When the world was tweed and smelled of pipe smoke, there was a long-running show called Down Your Way in the service of which the BBC despatched someone appropriately avuncular like Franklin Engelmann or Brian Johnston to the less-celebrated towns of Britain. There they would thrust one of those microphones shaped like a shower head into the face of the mayor or the manager of the local corset factory in order to winkle out that most elusive of radio resources, the nugget of local knowledge that can be presented as entertainment beyond the bounds of the locality.
There’s something similar going on in Mark Steel’s In Town (Tuesday, 6.30pm, Radio 4). The difference is that this time the local colour is played for laughs. In front of an audience of audibly refreshed locals, Steel sees how far he can push the famed British ability to laugh at ourselves. The answer is quite a long way. His targets are stress-tested: the gap between the claims of civic boosters and the often mundane reality; the community next door who are all fur coat and no knickers; the theories about the source of the local smell. Most of our population reside in medium-sized towns that will never be immortalised in story or song. These people are quite aware that there is something absurd and funny about these burgs. The fact that Mark Steel comes up from London to point this out for them ought to offend but in reality it gives them a kind of glow. The fact that Steel can kid along with a few local historians and factory managers helps soften his otherwise rather militant, Dave Spart-like image. This week he’s in Shrewsbury. One imagines he’ll have fun with the pronunciation.
In The War Game Files (Saturday, 8pm, Radio 4) Michael Apted tells the story of how, in 1965, the BBC commissioned Peter Watkins, at the time a 29-year-old producer with something of a reputation for upsetting the apple cart, to make a faux-documentary about the effect of a nuclear strike on the UK. Then they rather wished they hadn’t. With the help of documents released under the freedom of information act, this programme pieces together the cooking of a pickle such as can only be rustled up by the British establishment. Hugh Carleton-Greene, the director general at the time, took the step of asking senior government figures what they thought about the advisability of broadcasting the programme. Christopher Bland, who served in the same role under John Major and Tony Blair, confesses himself amazed that anyone could have been so naive. Nobody is amazed that once the government had been asked for their thoughts they thought it would be best to shelve it.
I Love It Loud: The Gene Simmons Rock Show (Wednesday, 10pm, Radio 2) is, like most things that trip off the longest tongue in popular music, primarily an advertisement for Gene Simmons, and is sure to appeal to people like the man I spoke to years ago who said he’d enjoyed the movie about Spinal Tap but wished they could have picked a better band.
Radio 3 marks a couple of literary birthdays this week with Jeremy Irons reading The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock on The Verb (Friday, 10pm, Radio 3) to mark 100 years since it was published. And on Free Thinking (Wednesday, 10pm, Radio 3) Martin Amis, Sarah Churchwell and Zachary Leader join Matthew Sweet to discuss Saul Bellow’s Herzog on the centenary of the author’s birth. Fellow Canadian Kerry Shale reads excerpts from the text itself.
