One of the weirdest responses when someone close to you dies is the gradual realisation that now at last you know them fully. They become to you complete, rounded, fully themselves, in a way that just does not seem possible while they are still alive. It’s so frustrating. Just when you’re at last ready and able to talk to them in the way you’ve always wanted, in full knowledge of who they are, seeing clearly every aspect of their person, they are no longer present. Radio 4 has come up with a partial antidote to this aspect of death, loss, grief, and so too of life and living, with its unsettling new lunchtime series, Unforgettable (produced by Adam Fowler), the title inspired by Natalie Cole’s 1991 single, where she duets with her long-dead father.
Using cutting-edge digital technology, which I’m told has been developed by DJs ‘to spontaneously play out musical clips’ (or in other words an advanced ability to edit), real-life people are invited to talk to relatives, colleagues or friends who are no longer with us in person via the use of the radio archives. In the first of the five short programmes, Derek Jarman has a conversation with his brother-in-law David Temple. Two more different people could not be envisioned; Jarman the film-maker, poet, theatre designer, gardener, gay activist, and Temple, a ‘pragmatic’ man working in ‘commerce’. Yet it becomes obvious how much Temple now misses Jarman’s unusual ability to always leave you ‘with a better sense of well-being’.
‘I just wish he was here to ask,’ says Temple. And, hey presto, here is Jarman speaking about the controversies that his work inspired, his garden at Dungeness, his thoughts on death, his relationship with his air-commodore father.
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