Speechification

I was very excited to hear - on Radio 4 -that the weekend past was going to be a Paul Scofield tribute weekend over on Radio 7. BBC Radio 7, graveyard of the forgotten sitcom and the deservedly banished panel game, might actually be worth listening to.

Paul Scofield was one of our greatest Shakespearean actors until his death in March, noted for his distinctive voice and delivery, and most famous for his generation-defining Lear, and his Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons. Personally, my favourite role of his is the droll, slightly camp narrator of Patrick Keillor’s peerless London, and its follow-up Robinson In Space.

Unfortunately, this tribute turned out to be simple rebroadcasts of just three plays, which are all a bit long for Speechification, but if you have an hour and a half to spare, this is a heads-up that they’re all available on Listen Again for the next week:

• Anton in Eastbourne, Peter Tinniswood’s last play, written as a tribute to Scofield and his great love of Chekhov (Listen Again).
• Macbeth, with Peggy Ashcroft (Listen Again).
• Dionysus, with Diana Rigg and Chiwetel Ejiofor (Listen Again).

At the end of the Seventies John Cooper Clarke lived in a little house opposite the front gates of my Secondary school in not-very-glamorous-but-not- very-gritty-either Stevenage, which is a new town at the wrong end of Hertfordshire. His presence there (I didn’t imagine it did I? Is there any evidence that he did live there?) was so unlikely and such a mad, peacock-haired challenge to the dreary suburban surroundings that boys I knew used to gather outside his house and throw chip papers and coke cans at him when he came out.

He passed by, implacable and apparently unmoved. Later he’d show up as support at practically every gig I ever attended. In fact I seem to remember thinking he must be resident at The Hammersmith Palais (or was it The Lyceum?). So here’s a lovely half hour about the man from the other reason I cut my hair weird and bought an Oxfam overcoat: Paul Morley (MP3).

Here’s the programme’s web page and here’s its press release, which has some more information.

This show’s a bit like when you’re a kid and your friend’s parents are Seventh Day Adventists or Jehovah’s Witnesses or something and you’re dying to get a look at the inside of their house to see if they have an altar or interesting dietary habits and then they turn out to be just like your own Mum and Dad (only no Christmas presents—which is just inhuman). It’s about The Socialist Workers Party and it got me grumbling and groaning round the house (”Bloody Trots”) a few weeks ago.

I never attained the heights of political awareness that my SWP mates did. But that didn’t stop them bugging me for years (and selling me their infernal, braindead newspaper in my own front room). So I wasn’t very positively disposed towards this 15-minute doc (part one of two) about the party. But the members and loyalists interviewed are less nutty and self-righteous than I remember and they provide some interesting insight into the ways of Britain’s largest kooky political tribe (but none at all into their actual politics, which is a pity—maybe that was in part two). MP3.

The shows originally went out as part of Sunday evening’s excellent Westminster Hour and they have a good archive so you can listen to both shows again here.

Misha Glenny’s new book McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers has been recieving excellent notices all over town, and the World Service have snapped him up for a four-part series charting the explosive growth of international crime following the end of the Cold War and other conflicts. He estimates that industrious crooks account for a fairly staggering 20% of the world’s GDP.

In the first programme [MP3] Glenny travels to British Columbia to meet the Canadian weed growers who use science (and Blackberries) to get their product over their border to a wealthy, heavily toking, but increasingly annoyed US. Access is key here, and as a former and much-honoured reporter in the former Yugoslavia (him, not me), I look forward to seeing who he’s cosied up to next week, reporting on cigarette smuggling in the Balkans.

I’m only putting this up because I was goaded to by ‘Birmingham: It’s Not Shit (mildly sarcastic since 2002)’. The best bit of this essentially indescribable doc is the laughter of a contemporary Brummie audience at the 1980 vision of their city presented in ‘Telly Savalas looks at Birmingham’. You can see parts of the film itself here and here. (MP3)

Humph was Shadow Controller of Radio 4. He was secretly in charge of the whole thing. You can’t understate his importance to the network. Only in the next weeks and months will we understand what we’ve lost. Humphrey Lyttelton was an accidental comic genius who, over the decades, came to set the station’s comedic tone: which was somewhere between withering senior common room irony and joyful, anarchic surrealism—and all without writing a single word.

While Clue was moving to the centre of the British radio comedy universe, becoming its timeless and unassailable mascot, Humph was modestly assuming the top spot himself. Shows came and went, comedians came and went. None could touch Humph who was, after all, a bloody trumpeter. We’ve lost our Controller of Beautifully Timed Sarcasm and our Controller of Barely Permissible Innuendo. Worse than that, I think we’re going to find we’ve lost our comedy anchor.

Here, to remember him by, is an edition of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue from 1998. It was recorded in Windsor (MP3).

Ed Reardon is the man I sometimes fear I’m turning into: an irascible failure, an over-educated, unemployable—but somehow undefeated—grumpy old man. I even find myself making that kind of grunting sound he produces when frustrated. I think Reardon is the current holder of the title ‘Britain’s Best Comic Creation’ and I assume that a translation to TV is imminent, although I think the fact that Christopher Douglas—who co-writes the stuff (with Andrew Nickolds) and plays Reardon himself—is a bit young for the role might be impeding the move. Here’s an episode from the fourth series that originally went out late last year and is being repeated now. Brilliant (MP3).

This is just lovely. I could listen to old men remembering interesting lives forever anyway, but one of these old men invented Minnie The Minx for The Beano. And the others drew or edited or wrote storylines for The Dandy at DC Thompson in Dundee. Morris Heggie and Dave Torrie both edited The Dandy (in 71 years the comic has had four editors), Bill Ritchie and Jim Petrie were artists and Walter Fearne worked his way up from storylines to Managing Editor. What a life to look back on… (MP3)

Three poets (two postgrad students and one faculty member, Fred D’Aguiar) from Virginia Tech remember the massacre which took place a year ago. I’ll warn you: this is a very moving programme. I think poetry must speak to a special centre in the brain. It short-circuits rationality and this gives it permission to provoke the kind of involuntary emotional reaction that this 23 minutes must have produced everywhere it was heard. Poetry also seems to have a special freedom to deal with topics untouchable in other forms—like this most awful story of death and loss. Outstanding (MP3).

The World Service web site has improved a lot lately and programme pages are now excellent. Here’s this programme’s page.

Somewhere there’s an archive as big as that one in Indiana Jones, full of letters, invoices and memos, detailing the internal machinations of the BBC. They seem to keep everything. No copies of the actual programmes, obviously, but all the accounting documents relating to it. The great advantage of this is it makes for tremendous internal history, lots of little documentaries about BBC people and projects illuminated by the marvellously dry language of the internal memo. This piece on Richard Dimbleby is a perfect example. Lovely stuff. And what a bloke. (And, just in case you were wondering, the Russell Davies presenting it isn’t me. He’s one of the many other, more popular, Russell Davieses.) MP3 here.