The Great Egg Freeze (Radio 4) | iPlayer
Heart and Soul: Inside the Mosque Ruled by Women (World Service) | iPlayer
Can the Centre Hold? (Radio 4) | iPlayer
Ah, how lovely it is to hear Fi Glover presenting a documentary. Or, indeed, to hear Fi Glover presenting anything on the radio. Her scripts are witty and deft; her delivery quick, light, clear; her questions intelligent and warmly polite. When Eddie Mair gets it right on PM, as he does so often, he reminds me of Glover.
Glover has several BBC radio series on the go at the moment – The Listening Project and Shared Experience on Radio 4 and the World Service’s My Perfect Country – but last week she presented a one-off programme, The Great Egg Freeze, about women freezing their eggs as a form of family planning. It opened with Glover returning to a previous report she’d made on the topic, in 2001. “I was very single,” she said, “and my body clock had started to tick.” (She’s married now, with two kids.) Since her first report, the practice has expanded and egg freezing is now promoted as part of the healthcare package for executives at companies such as Apple and Facebook.
This was an interesting programme, though I’m not quite sure why it was made now. Are we at a particular egg-freezing tipping point? Glover asked a private fertility doctor a similar question and the doctor called egg freezing as important as the contractive pill. But then she would, wouldn’t she? It’s clear that the option is available and known about, yet not huge numbers of us are doing it. The price stops it being an everyday option. Plus, as Glover acknowledged, we don’t really know whether it works, in terms of creating a real live baby.
Most of the jollier egg-freezing statistics are around a frozen egg later being fertilised, but once that happens, the potential mother has to go through IVF, and the older she is, the more likely this will fail. This is a still-developing story; who knows if we are in its middle or its end?
Another female-centred intervention in its early days is the Mariam mosque in Copenhagen, the subject of last week’s Heart and Soul on the World Service. A local, Sherin Khankan, set it up, with herself as “imama”. With room for 70 female worshippers, it has attracted a lot of attention from what one commentator called “western liberal media”. This particular commentator was an Islamic scholar, very keen to tell everyone that the Mariam mosque wasn’t truly Muslim. “It’s Islam-lite,” he said, adding that there is no way past the innate sexism of Islam.
But Khankan, the daughter of a Finnish Christian and a Syrian refugee Muslim, was resolute. She wants to challenge Islam’s “patriarchal structure”. China has had female imans since 1860, she said; Muhammad asked women to lead prayers in his mosque. When presenter Anna Holligan visited an immigrant area of Copenhagen, she found young women receptive to the idea of a female-led mosque. “It’s not adding to religion, it’s adding something to society,” said one. Religion operates within a culture and, if it wants to continue, it has to be relevant to the times in which people live.
The question is, then: are our times liberal, feminist and global or traditional, male-dominated and local? They appear, at the moment, to be both. Can such positions ever agree, ever meet in the middle and hold hands? Mary Ann Sieghart went in search of an answer, though she phrased it politically. Can the Centre Hold?, she wondered, and asked several impressive interviewees their thoughts: Tony Blair, George Osborne, Alex Salmond, Peter Hitchens.
Osborne pointed out that people are bored by professional politicians, that authenticity is an election winner (“at least you know Trump is actually sending his tweets”). And Salmond hit the nail on the head when he pointed out that what a party needs to win these days is a combination of a strong sense of national identity and an anti-establishment message. The SNP has this, as did the Leavers and Trump.
At the end of the programme, Blair wondered aloud if our long-established political parties could actually achieve this. I wonder, too.
