The sense of an ending | 25 April 2019

It was never given the choicest slot in the schedule, airing first thing on Sunday morning with a repeat at the end of the day. But in its 24 years Something Understood, guided and often presented by the esteemed foreign correspondent Mark Tully, has gathered an impressive audience. Its blend of poetry, prose and music from a huge variety of thinkers, theologians, scientists, poets and composers, carefully (but not artificially) edited around a theme, is for many listeners the best of Radio 4, challenging yet always accessible, highly selective but broad in content. I didn’t always manage to hear it but was glad to know it was there.

Yet on Easter Day Tully presented the last ‘live’ programme, his final script, and in its ending perhaps gave the clue to its success. His sadness at no longer being part of such a project (all that is left are archive recordings of episodes previously broadcast) was, he said, because it had ‘introduced’ him to such a wide variety of ideas, influences and music and ‘to people from many walks of life I would never have met’.