Storms, Tea and Tempests

 

Off then to Broadcasting House to record “A Good Read” for BBC Radio 4. It was my first time entering the hallowed portal since its rather wonderful facelift and I must confess to being impressed by the changes. On the rare occasions that I walk northwards from Oxford Circus, bound for the home of Auntie Beeb, it always gives me a frisson of excitement to look up and see the building’s ocean liner shape and Eric Gill’s wonderful rendering of Ariel and Prospero from Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ above the entrance. This time I found myself involuntarily stiffening the sinews and straightening my back, as if on parade. Had I been wearing a tie, I would no doubt have fiddled with it while shooting my shirt-cuffs as I entered. I was, I realised, quite nervous.

As I waited in the imposingly marbled reception area to be collected and ushered into broadcasting's bosom, I sat reading Ariel, the in-house newspaper, unsurprisingly full of opinions and perspectives on the decision not to broadcast the DEC’s Gaza appeal. Whilst believing Mark Thompson to be wrong on this occasion – surely a humanitarian crisis of such proportions deserves a humanitarian response irrespective of the political causes and ramifications; a duty to aid the relief of human suffering trumps the responsibility of broadcasting impartiality in the poker game of realpolitik – I am not without sympathy and admiration for the decision he has taken and his belief in it.

I think John Humphries put it perfectly on the Today programme on Monday when in response to Thompson’s point that “because of the BBC’s coverage (people) will be aware of the suffering and if they choose to make a contribution to the appeal of course they will be able to” he said, “ Isn’t that a bit hypocritical. We’re perfectly happy for people to support this appeal but we want to keep our own hands clean.”

Of course the argument that not to broadcast the appeal will hinder the DEC’s ability to get its message across is to my mind no longer valid, as the news coverage of the debate has given them more air –time than they might otherwise have been granted. Perhaps Mark Thompson has played a far smarter hand than he’s thus far been credited for, getting the humanitarian message across as a news story and thereby meeting the aims of the DEC’s appeal whilst not opening the BBC up to charges of partiality. Clever fellow.

Whilst this storm was raging, as evidenced by the ranks of police vans outside, there was an air of calm in the studio where the ever-wonderful Kate Mosse was hosting the first programme of a new series of “A Good Read”. My co-guest was Victoria Derbyshire who’s voice will be familiar to listeners to Radio 5 Live. I shan’t ruin the show before it’s broadcast on the 10^th of February at 4:30 p.m. (GMT), but I will say that it was a great deal of fun, the three books sparked some lively discussion and the half an hour flew by. In fact we recorded to 28 minutes so what you will hear will be as close to an unedited version of what we did as it’s possible to get. Oddly enough, BBC studio tea seems also to have undergone some improvement in tandem with the architectural updates.

I’m now fully focused  on the interview for the Literary Festival Artistic Director post, which is taking place next Tuesday. I have so many ideas, but which are the good ones? It's the perennial 'separating wheat from chaff' problem.

Let us hope that the good ship BBC soon finds that the tempestuous seas it is currently navigating give way to calmer waters and that a tenable ceasefire in Gaza will allow the aid agencies to carry out the much needed work they are so very good at.

 

Yours,

 

LibraDoodle

News, views and interviews.

January 12^th 2009

Well it’s been a week since I tendered my application for the artistic director post for a literary festival and so far nothing heard. Not a surprise as I assume that they’ve been inundated with hopefuls. I certainly hope so, it’s a good festival and it deserves the luxury of selecting from a wide range of applicants.

Extended unemployment plays havoc with one’s self-confidence and I’m in a strange gloaming, nervous that I won’t be called for an interview and yet more so that I might. It’s been a good few years since I’ve had to formally apply for a job and to be honest I worry that I’ve lost the skill, if I ever had it. It’s also a very long time since I had to attend a job interview so if any of you have current tips do let me know. Perhaps you’ll also keep your fingers crossed for me as I really want this job, would relish the challenge and believe that I could be of benefit to the festival.

Silence in that particular area can be set against an unexpected invitation from another for an altogether different sort of interview. I’ve received an email from a production assistant at BBC Radio 4 inviting me to be a guest on “A Good Read”.  It’s a programme I listen to and enjoy greatly and Kate Mosse, the hugely successful author of Labyrinth and Sepulchre, is hosting this season’s run. Actually I can’t quite believe that I’ve been invited, it’s such an honour.

I know Kate well and admire her enormously having interviewed her for radio on a number of occasions, both in her authorial capacity and also as the co-founder and honorary director of the Orange Prize for Fiction that has done so much for fiction by women from around the world. I feel strangely uncomfortable stating that line ‘fiction by women’, to me it seems so redundant these days, but that’s what the prize was set up for and with a roster of winners which includes Valerie Martin, Ann Patchett, Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Rose Tremain to name but a selection, it has really achieved what it set out to do and is very much a force for good. Perhaps one day, when I’ve grown up, I’ll get to be a male judge if they ever have such a thing. (I’m forty-six years old as I write that line, there’s time aplenty!)

It will be odd to be on the other side of the desk, I’m not at all sure that my experience as a broadcast interviewer will make me a good interviewee. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest not. Still, off I will go, proudly to Broadcasting House on the 27^th of this month to discuss my views on my chosen ‘good read’ and those of Kate Mosse and the other  - as yet unknown – guest.

What’s my choice? You’ll have to wait and see. A couple of my first thoughts were covered by earlier guests so while choosing a shortlist of three was relatively easy, the process of deciding on one is proving engagingly tough. I’m veering toward the small but perfectly formed so it may not be a full-blown, pocket-bursting, brick of a novel. It will be a damn good read though, that I promise.

So there we have it, a former interviewer turned interviewee now waiting for one interview while being interviewed in another interview by a former interviewee turned interviewer. Enjoy the views.

 Yours,

LibraDoodle

Word Worlds and Desert Island Discs

January 11th 2009

BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/desertislanddiscs.shtml held a treat in store today, as the guest of honour was my friend Ruth Padel, Charles Darwin’s great, great granddaughter, a hugely admired poet and a rightly much-mentioned name in the search for Britain's next Poet Laureate.

Whilst her choice of discs illustrated a profound love and understanding of music from string quartets to blues, what was most interesting was her ability to use the interview format of the show to create beautifully evoked 'word worlds'.

In a brief 45 minutes Ruth took listeners from the forests of Siberia where she was in search for the fast-disappearing Siberian tiger to the lush jungles of Sumatra in pursuit of another feline sub-species. These experiences were part of her research for "Tigers in Red Weather", a very personal travelogue, published in 2002, that encompasses the science of conservation, natural history, myth and poetry that was to my mind that rarest of books, an instant classic of enduring appeal. Her comment on the irony that her forebear wrote of the great explosion of species and just four generations later she is now writing of the appalling reduction in them tore straight to the heart of the issue.

She then took us to another world entirely and re-created in miraculously few words a mid twentieth century country home of her childhood where wood walks alone with a dog, unkempt mazey hedges and a book-laden school room were conjured for the listener, taking us back to a time when such issues as our treatment of the planet and its inhabitants had yet to impress themselves on our conscience.

I am getting to an age where people I know or have known are appearing more frequently on Desert Island Discs. Another recent example was the delightful Professor A.C. Grayling, reader in Philosophy at London University's Birkbeck College and one of the most graceful, kind and evolved men I know. During his edition he utterly altered the perception I had of the duration of life by saying: 

"that the human life-span is fewer than a thousand months - and with our time so limited, it is incumbent upon us all to use it thoughtfully and well."

It is perhaps not surprising to learn that his ethos is to take philosophy out of the ivory towers and into people's homes as a tool to help us live richer and more fulfilling lives of thought and consideration.

Grayling's choice of luxury to take to the imagined desert isle of the programme was a good piano. Padel's was a herd of deer that to my mind seemed wonderfully in keeping with her love of the natural world. Sadly her choice was disallowed - luxuries are supposed to provide no aid to survival - and so she settled on pencils and paper.

There are many good poets, both men and women, whose names are being mentioned as potential successors to Andrew Motion, the current and highly successful Poet Laureate. All of them would certainly bring much to the post. I harbour a hope that those whose unenviable task it is to make the choice will select a woman for the first time and that that woman will be Ruth Padel. She would be a timely choice for the post in a world where our connections with and abuses of the planet are becoming ever more critical and I like to imagine that she would take her pencils and paper to some of Britain's own desert islands and so create more word worlds for us to enjoy. But that's just my opinion. You could of course listen to BBC Radio 4 at 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday the 27th Jan when Ruth will be presenting a four-part show "Darwin my ancestor" and form your own opinion. I hope you do.

Yours,

LibraDoodle