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In Praise Of Radio Four

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I’ve recently stopped listening to Radio5Live for three reasons. A particular presenter, whom I find annoyingly self-indulgent, has become more prominent, I’ve grown tired of one football pundit’s schtick and there is just way too much Premier League. I might dip in for tennis and I do enjoy Fighting Talk much more these days.

However, I have discovered the breadth of Radio Four’s quality. It’s a very soothing voice with news, old fashioned weather, politics, plenty of comedy, interesting investigative pieces and familiar magazines. I hate gardening but Gardeners World turns out to be fascinating. The debates remain calm and measured.

I used to think Radio Four was for old people, probably when my mum was still in her twenties! Now, I’m officially “elderly” at sixty-five and Radio Four is perfect.

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Comments

  1. IMHO, some good bits still, but not as good as it was. “In Our Time”, “The Moral Maze” and DID still appeal hugely and are must-listens for me.

    Current R4 comedy is not funny. And too much content on R4 is like being hit round the head with a rolled-up copy of The Guardian. The solution? BBC Sounds for the good stuff (including archival comedy which IS funny), and Times Radio for the news and analysis.

    As one might say about a band: “I prefer the early stuff”.

    • When I met Mrs F in my mid-20s, she was living in Bracknell and I spent my Friday and Sunday evenings sitting in the M25 traffic. So I upgraded the speakers in my car doors and fitted a 10-CD changer, 4x 25W amplifier and 8″ subwoofer in the boot.

      At 10am one Sunday, I drove to the middle of the Waitrose car park with all the windows open… and the Archers at full blast. People were conflicted.

  4. I just read that Radio 4 Long Wave broadcasts are ending. Of course little need for them these days, however I can remember picking it up in Switzerland at night if the weather conditions were favourable in the days before satellites or internet

  6. Tigger, you are right, Radio 4 is superb. You are also getting old – gracefully, I’m sure.

    I am now old too. I have just become a grandfather.

    I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up.

    • Get a job!

      Congratulations on the grandchild. I think that little person will keep you young. You can look forward to watching many, many, many episodes of Paw Patrol.

  8. I’m definitely and defiantly old. Sixty eighth birthday next week. The festivities get off to a rousing start with a blood test on Monday and will culminate on Friday with a cup of camomile tea and an early night. No radio 4 listening though. I can’t take the excitement of Moneybox or Ed Reardon’s Week not with my blood pressure.

    • Happy birthday for next week!

      No wonder you listen to so much gentle Jazz. Have you heard the latest exciting release by Sam Gendel and Fabiano do Nascimento – The Room?

      • Diolch yn fawr iawn. I sure have and it’s splendid. I’m a fan of both geezers tbh. Sam Gendel is a prolific chap ain’t he? I started the day with the much anticipated banger replete Touch of Time from Arve Henriksen & Hermen Fraanje and followed that with 3 by Abdullah Ibrahim. I thought about taking Wall of Eyes the latest from The Smile out for a spin but that much excitement would probably kill me.

  9. I like Radio Four – so there! However, if pushed, my current favourite radio station (and the majority of my radio listening, such as it is)…..is Radio Three. My morning routine revolves around Essential Classics, presented by Georgia Mann.

  10. I like it less now than when I was younger, when I had enormous respect for its schedule, whose edifice was upheld with great pillars of regular programmes that marked out the day, week and year. I prefer the convenience of podcasts (admittedly often of R4 shows) to the real deal. The last thing I stopped listening to ‘live’ was the Today programme, though Just A Minute, ISIHAC and It’s A Fair Cop are enjoyable shows on BBC Sounds playback.

    Of the podcasted BBC shows,
    * Any Questions is back to being good now Alex Forsyth has replaced the desperately inane Chris Mason, and Anita Anand does an excellent* job of stage managing the endless pensioners who dial into Any Answers.
    * The Archers is a daily fix, though there’s a lot of muck/noise to get through to the brass/signal of the decent storylines.
    * Radio 4 Quiz is good with Round Britain Quiz (especially when it’s Stuart Maconie), dull with Brain of Britain and i never listen to Gambo’s Counterpoint. If I want opera, classical and musicals, I’d listen to R3.
    * The Skewer I don’t think ever is on live R4 (there is no way the swearing and political defamation would be allowed), but the Lewis-Smith style of warped sampled music and spoken word tapestry can be impressive – loads of research and audience suggestions go into that.

    * even though the 1st person to call gets 10 minutes and the last gets 10 seconds.

  11. I don’t listen to R4 live ever but I love the archive of comedy stuff that’s on BBC Sounds via R4 Extra

    The magnificent Clare in the Community, Party, Ed Reardon’s Week, Hut 33, and dozens of others are perfect cooking-time listening.

    I think Bleak Expectations takes the crown though – silly and laugh out loud funny.

  12. In Our Time is one of the glories of British radio. Melvyn is getting on now and it does show a bit – he’s not as sharp as he was – but if he’d done nothing else he’d deserve his place in broadcasting history for the library of those programmes.

    • To think, when it started it was a consolation prize for him getting kicked off Start the Week. “OK, we’ll give you a slot on Thursday morning. Do what you want with it. Makes no odds, no-one will be listening….”

      Round about the same time Clive Anderson (yes, that one) began his excellent Unreliable Evidence series.

    • I wrote a post about R4 yesterday but deleted it cos it was too grumpy. But yes, IOT is really the only remaining pillar of old R4 – smart, insatiably searching curiosity of a kind you get almost nowhere else.

      Unfortunately, that “nowhere else” includes the rest of the R4 schedule. I think the BBC, and particularly its news output, is in a crisis of its own making. It’s not particularly that it’s too Guardian or too Tory-supine (it can be both): it’s more about culture and assumptions. Everything it does, from the coverage itself to the way it handles complaints seems pleased with itself: made by people who live in Stoke Newington, for people who (literally or figuratively) live in Stoke Newington too. An urban, black-framed-glasses-and-polo-neck sensibility which can’t self-examine because all its stakeholders are the same type of person.

      It’s a real worry. The head of BBC Music is Lorna Clarke, former head of programming at Kiss, a person who seems actively hostile to classical and choral music. The BBC Singers debacle seems quite emblematic – you hate to use phrases like “dumbing down” but… pop music hardly needs the BBC’s help, and the music which does is getting ignored or gutted. What you might call the high-end of the culture industry has this problem throughout: the director of Glyndebourne or similar (can’t remember) recently said he was deeply mistrustful of “country house opera” in which case GET A DIFFERENT FUCKING JOB surely? Thank God Emma Rice didn’t last at the Globe, but her cringe aesthetic – ignore the language and the story but put some drag queens and rap battles in – which seems to loathe the material it presents is pretty endemic, and the BBC isn’t immune.

      For me, if the BBC is going to take our money, it needs to be defending the bits of our culture which get precious little defence from anywhere else, and R4 – like much of the rest of the Beeb of late – seems less and less interested in doing so.

      • This, this, this, this.

        I do find it depressing that Music now always means pop music. Even the bloody Proms is now mostly pop music with strings like some bloody sixties variety show.

        The only R4 I hear these days is Today, which is the smuggest programme in the world and epitomises a lot of what the noble Bob says about the Beeb’s middle-everything culture. Oh, so Amol and Nick like football, do they? Talk Sport is that way pal, this is meant to be a fucking news programme, not Sunday Brunch.

        Harrrrrumph….😠

      • It used to be said that Radio 4 needed to attract a younger audience as further-proofing, then it was pointed out that finding Radio 4 is something that happened to listeners later in life. There is something to be said for listener loyalty though. I stopped listening to the station when I stopped listening to Today because Humhrys drove me nuts, and when it didn’t go on first thing the radio was already tuned to another station ( Radio 3 for me) and stayed there.

        • Yes, true for me too. Humphrys, like Paxman, became too much of a self-fanclub, then a self-parody, and ultimately unlistenable. When I’ve dipped into Robinson and Rajan’s Today, they’ve seemingly taken the How Can I Make This Story About Meeee approach to a new level. Insufferable.

          I like Rajan on University Challenge, though.

        • Mishal Hussain is terrific on Today, though – an intelligent persistent interviewer who I suspect MPs hate being interviewed by because she is very good at refusing to let them get away with their usual blustering bullshit. And I like Evan Davis on PM – not as good as Eddie Mair, but someone who’s fair-minded interviewing style can produce more interesting results than the likes of Nick Robinson.

  13. I used to be an avid listener to Radio 4, but I hardly ever listen to it live nowadays.

    I used to bookend my days, starting with the Today Programme and ending with The World Tonight, often falling asleep only to be woken by that night’s Sailing By and the shipping forecast. I would also try and catch one or two the 6.30 comedies (The News Quiz, Just A Minute and ISIHAC).

    About a year ago, I stopped. I got fed up with the Today Programme every morning. Every time I listened, it seemed to me that the presenters were not so much interested in what the interviewees had to say (or that they even listened to what the interviewee had said) but that they seemed to have a point of view to push. For me, at least, Nick Robinson, was a prime example, frequently hurrying the interviewee (because they were running out of time), but then jumping in right at the end to get the last word, which then went unanswered.

    Now, I listen to Radio 4 (and Radio 4 Extra) on BBC Sounds. A Peter Wimsey or Paul Temple half hour does me for my walk to work and back each day. I have been listening to P.D. James’s Cover Her Face this week.

    Like others, I am a big In Our Time fan, and also The Long View.

    I have recently discovered Moving Pictures (people talking about a work of art … listeners can find a high-definition picture on the website and follow along, so to speak) and Misha Glenney’s The Making Of … (about how different countries came into being – the one about Turkey was fascinating).

    I like the Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry (I prefer Fry to Rutherford: I find Rutherford’s boyish enthusiasm a bit tiring) and the Infinite Monkey Cage, but only in small doses because I prefer my science without a comedic touch (see also: You’re Dead To Me as far as history in concerned).

    Finally, I am also fond of More Or Less for a bit of statistic debunking.

    • “or that they even listened to what the interviewee had said”…. Martha Kearney is always confirming that she isn’t listening by asking a question that has just been answered. Just once I want an interviewee to say “Fuck sake Martha, I said that like five seconds ago…”

  14. Thanks @tiggerlion

    Like you, I find Radio Four a very soothing voice. I will put it on in the car because I like having it on, just bubbling under. The advantage of BBC Sounds is, of course, that you can choose what you listen to, and when. However, there’s plenty to be said for the serendipity of coming across something on live radio that you might not have chosen to listen to – an item on the care of aspidistras on Gardeners’ World, for example!

    Not that I have listened to it for a long time, but I seem to remember that Pick of the Week early on Sunday evenings always has something to whet the appetite.

  15. One thing that bothers me is that the comedy podcasts aren’t uploaded to BBC Sounds until a month after broadcast. For shows with any kind of topicality (News Quiz being the most obvious) this is just bonkers.

  16. Lots of agreement here, and as a lifelong City fan I find Nick Robinson’s endless commentary on United tedious on Today. Exasperating though it maybe, there’s nothing better to get me out of bed and started on the day. I used to, with a longer commute, listen from 9 to 10 in the car, but have now with a shorter one managed to kick this habit.

    Must add to the general IOT love-in. It has one very particular role in the middle of the night. If sleeplessness strikes then it’s queue up 5 or 6 on a very quiet setting with headphones stuffed under the pillow. Science is best, as there’s no narrative to catch your interest – and within 5-10 mins I’m off, waking hours later to catch Melvyn and guests happily still at it on nuclear fusion or prime numbers.

    • You don’t have to be a City fan to find that tedious.

      Then there’s Justin Airhead managing to shoehorn Rugby Union into pretty much everything and still pronouncing “gone” as “gahn” twenty plus years after returning from America then there’s the God slot and then there’s Garry “Best of the Beatles” Richardson and then grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr……

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