Viva Lewes Issue #114 March 2016

column
David Jarman
Radio days... and nights
It has long been
the practice in our
household for my
wife and I to eat very
late at night. When
the children were
growing up, they
were fed early in the
evening. Only when
they were in bed and
sedated did we embark
upon our meal.
Now they are adults,
we continue to eat
late. One advantage
is that when I do the
washing up (No, of
course I don’t have a
dishwasher. Just one more thing to go wrong, as
my father always said) Radio 3’s Through the Night
is already on. Long pieces of classical music, brief
informative introductions, no parroting of irritating
phrases like ‘charged at your usual message
rate’ and ‘BBC New Generation Artist’- Radio 3
as it used to be for most of the day.
I do listen to Radio 3 during the day. Not Sean
Rafferty’s In Tune. That would be going too
far. But Essential Classics from 9am, though
God knows that’s enough of an ordeal. First the
moronic ‘Five reasons to love’ slot. Come 9.30
and it’s the ‘Brainteaser’, even more annoying
when Sarah Walker is presenting the show as she
always feels it necessary to refer to the setters of
the quiz as ‘our brainteaser boffins’. A certain
Herbie Goldberg always used to be the first to
call in with the right answer. But he seems to have
disappeared. Perhaps he’s been done away with by
less nifty listeners. I think I’ve noticed that Robin
Milner-Gulland only fires off the answer when
the brainteaser is less insultingly easy than usual.
I always relish Mr Milner-Gulland’s corrections
of the presenters on
all things Russian
- advising, for example
on how Night
on a Bare Mountain
should more accurately
be translated
into English. Sarah
Walker also suffers
from the modern
tendency of not
undermining the
self-esteem of any
brainteaser contestant
who contacts
the show, however
idiotic they are. So
if someone suggests
‘Josephine Baker’ as the answer, and is told by
Sarah that “that’s not quite right”, the correct
solution will almost certainly turn out to be
Hildegard of Bingen.
And then the habitual clichés. Listeners relating
how they were so moved on hearing a particular
piece of music in the car that the tears streamed
down their cheeks and, blinded, they had to pull
over to avoid an accident. JS Bach’s music having
affinities with Mathematics. The slow development
of a monumental Bruckner symphony
being like the building of a cathedral in sound.
The separate instruments of, say, a piano trio,
responding to each other as though they were
having a conversation. A particular rendition of
the Eroica being so vital that it’s as though the
ink had still not dried on Beethoven’s manuscript
paper. Rob Cowan telling us that a particular
recording was the first record he ever bought. It
seems to me that he has done this so many times
on the airwaves that, if true, he must have used
his pocket money to buy up half the record shop.
And so on and so on…
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