So why are we all becoming radio addicts, listening to an ever-greater variety of stations for more minutes each day? Could it be a yearning for something simpler, more direct, less tricksy than the constant visual stimuli that persist in assaulting us wherever we are, via the internet, TV, DVD and cinema? It’s the immediacy and the fact that you don’t have to wait those endless seconds while the wretched machine boots itself up, ready to perform, which make radio so much more appealing. With a soon-to-be-abandoned analogue set (though not, alas, my smart new digital boxes) all you have to do is press your preset button and be taken straightway, between heartbeats, to another dimension of experience.
For the past few Sunday nights I’ve happened upon a fascinating mini-series on Radio 4’s The Film Programme, which has been talking to women in the business who’ve been crucial to the success of certain films but whose talents we never usually hear about. A couple of weeks ago Angela Allen, who worked with John Huston on The African Queen, The Misfits and Freud, told us about her life in the 1950s and 1960s as a ‘script supervisor’ or ‘continuity girl’. It was her voice that gripped me. She was obviously not young, yet you could still tell from the timbre, the variety of tone and virility of expression that she was an indomitable character, a woman I would love to meet.
While everyone else succumbed to dysentery when filming on the Queen upriver in the Belgian Congo, Angela Allen was left doling out the pills to Bogart, Hepburn and the crew and getting them back to health and the film back on budget. Afterwards the film company sued East African Railways for supplying the boat with polluted water. Huston relied on her not just to keep track of the actors and their lines but above all to ensure the coherence and logic of the script. This led to awful difficulties with Monroe, who was too lazy to learn her lines, and Montgomery Clift, who was incapable of remembering them, mostly because he was drunk.
This week’s guest was Julie Harris, the costume designer who gave us Alec Guinness in a cassock and the spiky leather gear of Rollerball. Harris also had a great voice for radio, full of character but not ego, drawing us in to listen. She admitted that it was Diana Dors, not her, who had come up with the idea for the fluffy mink bikini which wowed the Venice Film Festival. She had thought it a rotten idea (and jolly uncomfortable) but was forced to admit that it did the trick, ensuring that Diana got all the attention — even though the bikini was pretty tawdry and made out of cheapskate rabbit fur, not mink at all.
Harris told us about working with Hitchcock on Frenzy and the difficulties involved in designing a dress that the star (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) could be strangled in. ‘You couldn’t,’ she recalled, ‘just create a seam that could be torn apart, because it would look fake.’ Such moments are why we love radio: a snapshot, a real insight, to fill the mind before switching off the light.
There’s nothing more annoying than being told to cheer up and I’ve so far avoided Radio 4’s Saturday-morning wind-up Reasons to be Cheerful. But the plummy words of Katharine Whitehorn are always worth a listen and she convinced me (almost) that life really is better now — and especially for women. Mind you, at the time she was sipping champagne at the St Pancras bar as she eulogised about Eurostar, her fridge and the fact that women no longer have to supply their mates with three hot meals a day. We can be pretty sure that even in the 1950s neither Angela Allen nor Julie Harris were doing that.
Comments