Missing the picture
Kate Chisholm
Why would anyone want to listen to a programme about the Oscars? Surely the whole point is to see those ghastly frocks and gimcrack smiles, effortfully put on forthe-camera-only? And yet Paul Gambaccini was sent over to Hollywood to recreate the ‘magic’ of the Oscars for a new Radio Four series (Saturday), And the Academy Award Goes To ... He took us inside the tiny room, in the Roosevelt Hotel, where the very first Oscars were awarded on 16 May 1929; from such small things do Versace glamfests grow. Fascinating enough. But it was just so irritating to hear the sweeping score of Lawrence of Arabia (winner of Best Picture in 1962) without being able to see those stunning images of the desert. There are times when only TV will do.
Later in the week, another new series left its audience, i.e., me, begging for some pictures — a panning shot across the city taken from a helicopter, or a scene-setting photomontage, blending documentary footage with images from now. (I know, I know, such techniques have become a cliché, and yet sometimes it is jolly useful to be able to see what everyone is talking about.) Roger Law (co-creator of Spitting Image) took a soundrecording team to China to investigate the astonishing boom in the art market there. Art Made in China (Radio Four, Monday to Friday) told an extraordinary story.
After decades, if not centuries, of the state banning creative freedom and only allowing government-supervised ‘art’, there are now estimated to be one million ‘artists’ living and working freely in Beijing. To prove it, Law took us to the construction site of a whole village that is being built solely for these artists, complete with concrete studios and glass-walled houses. (The state, weirdly, now seems to be encouraging what it formerly tried to repress as a way of tempting the West to come visit and spend, spend, spend.) Along the way we visited trendy installations in what were once ancient warehouses and frenzied art-world parties fuelled by dollars and euros. We heard about artists like the man who spends his time creating pumpkins of all shapes and sizes and colours because he wants to see how many varieties he can come up with. His one-man show consisted of 200 of them. ‘It’s an artwork,’ he insisted. How could we tell without seeing his vegetarian heaven?
Thank goodness, then, for Between the Ears (Radio Three, Saturday), which weekby-week takes a different subject and is not afraid to interpret it solely through its aural qualities. This week we were in Belfast, in a programme devised by the film-music composer David Holmes, who was born in the city. In The Wall of a Million Bricks (produced by Declan McGovern) we heard from all sorts of people affected by the euphemistically called ‘Peace Lines’ that still exist in Belfast despite the Agreement. Their stories and thoughts about these monstrous carbuncles, one of them even carving in two an area of parkland on the outskirts of the city, were underlain by a soundtrack of music that subtly worked against what was being said.
The ‘lines’ — or rather walls — were first constructed in 1969 out of nothing more than barbed wire and rubble as a way of keeping the two communities, Catholic and Protestant, apart. They were at first not very high, and were thought to be only ‘temporary’. Now some of them rise to over 30 feet and are built from reinforced concrete or bricks. Twenty-six of them. Not something we hear about very often, and especially not from Westminster or Stormont. One, in particular, was symbolically made of one million bricks and cost, we were told, £1 million to construct. As Baroness (May) Blood, elected to the House of Lords after 40 years as a community worker in the heart of the Shankhill Road area, remarked, that £1 million could surely have been spent in a more useful way, working perhaps on ‘the walls in people’s minds’. As she spoke, we also heard the kind of soft, drawn-out, melodi ous music that is used in relaxation tapes. You might think this deflected attention from what was being said. In fact it seemed to echo the baroness’s thoughts, or rather to emphasise them, taking our minds on a journey from bigotry into something more reflective and harmonious.
Thank goodness, too, that A Good Read is back, hosted for this series only by the novelist Kate Mosse (mostly known for Labyrinth). She and her guests (the lawyer Shami Chakrabarti and gardener Carol Klein) between them chose a Harry Potter, a Graham Greene (The Comedians) and a subtly provocative first novel by Catherine O’Flynn, What Was Lost, which they were all so enthusiastic about that I wanted to rush out and buy it immediately. Three talking heads in conversation for 30 minutes about three books? Not something you are ever likely to see now on TV.
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