Special traits
Kate Chisholm
It’s a topsy-turvy world at the moment, with New Labour tearing each other apart like Old Tories, and brothers Will and Ed transmogrifying into each other on The Archers. Even Radios Two and Four have been caught up in this changing-character business, with programmes you’d normally expect to find on Four’s schedule popping up on Radio Two, and vice versa. On Saturday morning I thought I must have pushed the wrong button by mistake when I heard Leonard Cohen girning away at ‘So long, Marianne’ on what I thought was Radio Four but then began to think must be 88 to 91 degrees FM. But no, as I continued to listen I realised it was definitely Four. No mistake. The quality of the production (by Alan Hall) gave the game away. I don’t mean to be rude about Two (more on that network later), but 80-odd years of featuremaking experience do count for something. On Four, words come first.
Leonard and Marianne (Saturday) seamlessly spun together an old 2005 interview with Cohen, first broadcast on Norwegian radio, and a newly recorded conversation with Marianne Ihlen, the woman who inspired some of his most melancholy odes. They met in the Sixties on the Greek island of Hydra, Marianne first seeing Leonard in the doorway of a grocer’s shop and experiencing one of those moments of recognition that only happen once in a life. They split up after seven years when Marianne realised Leonard’s affair with Suzanne (for whom he also wrote a song) was serious. It all sounds rather predictable when told like this: rock chicks versus an egotistical lover. But it was intensely moving, listening to these two septuagenarians looking back on what had drawn them together, and forced them apart. Not a tear was shed by either side in the telling; there was no trace of cloying sentiment. ‘What I loved in my old life, I haven’t forgotten. It lives in my spine,’ wrote Cohen in his poem ‘Days of Kindness’. But now, he said in conversation, ‘I have very little interest in the past and very little interest in the man I was then. It doesn’t present a mystery to me, a puzzle that has to be solved ... ’ I want to think like that when I’m 73.
Over on Two there’s been a series that sounds tailor-made for Four — until you look at the guest list. The Novel that Changed My Life (Fridays) has given Cherie Blair, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, Vic Reeves, Kathy Lette, Mel Smith and Alex James the chance to sound off about their favourite books. It was not just the choice of guests. I know, I know it’s a bit spooky to think that each waveband has its own peculiar etherbound sound. But I’m convinced that Cherie and co. would have sounded completely different if they’d been talking on Four. The tuning is just not quite the same. For a start there was lots of background music, cleverly chosen but still jolly irritating when what you want to hear is something clever about the books under discussion. But there was also something liberating about hearing ‘literature’ talked about without the hushed awe of a typical Four production.
Cherie Blair took us to Afghanistan to hear from women living in Kabul the experiences written about as ‘fiction’ in A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. It was a bit offputting to hear her saying that the book resonated with her because one of the characters is abandoned by her father just as she and her sister were back in Liverpool in the Sixties. Surely, there’s a chasm of difference between growing up without a father figure in the UK and being abandoned to the Taleban in Kabul. And yet I found myself drawn into her programme because it was so well researched, and took the book (which she admitted was ‘not what you might call literature’) out of the library and into the strange, violent world of Afghanistan since the 1979 communist invasion.
This week Vic Reeves talks about Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which he attempted to recreate, aged 19, by hitching down the A1 from Darlington to Grantham and sleeping in a field of corn stubble. Fortunately, he didn’t spend too much time on his own free-wheeling experiments but instead took us back to the source: Kerouac, Carolyn Cassady and co. in 1950s America. Reeves spoke not just to Kerouac’s biographer but also to Cassady and Joyce Pinchbeck, who were there, and could verify that Kerouac really did write the book, all 180,000 words of it, in just 21 days fuelled not by classified drugs but by caffeine, potloads of it.
As for those Grundy boys. As I write, we’re still on tenterhooks as to Will’s whereabouts. I’m not sure I can take any more dramas like these in Ambridge, and may have to give it up, as I did for years after John Archer was killed by a tractor.
Previous page
