‘I was mad with jealousy,’ said Gwyneth Williams, the controller of BBC Radio 4. ‘I am mad with jealousy,’ she corrected herself, and I believed her. We were discussing Tom Stoppard’s Darkside, a radio play written to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s album Dark Side of the Moon. The play, which was perhaps the radio event of the summer, aired on Radio 2. ‘Mad with jealousy,’ she repeated, in case I had missed the point.
Williams has spent the year revitalising Radio 4’s arts coverage. Stoppard’s perfidy aside, she has had marked success. Her aims were to ‘give people a break’ from the Great Recession and to see ‘if there were [fresh] ideas on the horizon’ that might shift the prevailing winds in politics and economics, which she regards as flat. To this end, Front Row ran ‘Cultural Exchange’, in which 75 ‘creative minds’ nattered about their favourite cultural work. This simple format was captivating: Richard Rogers on the Piazza del Campo in Siena sticks in my mind; but you can review each entry on the BBC website and contribute to the exchange. Williams also commissioned new music series, a music podcast and an art competition.
The hope that art might shake us from our stasis is a subtext of this year’s Reith Lectures, delivered by Grayson Perry. He is the first visual artist to give the lectures, and Williams (who edited the lectures for ten years from the mid-Nineties) is thrilled to have him: ‘I owe the series to Neil MacGregor, who sat me next to Grayson at a British Museum dinner. He was so inspiring on quality in art and the nature of creativity.’ Perry’s lectures are playful (listen out for the whip in lecture two); but he is playing seriously.
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