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’. The researchers and presenters were always on the lookout for new voices, new thoughts, or old ones given new life by juxtaposition with something unexpected, and after almost a quarter of a century were still excited by what they might find.
On Easter Day Tully took as his theme that line from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets,‘In my end is my beginning’, in an attempt to put a positive spin on what for him, and for us, is an unwelcome change, a loss, a new absence. Russian bells announced the Risen Christ followed by a Beethoven late quartet, the Byrds, Berlioz and some Cuban salsa, with words from Simone Weil, Vera Brittain, Marcus Aurelius, Ecclesiastes, as well as Eliot.
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