Anyone who says they’re not a snob is lying,” says an anonymous cut-glass voice from the archives at the beginning of A Guide To The Modern Snob (Saturday, 8pm, Radio 4), DJ Taylor’s look at one of radio’s inexhaustible subjects. Another voice complains that the barbarians have been at the gates ever since people stopped wearing waistcoats to the opera. That first voice is, of course, entirely correct. We’re all snobs because we all feel threatened, either by the passing of time or society’s shifts. Thackeray first sought to codify English snobbery in the 19th century when the aristocracy felt threatened by the rising bourgeoisie. Nancy Mitford did it again in the 1950s when the bourgeois felt themselves assailed by people who said “pudding” when she felt it should be “sweet”. At the moment the foremost snobs are the educated middle class, who are constrained by their political inclinations from looking down on anyone but the white working class.
While My Guitar Gently Bleeps (Tuesday, 11.30am, Radio 4) is Isy Suttie’s look at the musical genre known as “chiptune”, in which adults whose childhood soundtrack was provided by the music from video games such as Tetris and Pac-Man make pop records with some of the same values. What she finds, of course, is that it’s the limitations of the original technology that lent these sounds their charm and, no matter how hard you try, you can no more go back than you can make a record that sounds like the Four Tops sounded in 1966.
Most radio station websites are designed with everyone but the listener in mind: irritating pop-ups, invitations to subscribe and adverts that have to be endured before you are allowed near any of the content you have come looking for. The Resonance FM site is a welcome relief. It leads with a clear indication of what exactly is “On Now”, which you need with a station as unpredictable as this. Last time I looked, an edition of its Clear Spot (Weekdays, 9am) was devoted to one hour of dawn chorus recordings made by a listener. It was a joy. I expect nothing less of the new series From The Road (Thursday, 6.30pm), an hour of insight and anecdotage from the always entertaining producer and impresario Andrew Loog Oldham.
While flipping through one of my radio apps, I came across the Kathmandu Show With Binod, which is broadcast by BFBS Gurkha Radio, a new service from the British Forces Broadcasting Service from a transmitter in the Aldershot area, available to the rest of us on the web. That’s what you call community radio.
There’s a place for the pure unadulterated blokeness of Nick Ferrari (Weekdays, 7am, LBC), a place where I found out that unlicensed drivers charged with traffic offences have their penalty points placed on a so-called “phantom licence”. That’s the kind of thing to get cab drivers talking, which is still one of radio’s main purposes.
