Radio
Mutual therapy
Michael Vestey
There's been a listlessness about the dying days of summer on Radio Four. George Formby, I was at first pleased to hear, was presenting Today, without his ukulele because it was, in fact, Alex Brodie, standing in for someone. The News Quiz started a new season but, frankly, I can't stand more than ten minutes of it before I
reach for the off switch. Yes, such bees as still lingered in the flower beds had the air of tired businessmen who were about to shut up the office and go off to dinner'. This line from High Stakes, one of P.G. Wodehouse's golfing stories, summed up the network for me but of course there's always the autumn and winter. Wodehouse is the only author who could interest me in golf and it was a pleasure to hear a repeat of the stories of golfing rivalry on Radio Four this week, read by the late Simon Cadell.
Wodehousian collisions marked Radio Four's Marcelle — Life After Cosmo (Tues- day), a comically twee account of how Mar- celle d'Argy Smith (Oh, Gussie Fink-Nottle where are you now?) has survived leaving her 11-year job at the helm of Cosmopoli- tan magazine. Feeding every modern girl's neuroses must have been stressful; she says it was 'fast-moving and neurotic' but she loved it. Now, though, she enjoys working from home — a dinky little flat near Hyde Park. This, and the city itself, which she is now discovering as a tourist, made her think that it's like being married for a long time and suddenly falling in love with your partner. A very Cosmo remark, this.
Hyde Park is the natural place for her to go jogging in the morning and, apart from the birds, trees and flowers — yes, those things on stalks — you meet so many extraordinary people in the park who you don't necessarily bump into every day of Your life, she gushed. `I bumped into Andreas Whittam Smith ... I was such a fan of his and his paper...' Marcelle and Andreas, he in his cute white jogging shorts, Marcelle, no doubt, roller-blading between her Linford Christie sprints.
They had met before, actually, but she never dared say hello. Now here she was, talking to him! Courtesy of Radio Four, of course. Smith A.W. ruminated on life after editorship, having lost his at the Indepen- dent, two ex-editors offering mutual thera- py in Hyde Park, cast adrift from the chauffeur-driven cars and power lunches.
Marcelle, though, was bearing up like a true Cosmo woman, enjoying her days at the hairdresser and the manicurist. 'Jean has been doing my hair for ever ... '
Her time encouraging women to have it all was an exhausting process. 'I didn't realise you didn't have time to go to the bathroom,' she says. An editorial crisis sent her rushing to the shrink and a dose of Prozac — the magazine's circulation went into a dive. Enter another Wodehousian character, A.A. Gill, the columnist and restaurant critic lunching at the luvvies' place, The Ivy. Gill opined that 10,000 years of progress from the swamps and savannah had led us to his favourite restau- rant'. Everybody has been there, he says rev- erently. This twaddle of a programme did at least have the merit of making me laugh. John Birt is more Stanley Kubrick than Wodehouse and I wasn't going to mention the BBC Director General this week but he popped up on Feedback on Radio Four last Friday, sounding less like a combination of Dr Strangelove and Chance than usual. He was answering listeners' fears about the future of radio, and it became apparent to me — as someone who also trains people to be interviewed — that BBC spin-doctors might be making progress with Birt the broadcaster.
He hates giving interviews or public speeches, you sense the unease there all the time. But on Feedback he'd softened his tone, shed much of the jargon and even when he used the phrase 'multiple distribu- tion' — referring to the world the BBC is moving into — he added with what passed as a slight chuckle,^to use the jargon'. He didn't say much that was new but, in trying to reassure people that the World Service would not wrecked by its domestic radio take-over, he said it would continue to have its own dedicated newsroom and its own journalistic focus.
Don't believe a word of it. As part of his bi-media - and keep-'em-on-their-toes approach everybody is moved around regu- larly. The old expertise of the World Ser- vice will soon be lost. Birt, by the way, leaves nothing to chance. When going any- where he sends a minion on ahead to check who is in a room about to receive his pres- ence, and what the layout is. I'm surprised he doesn't have a food-taster, as well.
My client will not eat his greens.'
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