Radio
Clones and monsters
Noel Malcolm
Wen I penned my farewell tribute to the Timpson-Redhead Today Programme, a kind reader wrote to me to question the validity of the distinction I was making between Redhead and Timpson. 'I have seldom been able to distinguish the one from the other', he wrote, 'and have held that the transformation (if any) took place a long time ago: each has become a clone of the other. Of course, at 821/2 my hearing may be turning faulty.' Now, although I never had any difficulty in sorting them out, I feel that this observation must be in some very profound sense true. As with faces, where expressions are more impor- tant for purposes of recognition than mere physical features, so with voices it is the style of speech, rather than the pitch or the accent, which characterises the person. MY correspondent pointed out that there were several 'clone-families' within Radio 4, and now I can't stop thinking about this whenever I switch it on. There is no perceptible difference, for example, be- tween Robert Williams (PM Programme) and Gordon Clough (World at One); the character called 'Nicholas Tucker' on stop the Week is obviously played by the Rabbi Lionel Blue; and even the excellent Ex- plorers Extraordinary was spoiled for me last Sunday when the myopic Prussian monomaniac Ludwig Leichardt turned out to be indistinguishable from Fritz Spiegl. The exception that proves the rule is Willie Rushton, who never sounds like anyone except Willie Rushton, even when he is trying to. The new comedy series Moles- worth (Radio 4, Mondays, 12.27 pm) is disappointing, not only because it hasn't really captured the delicious crassness of the original book, but also because Whenever I listen to it all I can hear is Willie Rushton reading a script. When I first wrote about The Archers (who are now basking in the glory of a richly deserved Golden Award, whatever that is), my main complaint was that it was Impossible to work out who all the speak- ers were — not because their voices were all the same, but because they were all cousins and aunts and nieces. Fortunately they have been forced to go through a great deal of family history recently, be- cause it turned out that Mr Archer's second wife's daughter's boyfriend was Mr Archer's first wife's father's second wife's SO n. So at least that is clear. In fact I am now confident that I can pair off, filiate and divorce must of them in roughly the right order, give or take a few 'uncles' Whose avuncularity remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma. The person who earns my greatest sympathy and admira- tion, on the grounds that she is not related to any of them, is the saintly Mrs Snell. She arrived in the programme shortly after I started listening to it, having previously lived in Sunningdale, and she has made short work of getting to know everybody and sitting on all the right committees. For a while I wondered whether Mr Archer's first wife had in fact escaped the blazing barn in which she was thought to have Perished, and had survived, totaly amne- siac but only slightly charred, to marry the debonair computer programmer Mr Snell. Rut, sadly, it seems that Mrs Snell's role on this programme is not to unleash any Dickensian denouements, but only to act as the butt of interminable flights of scriptwriters' humour concerning the ignorance and vulgarity of Home Counties suburbia. Mrs Snell worries about preserv- ing rare breeds, is shocked by the sight of a dead rabbit and (worst of all) says `cooee' When greeting friends across a crowded room. She has never seen a farm before in her life, and thinks that the countryside is What you wipe your feet on before getting back into your BMW. All this makes me realise what a narrow, Sheltered life has been led by these poor, blinkered people — I mean the scriptwri- ters. They may have ventured sometimes away from their desks, but they clearly haven't ventured as far as Sunningdale. .I recommend an outing; the country air would do them some good. On leaving Sunningdale station they should turn left and then left again: this will bring them roughly to the centre of the village, where they will find Broom Hall Farm. I recom- mend Mr Tomkins's fresh eggs. But I fear that they will quickly tire of Sunningdale life, since it is much less sophisticated than what they are used to in Ambridge. Sun- ningdale, unlike Ambridge, does not pos- sess a luxury hotel, and it did not even have a wine bar until six months ago, although the EEC-rich farmers of Ambridge have been ordering their glasses of sparkling Saumur at Nelson Gabriel's since time immemorial.
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