ARTS

A waste of breath

Lloyd Evans calls for silence on the airwaves Ihave a secret. I try to keep it quiet but it's hard — especially when I meet Radio Four producers interested in my writing. It is that I hate Radio Four. I loathe it. I detest it. You could empty a hundred Rogets and never plumb the depths of my revulsion. In company I never mention it because my vehemence rapidly becomes embarrassing. I cannot explain it. But whenever my radio dial strays accidentally into the Death Zone and I hear some well- fed white middle-class person speaking in a vastly important manner about a subject of no importance, I seethe — I glower. My lips narrow. My eyebrows meet. The finger- nails deep in my tightening fists find blood.

I have no quarrel with the well-fed white middle classes. I'm one of them. And yet, when I hear Radio Four, something evil as the urge to commit murder begins to flow- er in my heart. Nor can I be alone in this. My mind is insufficiently original. There must be others out there. Are you one?

Radio Four grew out of the Home Ser- vice. In the early days this was the BBC — and some regard Radio Four as the BBC's quintessence. It is not. The BBC is packed with ambitious, worldly go-getters who are currently responding to their audience's polymorphous tastes with a digital TV rev- olution. Radio Four doesn't attract such people. Like the central dogma of some ancient faith, it remains in a world that's moved on — unchallenged, irrelevant, obtuse, immutable.

Why am I writing this? I'm poor. I'll write for anyone — even Radio Four (though clearly they may revise their inter- est in me shortly). Insolvency would com- pel me to accept any work they might offer. If you call that hypocrisy, you're right. It is hypocrisy and I'm a hypocrite (of course I don't actually mean I'm a hypocrite, I'm just saying it). Recently I went into Broad- casting House to discuss ideas for a series — and I felt a fraud. Some absurd social scruple prevented me from speaking out. But my loathing is deep and craves expres- sion. I have nothing against the audience, let me make that clear. Radio Four listen- ers, like cattle or humming birds, deserve whatever pleasures their simple lives afford them. I wish them no malice. What I revile is the mentality that allows Radio Four to continue.

The best thing on the network is the shipping forecast. Like an incantation or a speech from the theatre of the absurd, it lists the ancient names of seas alongside plain, homespun adjectives — 'good', 'fair', 'moderate' and so on. Lousy material. Great show. What else is there? Moronic parlour games, dreary documentaries fea- turing items barely worthy of a parish

newsletter, chirpy news-quizzes zinging with self-approval, free airtime for windbag bishops. Comedy shows which sound like scientific investigations into how much mirthless plagiarism can be fitted into 30 minutes. Dramas that each week set fresh standards for ineptitude and feeble-mind- edness. Take a hundred monkeys, as the saying goes, give them a hundred typewrit- ers and after a million years they would write Shakespeare. After about two min- utes they would write the Friday Play. Then there are the panel shows, the endless panel shows with their swarms, their plagues of panellists — the Jennies and Jil- lies and Mollies and Libbies, the Pennies and Ginnies and Dollies and Dillies, the Jans and the Frans and the Tams and the Pams — each one crying out for a panel- beater. And finally there's The Archers, a 50-year old soap that glories in a kind of sluggish, bovine triviality. Like Chekhov, but without the vibrant optimism.

Listening to Radio Four means volun- teering to have your time wasted. Assum- ing you pay your licence fee there's the added joy of having your money wasted simultaneously. Radio Four delivers about as much entertainment as you'd have sit- ting in a stalled cab watching the meter rise Assembling your new bar is really a twelve- step programme while the garrulous driver beats a constant pulse on your eardrums.

Fans will tell you Radio Four extends your experience, that its output is so diverse you can 'travel the world' just by tuning in. I disagree. There is only one way to travel the world. It involves opening and shutting the front door. If someone told you their sex life had improved immeasur- ably since they brought their new high- powered telescope, would you believe them?

And why is there no competition for Radio Four? The BBC runs five national radio networks — each has spawned imita- tors that shamelessly replicate their entire range of programming with a few Car phone Warehouse adverts thrown in to pay the bills. But no one has launched a rival to Radio Four. Could it be that commercial radio is on to something here — and that, in the harsh language of media finance, Radio Four eats Pedigree Chum, pants all summer and says 'Woof'?

The other great claim of devotees is that you can listen while 'doing something else'. Cooking. Cleaning. Scrubbing. Scraping. But has anyone done anything important while listening? Anything exciting? Any- thing fun? Do lovers hearing the MoneY Box theme rush to each other from oppos- ing rooms shouting 'Darling! It's our song! and then tear off their clothes and throw themselves on the cold tiles seized by raw desire ...? The fact is no one listens to Radio Four. They half-listen, they quarter listen. It's cultural muzak, a background hum for Middle England's stoned millions, mentally 'out of it' on the ironing. What galls me most is the ethos of Radio Four. Listen to it for a few minutes and you can tell whom it's aimed at — complacent, deluded people who think they know where they stand in this life and shape their exis- tences around its certainties. But life is not like Radio Four. Life is bananas. Radio Four appears not to have noticed. So I revile Radio Four.

We're a schizophrenic country. A nation of shopkeepers on the one hand, a nation of rock stars, football hooligans and empire-builders on the other. We invented Punk. And we invented PEPs. Radio Four is for the personal-equity-planners, the intellectually brain-dead, the stay-at-home- and-dust-the-porcelain tendency. I'm with the smashers of porcelain, the criminals and hooligans and world-changers. I'm with the explorer up the Amazon dying in .a pool of sweat with a blow-dart lodged in his neck. So I revile Radio Four.

It exudes weakness and timidity. Its intel- lectual ambitions are those of the dish- cloth and the baking tray. It is the official

voice of constipated thinking, the apathetic half-wit's station of choice. It's for people Whose grandest ambition is to die in their beds aged 90. I don't want to die in my bed aged 90. I want to die in someone else's bed aged 90, preferably the attractive Young wife of my next-door neighbour. So I revile Radio Four.

Recently there has been chatter about new controllers tinkering with the network. And a few years ago I remember how close We were to a State of Emergency when Woman's Hour moved from the afternoon to the morning. But it doesn't matter when Woman's Hour is broadcast. What matters, What shames us, is that it is broadcast at all. Shift The Archers? Trim The World At One? Who cares? There is only one change that Will have a lasting and benevolent effect on this much-admired nation of ours. This is it. Radio Four must be destroyed.

Lloyd Evans was taking part in Radio Four's New Writing Initiative at the time of writing.