The Reunion: Euro 96 (Radio 4) | iPlayer
Scenes from Student Life (Radio 4) | iPlayer
The Business of Music With Matt Everitt (Radio 4) | iPlayer
The past. When you reach an age where you have more past than you have future, the past isn’t somewhere that you like to dwell. And yet it keeps popping up. The deaths of beloved icons send you spiralling back into memories, of course, but also, aren’t there a lot of programmes about the past? Programmes that unpick a particular era or event, a time in history. This would be fine, except you remember all this stuff anyway. You were there, and it was long ago, and you didn’t realise how long until you heard a programme about it.
Sue MacGregor’s The Reunion is always doing this to me, and last Friday’s was a prime example. She revisited Euro 96, which I remember as a laugh and a tragedy and a sunny summer. As it was about football, all her guests were men, and MacGregor fielded them with her usual deft graciousness. Within a couple of minutes, she exposed differences in the way they thought about football culture. The England squad were sent to China and Hong Kong to bond before the tournament; they were pictured in a bar having spirits poured down their throats as they lounged on a dentist’s chair. “Do you remember that night?” asked MacGregor of Ted Buxton, who assisted Terry Venables. He did. “I don’t,” said Darren Anderton. “Neither do I,” said David Davies. Hahaha. Harry Harris from the Mirror pointed out that it was “lunacy” to send the team there and to allow them to drink so much; Ted said no, it “worked out just right”. There was nothing wrong with elite athletes coming up to the tournament of their lives getting as completely wasted as students in freshers’ week. The fault lay with those naughty journalists printing the photo. Suddenly, Euro 96 did seem very long ago.
Freshers’ week was the subject of the first in Ellie Cawthorne’s two-week series Scenes from Student Life. Cawthorne trotted off to St Andrews University, to Raisin weekend, where older students declare themselves younger students’ “mum” and “dad”. Someone offers someone else some raisins, there’s a huge foam fight, everyone gets hammered, and… there you go. Cawthorne, a likable presenter, talked to many students who insisted that they kept the receipts for the foam, that Raisins was one of the most memorable times in their university life… And I remembered how much I hated all that stuff. Being a student does not mean you have to join in horrible, “traditional” drinking games. You can stand off to the side wearing black and sneering through your fringe. That’s a student tradition too, and better for making friends.
And then on Monday, Matt Everitt from 6Music offered us the first of two programmes about The Business of Music. The first, about the impact of Napster and the iPod, cleverly used a bit of soundscaping to weave voices together at the beginning and the end, overlapping comments about how music used to be sold and what happened, turning them into a lament. The music choice was unexpected – more soulful than indie – and this, too, gave a mournful feel.
Lots of men on this programme too: only ex-A&R manager Debbie Southwood-Smith provided a female voice. But then that was the way, those days, and we barely even noticed. I enjoyed Rob Wells’s dry anecdotes: he remembered suggesting in a meeting that the record label send Take That fans an email rather than a letter, to save money, and afterwards being cornered by an executive who said, “What’s an email?” And I also enjoyed Daniel Glass’s cool assessment of Napster’s business model as “extortion”. This was a sensible programme about a mad time, an insightful overview of what happens when you get comfortable in life. Things change, faster than you can imagine. Your expectations are always wrong. I know this now, of course, because of the lessons of the past.
