Radio
Why change our habits?
Michael Vestey
By now you will know the details of the major changes to Radio Four announced by the network's controller, James Boyle, on Wednesday, too late for this column, alas. At the time of writing I do not, though there's been intense speculation in the press for the past fortnight or so. As I'm told by the BBC that much of it is inaccu- rate, I won't analyse the shake-up until next week in case it turns out to be wrong.
However, it is typical of the BBC to sub- mit the proposals to the board of governors on a Thursday and wait until the following Wednesday to inform listeners who, after all, pay for the programmes. I suspect that some of the changes will be appropriate, others less so. Like Brenda Maddox of the Times speaking last Sunday on Radio Four's Mediumwave (one of the pro- grammes said to be for the chop), I don't see why it's necessary to introduce compre- hensive changes to a successful and admired network, and all at once. Why, she asked, a 'massive assault on listeners' habits?'
Polly Toynbee was vexed that listeners disliked change. As a friend of the director- general, John Birt, who yearns for constant revolution (a candidate for In The Psychia- trist's Chair, perhaps?) she said the BBC had 'hunkered down for a big reaction' so it might be better to do it all in one go.
Toynbee, by the way, was quoted in David Sexton's radio column in the Sunday Telegraph as describing Radio Four listen- ers thus: 'In their dreams, Radio Four means seed-cake and Darjeeling, warm beer and spinsters on bikes, when police- man were old, pews were full and India was ours.' I don't know where she said or wrote these words but does she really mean this or was it a joke?
No, Toynbees don't make jokes; she real- ly believes it. It struck me that Birt proba- bly does too. I know many Radio Four listeners and not one of them remotely matches her ignorant description of their mind-set. I think she's displaying all the prejudice and snobbery of the liberal intel- ligentsia that, back in the Thirties, George Orwell saw through so acutely; ironically, though, it was an essay of his that provided her with the silly line about warm beer and spinsters, as indeed it did for John Major's cringe-making speech at a party conference a few years ago.
You can bet that Toynbee is the sort that wouldn't have read Enid Blyton bedtime stories to her children. Blyton, author of 700 children's books which still sell 8 mil- lion copies a year nearly 30 years after her death, was the subject of Queen of Adven- ture on Radio Four this week (Thursday) to mark the centenary of her birth. When the presenter Susan Jeffreys began I thought we were in for a hatchet job — 'Before they were rewritten, her works were accused of racism, the golliwogs were depicted as idle and dishonest . . . her mid- dle-class children have an offhand manner with the "lower orders".. .' etc. But, in fact, the producer Jill Burridge created a bal- anced and fair examination of Blyton's works and came up with the bright idea of asking pupils at Holt primary school in Norfolk what they made of Enid Blyton. They loved her books, they replied; one boy said, 'Everybody knows about the nor- mal-day world, they don't want to read about it, they want to read about some- thing else.' Enid Blyton knew that, he went on, and so she imagined her characters in another world of their own: 'She's such a good author, you just can't put the book down.'
A grim-sounding children's writer called Jan Mark said she hated the stories. Although she thought Enid Blyton some- times created wonderful situations they would, 'in more skilful, intelligent hands, have been exploited and worked up'. I wonder if Jan Mark will ever become like Blyton, the world's fourth most translated author. Somehow, I doubt it. So many peo- ple, often for narrow ideological reasons, miss the point of Blyton. Her books were written for children, not adults; they mirror a child's thoughts and actions as they are, or were, not how others would like them to be. They were not written as English Lit. for Leavisite scrutiny; they were stories with straightforward plain language appeal- ing to children. Peter Hunt, professor of English at the University of Wales, defend- ed her writing and thought she was a very complex not a simple writer. Alan Coren put his finger on it when he said that, despite using a limited vocabulary, Blyton manufactured a world, though surprisingly, I felt, he didn't think her stories enriched the imagination of children, certainly not his own in boyhood.
This excellent programme made me decide to collect pre-politically correct works of Blyton so that, if I live long enough to have grandchildren, I'll be able to read her stories to them, explaining along the way that people spoke differently in those days.
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