Radio
Split personality
Michael Vestey
The summer wine and food section in last week's Spectator was a delightful and civilised read. There was Katie Dashwood describing how thinly peeled cucumber can be salted to disgorge its juices, dried and then teamed with soured cream and dill; Minette Man-in wrote of her late mother- in-law's magnificent cold lunches of superb salmon and beef with 'memorable salads of scented tomatoes with mint and parsley .. .' I could almost smell the ingredients off the pages and I hurried to my bookshelves in search of inspiration from Elizabeth David, Josceline Dimbleby and Rick Stein. There is still August .. .
Food and cookery programmes on televi- sion are easy to follow because viewers can see the produce and methods used but one would think that Radio Four would know how to tackle food on radio. After all, The Food Programme has long maintained a high standard of excellence: intelligent, thoughtful, probing and informative, and Derek Cooper sounds as if he's a trencher- man who has eaten well just before going 'I came here by car.' on air. But Radio Four, I'm afraid, is enduring an identity crisis. It doesn't seem to know if it is Dr Jekyll or Mr Hyde.
It is certainly Mr Hyde at three o'clock on Friday afternoons. Someone accosted me recently to demand if I had heard a programme called Veg Talk that now goes out at that time. I hadn't. Well, you should, came the outraged, wild-eyed reply. I lis- tened to it and understood why he was so cross. Veg Talk is about fruit and vegetables but is so unbelievably tacky that it makes Chris Evans sound like The Brains Trust. The two presenters, Charlie Hicks and Greg Wallace, take calls from listeners inquiring about how to cook or grow fruit and vegetables. The callers are the only signs of intelligent life in the programme though much of what they wish to learn can be found in easily available food and cook- ery books.
Greg opened the programme by saying it was Californian food this week, with Char- lie humming a song in the background. 'Charlie, Charlie . . .' said Greg. 'Oh, sorry, mate.' Greg switched to an American voice to introduce a Californian cook called Mar- lene and then they all started speaking at once. In fact, throughout, hardly anyone seemed to finish a sentence as they kept interrupting each other with quick-fire remarks and dreadful jokes. It is one of the most moronic programmes I have heard on Radio Four, or indeed anywhere, for that matter, for some time.
It follows on from what I was saying in last week's column, that Radio Four is so desperate to attract listeners who, it thinks, cannot follow intelligent conversation that it strikes a breezy, downmarket, patronising tone. Greg and Charlie call each other mate. This is no doubt the standard form of address at Covent Garden market where they appear to work but it jars on Radio Four. Rodney called to ask about apples. Greg or Charlie told him, 'If we have a phi- losophy .. . don't buy with yer eyes, buy with yer taste buds. Good old Rodney!' 'Yeah, give it to 'im mate.' After Reg had called from Brighton about juicing fruit, he was told, 'Thanks, Reg, we've gotta dash, mate.' One of them, I think it was Charlie, had one of those maddeningly inane laughs, a sort of elongated male cackle that burst into life every so often drowning what anyone else was saying.
They ended the programme thus: 'We're off down the pub to wax our surf-boards.' 'I've got me sunglasses on, I'm definitely gonna pull that barmaid.' Cackle, cackle. One can only hope that Veg Talk is a pass- ing symptom of Radio Four's split person- ality. I doubt if it would appeal even to Radio Five Live which sometimes goes for a more blokeish sound. I fear, though, that this is the sort of programme the controller James Boyle would like to encourage. His predecessor Michael Green was itching to broadcast this kind of tripe but fortunately for us seemed to lack the nerve, at least for most of the time. Boyle was brought in to make Radio Four more popular. It won't work, of course. All it will do is drive away the once-loyal listeners who have kept audience figures more or less steady over the years and fail to attract sufficient new ones to make much of a difference. If any- thing, I suspect, the Boyle experiment will end up producing fewer listeners.
I'm not suggesting he shouldn't try new ideas; every controller has had to do that. Sometimes there are failures and they should be strangled before they can walk. Past experience, though, shows that they stagger on for years. Look how long The Afternoon Shift lasted before the humane killer was brought out. Another feeble dud presented like an end of the pier show is the comedy news quiz RTFP, launched last Friday and repeated on Saturdays. Let us hope that this and Veg Talk will be quietly put down when they finish their runs.
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