Monkman and Seagull’s Polymathic Adventure (Radio 4) | iPlayer
The Reunion: The Wapping Dispute (Radio 4) | iPlayer
Who are Bobby Seagull and Eric Monkman? You might reasonably guess a 1970s singer-songwriter and your accountant. Unless, that is, you’re a University Challenge viewer, in which case you’ll recall that they were two eccentrically talented competitors in the last series of the egghead quiz show.
Indeed, such was their breadth of knowledge and speed of thought on the buzzer that they entered the news earlier this year and claimed their 15 minutes of fame. But it seems that neither man is content to disappear back into the ivory-towered obscurity whence they came. Or more to the point, the BBC wants to keep them in the public eye.
And so to Monkman and Seagull’s Polymathic Adventure, a half-hour featuring no polymaths and very little adventure. The two men set out to see if “it is possible to be a useful polymath”, but everyone they spoke to agreed that in these days of specialist knowledge, there are very few, if any, people who qualify as genuine polymaths – ie, someone who makes significant contributions in different fields of expertise.
The one interesting idea of the programme was that we in Britain tend to admire the quick-witted all-rounder. As long as you’re thought clever, as Monkman noted, you’re seen as capable of doing anything – chancellor one day, secretary of state for defence the next.
The pair interviewed Stephen Fry, inevitably, who also rejected the popular idea that he was a polymath. He was just keen to learn. “If you want to know why someone’s obese, it’s because they’re greedy,” he declared. “There’s no other reason. It’s about being greedy. It makes you fat.”
Where, one wondered, was he going with this unprovoked indictment of the fuller figured? “It’s the same with being curious,” he explained. “I’m greedy to know things.”
Oh. A fat thinker, as it were. I’m not sure the analogy worked. No one, as far as I know, goes on information diets, or to a place to lose knowledge. Not intentionally, anyway, though I suppose the pub might qualify indirectly. And that’s where this muddled programme ended up, in a pub quiz. Monkman and Seagull finished fourth. Somehow, that felt about right.
One of the usual pleasures of listening to The Reunion is having a group of historical antagonists coming to understand one another’s side of things many years later. Not last week. It was on the Wapping dispute, that bitter strike and picket that took place over 13 months in 1986-7, as Rupert Murdoch moved his newspapers out of Fleet Street to a purpose-built, union-free bunker on the river.
Kelvin MacKenzie, then editor of the Sun, and never a man to look for a fence to sit on, said of the local union chapel members: “a more vile collection of bullies I’ve never met in my life”. One of those members was Paul King, who said he was still in dispute with Murdoch’s papers, which he made a point of hiding whenever he was in a newsagent’s shop.
The two men refused to accept either’s position, and their ongoing animosity crackled across the airwaves like static electricity. Somewhere in the middle, trying to occupy a sensible place was Brenda (now Baroness) Dean, the general secretary of Sogat ’82 during the dispute.
She all but admitted that the chapel leaders were intransigent to the point of destruction. It was a bad time for organised labour, which suffered a number of punishing defeats. But it was also a bad time because too often organised labour had no viable vision of the future, just a determination to hold on to the failed practices of the past.
And just as the printers were made obsolete by new technology, so now do newspapers find themselves in a similar position. Time plus irony equals history.
