Love With Annie Nightingale (R1) | iPlayer
The Conversation: Simone Biles and Nadia Comaneci (BBC World Service) | iPlayer
The Unmissables (Bauer podcast)
When I was young I listened to Annie Nightingale’s Radio 1 show every week. It was on straight after the Top 40 and I liked her music choices more than John Peel’s, though he was deemed the indie king. Nightingale played strange stuff – she’s a musical magpie who’s naturally attracted to the offbeat and alternative – but she had a pop sensibility, an ear for a hit. She still does, which is why Radio 1 continues to employ her and I continue to listen.
As part of Radio 1’s 50th birthday celebrations, Nightingale has been commissioned to make four hour-long shows. They’re themed soundscapes on the subject of Rebellion, Love, Heroes and Dreams (perfect pop choices); last week’s was Love. In each, tunes bleed into one another, with the occasional punctuation of a news clip or relevant voice. Though Nightingale only speaks at the beginning and the end, with the odd comment in the middle, her musical taste is all over these shows, which bop between the Beatles and Stormzy, Kym Sims and Nadia Rose. You note that the tracks were all, at one time, seen as new, revolutionary, weird. Now they are classics: familiar yet moving. They come from a particular time and culture. They mean something.
“Taking you on a journey” is a DJ cliche, but the programmes have a sense of movement. Though the tunes hop about chronologically, you feel a progression from then to now. It’s a good feeling. I also like the way that the theme is stuck to but not conventionally interpreted. Love was full of love, but not the usual boy-meets-girl stuff. Nightingale is too unconventional for that. This love included sex, love for God, unrequited love, love that’s left you in bits. And communal, uplifting love – rave love – the kind you only find in big crowds with big music.
Some interview clips brought you up short, such as Margaret Thatcher’s section 28 pronouncement: “Children ought to be taught to respect traditional values… they are being taught they have an inalienable right to be gay.” (We later heard from David Cameron, announcing that gay marriage was to be made legal.) And, oh, it’s so great to hear these tracks. I knew every single one, but This Mortal Coil’s Song to the Siren, CeCe Peniston’s Finally and the Street’s Dry Your Eyes all made my heart sing. And Elvis Costello’s I Want You, that shocking shudder of a song, took me right back to the very first time I heard it. It was 1986 and I was in my bedroom, listening to the Annie Nightingale show.
There was more old and new in last week’s The Conversation on the World Service. It brought together two amazing athletes: gymnasts Nadia Comaneci and Simone Biles. Unfortunately, the conversation, steered by Kim Chakanetsa, was disappointing. Chakanetsa’s descriptions of Biles’s signature tumble were embarrassing (“She flips twice with her body fully extended, then twists around and lands without looking on the ground”; it’s like saying of a golfer: “He swings the long stick, hits the small ball up in the air and it goes a really long way”) and she didn’t pick up on Comaneci’s comment about the changes in equipment from her era to now (“The floor was very hard,” said Comaneci. “We didn’t have the same springs as now. Sometimes when I took off I felt as though my ankles were still on the floor”). Plus, she pronounced Comaneci as Comaneeeech. Things got better when Biles and Comaneci were allowed to ask each other questions, but this was disappointing. Gymnastics is an elite sport, not a circus turn.
The Unmissables is an attempt by Heat magazine to create a podcast about pop culture – mostly TV programmes – in the same style as the Kermode and Mayo film review podcast. And it succeeds, on and off. Presenters Boyd Hilton, Kay Ribeiro and Steph Seelan are clearly good friends, but they need to stop talking over one another, hold back on the interjections and let us hear their extensive knowledge as well as their gasps, yeahs and oh my Gods.
