In Minecraft: More Than A Game (Monday 30 March, 11am, Radio 4), Jolyon Jenkins talks to people who, as teenagers, no doubt worried their own parents to death by deafening themselves with acid house music. These same people are now concerned by their own children’s apparent obsession with what Jenkins refers to as “digital Lego” and how much of their life the game of Minecraft takes up, often to the exclusion of other things. At the beginning of the weekend, these twitchy 10-year-olds demand assurances that they won’t be required to go outdoors and will be able to devote all their waking hours to building these virtual worlds. “He doesn’t do clubs any more,” wails one mother.
Jenkins’s programme is another tiny reminder of the magic of radio because it tells you as much as you need to know about how the game works and no more, concentrating instead on what it does to people. There’s a chilling recording of virtual vandals spraying digital swastikas over somebody’s painstakingly built Minecraft world. There’s an interview with a doctor who runs a digital addiction unit. Jenkins even persuades his own 13-year-old son to show him what he’s been doing in his own bedroom for the past two years. He finds he’s got virtual friends all over the world. The CEO of a Minecraft YouTube channel blandly announces: “We have 70 years of viewer minutes watching our content every day.”
This last sounds like a line from Stephen Fry’s meditation on time and the way we parcel it up, The Clocks Go Forward Tonight (Saturday 28 March, 10.30am and 11.30pm, Radio 4). Daylight saving was first proposed in the 18th century as a way of saving on candles. Accurate time-keeping grew with heavy industry. The siting of clocks over factory gates was a provocation to the textile workers who trooped through them, because it seemed to imply that their bosses owned time itself. During the second world war, the government introduced the concept of double daylight to increase productivity. It’s an interesting programme, with some of its speculations about the important difference between time and the instruments for measuring it demanding to be listened to more than once.
Ray Davies is the guest on the Tom Robinson Show (Saturday 28 March, 9pm, 6Music) and he’s so keen to talk that at one stage he even says “sorry to butt in” as the presenter is talking. When musicians are this loquacious it usually means they’re talking about a new record that nobody has yet heard and the audience unsurprisingly glazes over. This particular programme works so well, though, because fans have nominated the less well-known Davies songs they would like him to talk about. Thus it’s Dead End Street and Phenomenal Cat rather than Waterloo Sunset and You Really Got Me. His memories are very precise. Picture Book sounded the way it did because that day they took the snare from the snare drum. There’s even one occasion when we can hear his voice coming in over the track that’s being played saying, “This is the key line.” There should be more of this kind of thing.
Colin Meloy of the American band the Decemberists has compiled the show Easter Folk (Friday 3 April, 7pm, 6Music), featuring the likes of Shirley Collins, the Watersons, Kevin Ayers and the Grateful Dead. This is Meloy’s debut as a 6Music presenter. He should be an excellent signing since he speaks in joined-up sentences and has what I can only describe as a surprisingly pleasant manner for a rock star.
