And so we are losing another great radio voice. Robert Robinson is to retire as host of Brain of Britain after more than 30 years' tenure on the fiendishly difficult, fiendishly courteous and otherworldly general knowledge quiz. He's been away for periods of time in the past decade due to illness, replaced by Peter Snow and Russell Davies, but always with the promise of a return. That's now ruled out.
The funny thing is that, when I heard this news, I thought less about the fusty old programme itself and more about Robinson's voice. I don't really mind who takes over, to be honest, because it won't be the same without him. It's like that with I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, which revolved around Humph to a degree that makes me think, on reflection, that it's time to wrap it up without him and seek another show from scratch.
Some radio shows are simply defined by their hosts. Robinson brought to BoB an eccentric, unhurried civility, with his use of honorifics and surnames (Mr Spicer, Mrs Baker), and an in-built quaintness that long outlived the era it might have belonged to. I'm not convinced it ever truly did stem from one, really, with its mix of 1950s formality and oddly polite Victorian parlour game, yet it was a gentle, endearing illusion. But it worked, and quietly defined itself as a radio institution, hosted by an unsung national treasure. The winner of each year's title, among 48 contestants, took home no more a silver salver and the title; the listener who could beat the contestants with two questions for the Beat the Brains feature got a humble book token.
We've lost too many of these hosts, and voices, of late from radio, to retirement or the wireless in the sky. One thinks fondly of Humphrey Lyttelton, Alistair Cooke, John Cushnie, Charles Wheeler, Wogan (I don't count that Sunday show – it doesn't work), Nick Clarke, Ned Sherrin, all of whom brought to radio the feel and sound of a disappearing world: polite, intimate, square and old-fashioned, but lovably so.
These sorts of voices are at the heart of radio – without visuals and with the feel of a one-to-one conversation, they never seem to age or alter, and become the heart of their programmes, enveloping and shaping them in a way that telly can't match. It's hard to imagine who might be the next generation of these voices, and we don't want to lose the last few we have left. I'd like to insist for starters that Nicholas Parsons is bubble-wrapped and carried around at all times by grateful minions from now on.
