I’m not saying that Capital Breakfast (Weekdays, 6am, Capital FM) is aimed at people born yesterday but I heard a recent news item about Judi Dench establish her cultural coordinates by calling her “the James Bond legend”. The rest of this particular bulletin was about Patsy Kensit’s fake tan, a restaurant in Cardiff run by prisoners and the prospect of a beheading in Iraq. Actually this was Capital South Wales, one of a chain of Capital stations across the nation, each of which is as fiercely protective of its local identity as your nearest branch of Marks & Spencer. They are all playing Taylor Swift, Meghan Trainor and OneRepublic in the same pitiless rotation, and they’re mostly presented by matched pairs: Rob & Katy in Birmingham, Dino & Pete in Derby, Des & Jennie in Edinburgh, and then the trio of Bodj, Matt & JoJo in the north-east. I’m puzzled by these manning levels because the music is programmed in such tight blocks, the tiniest fissure between the tunes is crammed with a trail, and the advertising is so obviously non-negotiable that there’s barely time left for one person to read out a single news item from Buzzfeed, let alone three. Still, there are no doubt people who like their days to start like this. I suspect they may be the same people I see chugging energy drinks on the Piccadilly line first thing.
The most full-cream radio experience of the week is Side By Side With Sherrin (Saturday, 9am, Radio 4 Extra) in which Emma Freud, who really should be on the radio more often, presents a treasure trove of comment and anecdote by and about the broadcaster, producer and talent spotter Ned, who died seven years ago. I suppose there has to be someone on radio today who is similarly entertaining but I can’t think of one right now. Among those recalling Sherrin, we hear from Millicent Martin, Arthur Smith and Alistair Beaton, who points out that, before the internet came along, Ned was the nearest thing to Google that most of his friends could call upon.
Clearly the Oscars are handed out more on the basis of the way they flatter the conventional wisdom of the day than their cinematic quality. And The Academy Award Goes To… (Saturday, 10.30am, Radio 4) shows that it was always thus. Here, Paul Gambaccini looks back to 1942 when the board was swept by Mrs Miniver, a soft-focus soap opera about an upper middle-class English family confronting the might of the Axis without having to leave Beverly Hills. Mrs Miniver started life as a column in the Times, and was bought by MGM for $30,000; the film version eventually grossed over $8m. Film historian David Thomson and critic Philip French remember the film, and a period when Hollywood held off from making war movies because they weren’t sure who was going to win. This is a policy they still pursue today.
“It’s a very simple work in four movements,” says Courtney Pine breezily at the beginning of A Love Supreme - 50 Years On (Tuesday, 11.30am, Radio 4). There’s nothing wrong with marking the anniversary of John Coltrane’s enduring 1964 album, and there’s a case for marking that anniversary in the middle of a weekday when more people are tuning in, but I think that Pine would be happy to concede that for most people this kind of music is still a tough listen. He visits the Gaumont State Theatre in Kilburn where Coltrane played in 1961, and talks to a trio of British jazz saxophonists who continue to derive nourishment from Coltrane’s recording.
