What do mimics do these days?
Rory Bremner gave us his Trump voice – almost too easy, like Boris. He nailed poor Keir Starmer – apologetic, earnest, adenoidal. Bremner’s Trump claimed to have known Keir Hardie (‘loved his films – such good films with Stan Laurel, beautiful films’) and to have advised Hadrian to build his wall – ‘That’s what I told Hadrian and he did put up a wall, a beautiful wall.’
That was on Broadcasting House, which does its Sunday best to lighten a conflicted, war-torn world. Michael Berkeley’s Private Passions had interesting choices from Lucian Msamati, currently in Waiting for Godot. Having once turned down the part of Othello, he’d rather like to play Juliet.
‘A barrel-chested, deep-voiced man of African origin,’ he laughed, ‘playing a lovestruck 14-year-old girl.’
Next came Jenny Beavan, the brilliant designer of film costumes. Stephen Fry said only she could turn up at an award ceremony ‘looking like a bag lady’.
‘Look, Michael,’ said Beavan. ‘I’m short, fat and Welsh. There’s no way I’m going to wear a dress.’
She’s funny, forthright, a great music enthusiast and proud of her father, who was one of six cellists on the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album.
Andrew O’Hagan, the Glaswegian novelist, in Friendship (Radio 4, in five parts), went to Ireland to give the eulogy at the funeral of his friend Edna O’Brien.
On his last visit to see her, he took champagne. She thanked him with, ‘Oh Andrew – the great enemy is Prosecco!’
He’d also been spending a lot of time with his ‘imaginary friend’ Charles Dickens. ‘He isna exactly a friend, but I felt he was by my side, and lighting the way, in the writing of a big London novel.’ That’s Caledonian Road – which several critics indeed found Dickensian.
Dickensian is the umbrella title of Radio 4’s dramatisations of Hard Times and Little Dorrit. The association of period drama with Sunday seems ineradicable: can it still work on radio?
Little Dorrit is far too massive to contain in three episodes – so bravo to seasoned adaptor Mike Walker for undertaking it. Andrew Davies’s 2008 TV version took 14 episodes.
With Jeremy Mortimer directing, this production still manages to convey the atmosphere of the Marshalsea, the Circumlocution Office and the dim, dreary Sundayness of a Victorian London Sunday. It helps that Dickens himself is the narrator, played by Jason Watkins, who also plays the villainous Rigaud.
When Hillary Clinton popped up on Today in praise of Kamala Harris, sounding distractingly shrill, it was a relief to listen next to Kate Kennedy, cellist and author of a new book, Cello.
She told the story of the Hungarian composer and cellist Pál Hermann, who (with cello) vanished into a Nazi camp 85 years ago, when he was last seen by daughter Corrie. She, now 92, was, amazingly, there in the Today studio.
Even more amazingly, there too was the lost cello, a Gagliano, played by the Australian virtuoso Sam Lucas. ‘The cello is the nearest thing to our human body,’ as Kennedy said. ‘A torso-sized, resonating cavity that we hold against our breastbone.’ A too-brief musical interlude, yet sublime.
I am bewildered by how many prolific podcasters come garlanded with social-media likes: the chefs Michelin-starred, the novelists bestselling, the actors award-winning. Arthur Smith once announced himself as an ‘award-winning comedian’ – then added, ‘Unfortunately, the award was for swimming.’
And what sad news about Ed McLachlan (1940-2024), the great Oldie cartoonist.
How he captured the moronic back-slapping you can’t avoid these days in radio interviews – see his divine cartoon pictured.
The Oldie November 2024
