Radio
Here yesterday
Noel Malcolm
When John Timpson was asked why he was leaving the Today programme after so many years, he said that he thought he ought to get out while he was winning. I've never quite understood this attitude. Win- ning what, exactly, apart from a very large salary? A few weeks later Aled Jones announced that he was giving up his career as soprano-superstar, but insisted that it wasn't because his voice was beginning to break. No, it was in order to 'get out at the top'. The boy is 16 years old, for heaven's sake. If he said his voice was breaking he would disappoint no one, except those of us who have begun to suspect that he's like the circus girl in Nicholas Nickleby who was billed as an 11-year-old but was in fact twice that age and stunted by gin. But I digress. The point is that this is an attitude taken by singers, sportsmen and other star 'We should have included a recruiting leaflet.' performers who feel they have a fan-club and a place in history to support. Mr Timpson may have both of these; but should he think of himself in this way? Could he not simply say that he's tired of getting up at three o'clock, or that he's afraid of turning into someone like Brian Redhead?
For years I have tried to work out what it is that makes Brian Redhead's perform- ance so unbearably self-regarding. It's not that he tries to score points off his inter- viewees in any direct way. And I have to admit, grudgingly, that he is an extremely able questioner, good at talking and think- ing on his feet. But he has a cheeky-boy manner when dealing with Cabinet minis- ters etc which doesn't depend on saying particular cheeky things, but involves framing questions about major political or industrial issues in a way that makes them sound like arguments in a school play- ground. The result: either the interviewee goes along with the Redhead view of the world, and ends up sounding more like a schoolboy himself, or he tries to explain that it's all a bit more complicated and more important than that, and ends up sounding pompous and irritable. Either result redounds greatly to the credit of Mr Redhead, who has shown us that he can see through the lot of them. We all need the occasional comment from little boys about the state of our Emperors' clothing. But boys who make a habit of it are usually showing signs of latent exhibitionism them- selves.
It is almost impossible for any sane, normal person to appear regularly on radio, and a fortiori on television, without becoming a 'personality'. Kleist has a story (suitably enough in his essay 'On the Puppet Theatre') about a graceful child who turned into a gawky adolescent the moment he became aware of his own gracefulness. When people discover that they are not just people, but personalities, there is a similar fall from grace. Gerald Priestland was a perfectly good religious affairs correspondent until, not long before he retired, he started reading his fan mall and believing it. Now he knows he's sitting on a gold-mine of lovable idiosyncracies --- a cross between Malcolm Muggeridge and Winnie the Pooh — and he's never out of the studio. It is one of the excellences of the World Service that the people who present its programmes never turn into personalities. To hear what I mean, listen to Malcolm Billings, an old World Service hand, who is now cornering the history/ archaeology market on Radio 4. He pre- sented two exemplary programmes last week, one on Avebury, the other a miscel- lany about ruins, from which I learned that some of the ruins built by Sanderson Miller were so good that they fell down, and that mediaeval masons who did not want their buildings to fall down added ox blood to the mortar. Best of all, I learned nothing whatsoever about Mr Billings, except that he is a good listener and a good talker, who knows how to sound interested in his subject-matter without getting in its way. Every now and then I turn for light relief to Radio Pyongyang (often surprisingly audible from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. on 6575 kHz), where the extinction of personality is practised as an art form. There is only one Personality in the whole of North Korea, and unfortunately the entire evening's broadcast often consists of one of his speeches. But it was refreshing, while Radio 4 was suffering badly from the great news famine over Christmas, to tune in to Pyongyang, where both Christmas and news are equally unknown. Persistent listeners are rewarded sooner or later with a 'commentary' entitled 'The imperialists are. showing their blood-stained teeth again', or, best of all, a folk-song, which the presenter introduces by reading out the !Ynes while the chorus hums romantically in the background. 'Oh the Party has brought me up to be as sound and upright as a bamboo stake in its bosom.' That song Is haunting me. I wonder if young Aled
Could be persuaded to put it in his farewell recital.
Previous page
