Of course there’s a future for digital radio, it’s just that we’ll probably be listening to it online, or on the phone. The wireless set, tucked on the kitchen shelf, beside the bed, among the vases in the lounge, permanently tuned in to Aggers or Humphrys, Livesey or Lamacq, will become a museum piece, an object from the past. Instead we’ll be going back to the future and walking around with a smartphone plugged to our ears as if it were an old transistor radio. But with a difference. Aggers and co. will have to compete with the constant chatter of online life. No longer a dedicated stream of wireless talk but a babble of disconnected thoughts and ideas.
But that’s still in the future for most of us (though not the 15- to 24-year-olds who are fast discovering smart radio). In the meantime, on Saturday evening Radio 4 gave us a haunting. Only one voice could have pulled it off — Ivor Cutler. He would have been 90 this year and David Bramwell, friend and fan, devised a party trick in celebration, rescuing Cutler clips from the archives. But it was uncannily as if Cutler were performing for us right now in real time. He speaks so directly into the mike, his Scottish voice, though softly burred, is so persistent, he bores his way into the brain, willing us on to his wavelength.
Cutler in his prime was an acquired taste (after all, boring has two quite different meanings). He banned children from his stage performances as a one-man musician, poet, raconteur. He was notoriously demanding about his conditions of work — absolutely no background noise, no interference with his scripts, everything on his terms. But there is no one else like him (you can’t possibly talk of him in the past tense, he’s such a vibrant force).
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