Two faced

It’s a two-way genre, radio, Janus-faced, going forwards while at the same time looking backwards, flexible enough to adapt to the internet world but also still wallowing in the wealth of its archive.

It’s a two-way genre, radio, Janus-faced, going forwards while at the same time looking backwards, flexible enough to adapt to the internet world but also still wallowing in the wealth of its archive. Just as the arrival of Radioplayer was announced in an up-to-the-minute presentation at the top of the Centrepoint building in the heart of London, of which more later, Radio 4 Extra launched its new weekday magazine, The 4 O’Clock Show, which sounds surprisingly, and endearingly, old-fashioned. It’s presented by Mel Giedroyc, whose warm, homely voice provides just the right kind of intimate authority for the hour-long afternoon show.

But it was the blend of interviews, quizzes, notes from a woodland walk in Wales in search of animal droppings, and a classic reading which took me straight back to the lost world of the 1950s and family tea while listening to Derek McCulloch and David Davis on Children’s Hour. I just hope enough young listeners find it and get hooked. It’s radio at its most versatile, veering from laugh-aloud comedy to crucial questions, and their answers, and on to brilliant sallies of the imagination, without missing a beat.

Instead of the inimitable Davis, who could pace a story better than anyone, we heard this week from the unmistakable and just as unmissable Alan Bennett as he read A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. His air of constant surprise yet down-to-earth flatness of delivery gives us Pooh as we perhaps imagined him when children but with something added. It’s as if listening now with grown-up ears we can discover an explanation for those episodes of chasing honey or getting stuck in holes not intended for persons of our more generous, less flexible proportions.

As a taster, pacing our ears and allowing us time to tune in, we first heard Bennett talking about himself in an interview with Jenni Murray from the 1990s. Murray asked him whether he really is as private and solitary a person as his reputation suggests. Bennett replied with an answer that should inspire any budding young writers among his listeners. ‘Your private life is a dark room,’ he said. ‘You’re not sure what’s in it yourself.’ Then he added,‘But it’s also a dark room. Something is developing there.’ He paused. ‘If you’re a writer. So you don’t want the door flung open…because that upsets the whole process of self-discovery, which is what writing is about.’

On one level we were given a masterly reading of Pooh. On another, an intriguing lesson perfectly pitched for young teenagers whose attention might then have been sufficiently intrigued to hear Bennett making Pooh sound like a surrealist lesson in how to make sense of a world that never does make sense. And all this in little more than 20 minutes of radio.

Another nugget came from Sandi Toksvig who was talking to Susan Calman in an interview first heard on Radio Scotland (4 Extra seems to have the run of the entire BBC archive). Toksvig was trying to work out why there are still so few women comedians, and decided that it’s because male comedy is so competitive. This doesn’t suit the collaborative way in which most women prefer to work.

She clinched her argument by pointing out that if you go to any large social gathering and stand outside the loos for a minute or two, you will most likely hear nothing coming from the gents, except perhaps the noise of a hand-drying machine. Open the door to the ladies, though, and you’ll almost always hear laughter and conversation. Women, says Toksvig, laugh all the time — but they don’t do it in a competitive atmosphere. Well, it makes perfect sense to me.

Back in the future, Radioplayer is the new interface for web-based listening. It will, we are promised, take our listening to new levels of cleverness, giving us the ability to pick and choose what we want to hear, minute by minute, without needing Controllers, Programme Directors and DJs to organise it for us.

All you have to do is find the Radioplayer button on the station that you’re currently listening to on the web, and one click will open up for you the full diversity of what’s on offer on air in that instant. If you feel like a bit of Debussy, you might find it on Radio 3 or on any one of the 200 or more stations, BBC and commercial, who have signed up to be part of Radioplayer. If you’d prefer Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’, then Radioplayer will find it for you. And that’s just the music content. Try putting in Chekhov, or an update on the situation in Libya.

It all sounded splendidly exciting, until I got home and tried to use the new web tool as I made my toasted sandwich. I confess it was easier just to press the preset button on the Roberts as I buttered the toast, and to find myself immediately in the reassuring world of Martha Kearney and the pips.