfully evocative of the magisterial word from London. I lit- erally feel my spine tingling. It is, though, a tune we tend to take for granted without really thinking of its origins.
So when I returned to England I was interested to find a tape the BBC World Service had sent me of an arts programme, a Meridian Feature: Lilliburlero, broadcast last weekend. It deserves an airing on Radio Four. Last Saturday was the 55th birthday of Lilliburlero on the World Ser- 'You've been watching too many of those cookery programmes.' vice and the producer Dan Shepherd and presenter Nick Rankin delved into the 300- year-old history of the tune, some of which I was unaware of.
It is, of course, an anti-Catholic jig with Irish roots which was adopted by William of Orange in the late 17th century as a marching tune for his Protestant troops and is still used in Orange Day parades in Northern Ireland. Purcell first adapted it for harpsichord but it was written by the Protestant propagandist Thomas Wharton, and the original Gaelic words refer to William Lilley the famous astrologer who had predicted the Protestant ascendancy. Ironically, and the programme skated over this, it is thought originally to have cele- brated a Catholic massacre of Protestants in Ireland before being taken up later by William's troops. Julian Humphrys of the National Army Museum told us of its remarkable similarity to the then new nurs- ery rhyme, 'Rock a Bye Baby' which also began as an anti-papist song.
When the Catholic James II came to the throne he caused alarm by producing an heir to secure the Stuart succession. In the nursery rhyme, the baby on the tree-top is the heir, when the wind blows it is the Protestant wind that will blow the fleet of William over to Britain, and when the bough breaks and 'down will come baby, cradle and all' down too will come the Stu- art monarchy. Lilliburlero started being played on the BBC Home Service in 1943 and was chosen by the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers as a regimental march.
The present version was arranged by the music producer David Cox in 1970 and has managed to survive attempts by Catholics to have it removed. The poet Robert Graves wrote to the Times in 1972 com- plaining of its anti-Catholic connotations and Meridian interviewed a woman in Dublin who said she would prefer some- thing less controversial, perhaps Cliff Richard singing 'Congratulations'. The pro- gramme tried it out and the result sounded hideous. Rankin said ominously at the end of the programme that the World Service was trying to balance the contradictions of modernity and tradition, so I hope that doesn't mean curtains for Lilliburlero in a burst of modernising zeal. We shall have to see.
There was another, more widely known, birthday last weekend, the 90th of Alistair Cooke who broadcast his 2,597th edition of Letter From America. Throughout the week on Radio Four, Ian Richardson read extracts from Nick Clarke's biography of Cooke due to be published next year, and Clarke presented a tribute last Saturday in The Archive Hour, produced by Tony Grant. It contained a witty and illuminating speech by Cooke about his life and art, delivered to the Royal Television Society 01 New York. Early on, he realised that writ- ing for talking meant putting it on the page 'in a syntactical break-up and normal con- fusion that is normal talk'; not to be inhib- ited as he wrote but to cut afterwards and to trust, as Freud advised, his unconscious. Cooke developed a style of broadcasting in which he imagined himself talking to no more than two friends in a room.
There was also a repeat of his Letter From America in June 1968 in which he described in harrowing terms the assassina- tion of Robert Kennedy. He was close by when it happened and he saw Kennedy's face. It was 'like the stone face of a child on a cathedral tomb'. He dismissed what he called the `sophistry of collective guilt' that led people to believe that a nation killed the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, not the country's derelicts. Clarke ended the programme by reassuring us that only infirmity while he was still alive would bring an end to Cooke's Letter From America.
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