How very appropriate that the Queen’s death was announced just after the six-o’clock news bulletin.
Mishal Husain’s well-spoken tones made the historic statement, followed by Evan Davis’s reading of the tweet from the Palace.
On the number 11 bus, I was listening on my DAB earphones. Other passengers gleaned the news from their devices; the buzz united us. Admittedly long-prepared, the voices leading the Radio 4 tributes – Jim Naughtie, Robert Lacey and Gyles Brandreth – and the brilliantly chosen sound archive reflected the impact of history. It was a triumph for the spoken word.
Roger Bolton would often open a Feedback item on Radio 4 by saying, ‘Listeners were not pleased when…’
Listeners were not pleased when he was sacked as presenter.
OK, he’s 76 and has done 23 years at this coalface, after editing Panorama and presenting Right to Reply – hence his well-informed authority.
He will be replaced – please, not by two giggly young women with baby voices and rising inflections – from ‘outside London’. His last broadcast underlined the BBC’s smugness:
‘It claims to be our BBC. It belongs to the people who pay for it, not to those who are paid by it. It’s vulnerable because it faces an unsupportive government, which makes the BBC defensive. Remember the John Birt era? Radio was “on its last legs”. Today, radio has never been more popular.’
Podcasts have been liberating, Bolton concedes, but – as he told me from Devon – ‘Only a small number will stand the test of time.’ Looking for a critical podcast on podcasts, I found John Ryan’s Pod Roast: succinct and scathing. His verdict on Desert Island Discs? ‘So old-fashioned it’s printed in sepia… Why the Bible and Shakespeare? Fresh formatics needed.’
Ryan, a former radio producer, tells new podcasters, ‘Get an editor! Take out the erms and sos and the repetitions.’ For him (and me), the new Americast beats Maitlis and Sopel’s The News Agents. He says, ‘Speech radio is samey.’ Especially in this year of Tory-leadership groundhog days.
This unashamedly pro-age column pricks up its ears when a well-informed, mature voice breaks into the babble, eg Bridget Kendall on Gorbachev or Isabel Hilton on China. Joan Bakewell (89) and A N Wilson (71) popped up together on Times Radio with their opinions. Wilson said, ‘We have no business getting involved in the Ukraine, a corrupt country.’ He complained, too, of the sliminess of a microwaved baked potato. Not that Andrew has ever possessed a microwave.
Saturday Live is curate’s-eggy, as someone said recently. But when Deborah Moggach, 74, breezed in on her bike, bringing many tales and a lively, candid manner of telling them, she was the best of guests. The hosts, accustomed to guests’ self-referential solipsisms about their ‘journeys’, were silenced, agog to hear about Moggach’s writer mother, Charlotte Hough – a Samaritan – imprisoned at 60 for abetting a euthanasia suicide.
They were gripped by Moggach’s lover Mel Calman’s dying of a heart attack beside her in a Leicester Square cinema during Brian De Palma’s Carlito’s Way.
She’d come to plug her play of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, based on her original 2004 novel, These Foolish Things. Do read!
