Refuge from the referendum

A brief encounter with Radio 4’s Any Questions to gauge the measure of opinion in the shires after the referendum result was enough to convince me we are entering even more torrid times than during the campaign. For some mysterious reason both Harriet Harman and Alex Salmond, billed in Radio Times to appear on the panel alongside Ken Clarke and Chris Grayling, had reneged on their promise and been replaced by Emily Thornberry, the Labour MP who got into trouble in 2014 for her white van man tweet, and Steven Woolfe, an oxymoronic Ukip MEP. The audience, judging from the applause, were pretty much balanced between the Leavers and Remainers but within minutes Thornberry and Woolfe were at each other’s throats, their venom poisoning the airwaves, each asserting a superior claim to council-estate compassion. With relief, when I switched over to Radio 3, I discovered that it was Bridget Kendall’s turn to introduce Saturday Classics as her swansong before she leaves the BBC to take up her new position as Master of Peterhouse at Cambridge University.

Since she first began reporting from the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, Kendall has always been a calm voice of reason in a troubled world. Clear-sighted, with the authority of an intelligence that never cuts her off from those with less brainpower, she reassures, not with false promises of what will happen but because whatever she says is underpinned by the necessary inside knowledge. On Saturday, for example, in between the music she played, chosen as a brief narrative of her working life, she told us how she had spent a year in the mid-1970s living in a nondescript industrial town in the heartland of Brezhnev’s Russia. It sounded pretty grim and gloomy, with little in the way of culture and an atmosphere of stark oppression.