A few years ago, while talking to a successful programme director in British commercial radio, I asked, in a tone of exasperation: “Is there anybody out there playing what they want and saying what they want?” His answer was: “I hope not.”
This was tongue in cheek but it was also his honest view. Over the past 20 years, commercial radio seems to have methodically squeezed every last bit of spontaneity out of its programming. The result of this is that now it finds itself equipped with exciting new tools and doesn’t know what to do with them. The feisty, likable Jamie East (Weekdays, 10am, Virgin Radio) may be too lively for commercial radio. I hope not. He’s started using Periscope to live stream from his studio as he’s doing the show, which should be interesting.
At the moment, the main thing you learn from watching is that there’s slightly less going on in the average radio studio than in the average call centre. This is symptomatic of a wider malaise. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to radio stations to worry about how things look. Quite often, when I click on the Watch Live tab on BBC 5 Live, I find myself looking at an empty studio in Salford while the programme is clearly being broadcast from London, which isn’t the message the BBC ought to be putting out.
If you grew up any time between the end of the war and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the lore of the cold war is in your bloodstream. Cold War: Stories From The Big Freeze (Weekdays 1.45pm, Radio 4) is aimed at people who didn’t have that experience and tells the stories that seemed unremarkable at the time and are now jaw-dropping. The series takes advantage of the fact that the people who remember incidents like the airlift that kept Berlin supplied in 1948-9 when Stalin tried to starve it out are still alive.
BBC TV is adapting Evelyn Waugh’s Decline And Fall. The Honourable Mrs Margot Beste-Chetwynde will be played by Eva Longoria. There’s something faintly incredible about the fact that Waugh went to Hollywood in 1947 to discuss a possible screen version of Brideshead Revisited. This is one of the eyebrow-raising morsels that make Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited (Weekdays, 9.45am, Radio 4) such an appealing book of the week. Just about everybody Waugh met – and he met a lot of people – came away stunned by his rudeness and arrogance. In his defence, he had terrible piles. John Harris’s excellent The Twilight World Of Syd Barrett (Thursday, 6.30am, Radio 4 Extra) is a repeat of the 2011 profile of the man who led Pink Floyd and then walked away. Barrett’s sister talks about how surprised his family were to find how celebrated he was when he died in 2006, over a quarter of a century after his retirement. But then, as Bob Seger once sang, rock’n’roll never forgets.
