Come over here, Tom Stoppard

‘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.