Podcasts may be the future but Valerie Grove's old habits die hard
‘Come on, man! What you doing radio programmes for? Podcasts are the future, man!’
Thus spoke Alastair Campbell to Rory Stewart in their shared podcast, when Stewart plugged his Radio 4 series, A Long History of Argument from Socrates to Social Media. Alas, Campbell is probably right.
Does anyone else still listen on a radio set, catching programmes at the time they are broadcast – eg the Six O’Clock News, 100 this year? ‘To the six-o’clock news and a lime-juice and gin’, as Betjeman wrote, of visiting Joan Hunter Dunn’s Surrey home.
When first broadcast, the 6pm bulletin was read once at normal speed, and then again s-l-o-w-l-y, ‘so that listeners can take notes’. Hilarious! Imagine noting the repetitive platitudes of the Tory leadership contest, dragging on through the hot dog days of summer.
My young (now middle-aged) are captivated by podcasts: This American Life, Uncanny, High Performance, The Rest Is History, Adam Fleming on Boris, true crime with Paul Britton, and Times Radio’s Stories of Our Times.
My old habits die hard. Switching on, on a Sunday morning, I am happy to hear a succession of oldie friends: Sara Wheeler on writing Jan Morris’s life; Michael Palin on the ostrich; Jim Naughtie on catchy novel-openings; Maureen Lipman on the Lionesses – ‘clean, fresh, and nobody pretends they’re dying’.
Later, I hear my friend Roy Foster on Times Radio’s Times Literary Supplement slot, talking of Rose Dugdale, debutante turned IRA guerrilla, now 80, ‘in a nursing home run by the Poor Servants of the Mother of God, where the nuns take tea with her and think she’s great’, said Foster. ‘It’s like an Iris Murdoch novel.’
I even heard Peggy in The Archers (June Spencer, 103) giving her last wishes – to commission a stained-glass window marking the birth of her new great-grandchildren. A moving valedictory.
Radio 4 Extra (one of my refuges) is moving online. Let’s hope they continue to put out reruns of The Write Stuff, and books like the current gem – Peter O’Toole’s 1992 memoir Loitering with Intent, read in his lilting, lyrical, mellifluous voice: ‘these brick rabbit-hutches had been studded up, squat and meagre, back to back, row upon row along criss-crossing, cobblestoned miles of nasty, sunless, narrow streets’.
Notice the Under Milk Wood-like cadences? I scurried back to the book, to check. Then to YouTube, for Melvyn Bragg’s 1992 South Bank Show on O’Toole, which I urgently recommend. As Annabel Leventon writes on page 26, O’Toole would have been 90 in August. He is so intelligent, honest and modest, and in close-up, oh my, those beautiful eyes, and the lips enunciating every syllable.
The tale of how he ‘blundered into RADA’ is priceless. He chanced on its principal, Sir Kenneth Barnes, and they swapped tales of George Bernard Shaw. O’Toole was a newspaperman first, which explains much. He describes Siân Phillips, still happily with us at 89, as ‘my widow, an estimable, haughty bird, and beautiful’.
Here’s a test. ‘I am outgoing, nice, genuine, loyal, honest. Friends say I’m funny, and people seem to like my company, and smile and laugh when they’re with me.’ Male or female? Michael Rosen was challenged, on his Word of Mouth about the lingo of online dating (‘woke phishing’, ‘caking’, ‘cookie jarring’ etc), to guess the sex of this would-be date. ‘Female,’ said Rosen. Wrong!
But unrestrained self-advertisement – ‘Hi! I’m Dr Julie Shaw, clinical psychologist! And I’m Sofie Hagen, stand-up comedian! And our Bad People podcast has science and jokes! Funny jokes!’ – has become the norm.
As Oliver Pritchett asked in last month’s Oldie, where did British understatement go? I found a corking example in Matthew Syed’s Sideways on nuclear warfare. In a 1959 clip of Bertrand Russell at a CND meeting, Russell said, ‘Modern weapons have the power to destroy the entire human race’– and then added, in his venerable, ancient voice, ‘which many of us are inclined to agree would be rather a pity.’
