I sometimes listen to Radio 4 and think, ‘How did I get here?’ Did I graduate through Radios 1 – 3, work my way up through the channels? And where do I go next? Is this the end of the radio road for me?
If at first glance there appears to be an incremental, chrono-evolutionary progression through the BBC’s public service channels, then Radio 5 kind of fucks that up.
Ah, the well-known ages of man: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle-age, old age and, erm… sport. Never-the-less, there’s a path of sorts to be followed between the first four BBC stations; a loose road-map that traces a route from the fast roads of youth, winding up through the mountains of middle-age, and finally down into the valley of death.
Radio 1, with its achingly hip beats and love of ‘banging’ tracks (or whatever youth lingo they’re using these days that’s clearly being transmitted on too high a frequency for my ancient ears to detect), is your first stop: the radio-wave that signals you’re coming-of-age. Radio 1 bombards you with every trendy musical sub-genre, from Peruvian Seal Techno, to Robert Redford’s Reverse Reggae, to Andalusian Anne-Frank Funk. The station’s shows are presented by 13-year-old DJs with floppy, flicky hair, fake tans and regional accents so dense and packed they form linguistic black-holes from which no sense or consequence can ever escape.
From there you move on to Radio 2, where the tunes are still edgy – but only if you’re 47. You listen to phone-ins about how annoying it is to listen to phone-ins about phone-ins, and you’re so annoyed you decide to phone-in, but then you have to hang up because the station has almost breached its contractual obligation to play a Manfred Mann song every seven minutes; the producers placate you by offering to have you on the next morning when their phone-in topic is ‘Men Making a Stand When They’re Banned by Manfred Mann: Mann’s Inhumanity to Man’.
Next stop, Radio 3, the station for those who still like music, but can’t be bothered with lyrics any more – the sort of people who own a Charles & Camilla commemorative fountain pen they bought after seeing an advert on the back cover of the Radio Times; the sort of people who then use that fountain pen to keep a hand-written journal of their crushingly dull lives, preserving their trip to the supermarket for posterity in an ornate hand as they listen to a piece of classical music that once appeared in the film Gladiator, which might be Mozart or something, but they aren’t really sure, because they don’t really like classical music, but they sure as shit like people KNOWING that they listen to classical music.
Finally, it’s time to say ‘Fuck the music’ altogether and embrace Radio 4. No music for you anymore, sonny Jim, unless it’s the theme tune from The Archers, or 30 seconds of a song chosen by some Hungarian nuclear physicist you’ve never heard of on Desert Island Discs. From hereon out you’ll be listening to interviews with reverends about the history of raffles of Pre-Raphaelite drafts in the Raffles hotel by Russian riff-raff, or Simon Callow reading the shipping forecast, or afternoon plays about laconic, lah-dee-dah English detectives investigating the theft of bejeweled ostrich eggs in 19th century Chile; and, of course, twelve-part documentaries about the man who invented crepe paper.
OK, let’s address the thoroughly middle-aged elephant in the room here. I’ve always liked Radio 4. In fact, as a young man, in full mockery of the supposed linear progression through the BBC channels I outlined at the beginning of this piece of writing, I jumped straight to Radio 4, hopping over the horror of Radio 1 in one single, grateful bound. I’ve long, and indeed always, considered Radio 1 to be ‘noise’, even when I was in its consumer demographic. All of the songs they’ve ever played sound to me like somebody taking a home-made aerosol flame-thrower to a noisily loading ZX Spectrum as a man shouts ‘WRECK IT, FOOL, CHECK IT’ over and over into a megaphone. I think a little part of me has always been 44; it just took me a long time to notice because I spent most of my teens and 20s either drunk or stoned (or both).
Radio 4 just seems to fit me. It’s comfortable: like a fluffy slipper o’er the toes; an antique pipe between the teeth (I’ve never smoked a pipe, but I like the idea of it), or a lazy fondle of your sudsy, soap-slicked cock in a warm morning shower.
But sometimes… just sometimes, Radio 4 and I have a little ideological disagreement or class-based skirmish. Something happens to remind me that I’m not some middle-aged, middle-class, Home Counties cabbage-grower from Berkshire, but the son of a woman from Maryhill who spent her formative years shiteing outside; a man who took all of the trappings of his parents’ rags-to-nicer-rags, working-to-middle-class success story, soaked them in vodka, rolled them in Rizla and set them alight.
Here’s a case-study for you.
Now, I’ll always listen to BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour if it’s on when I’m driving. It’s entertaining, and makes me feel like a proper feminist who cares about the issues and that. Sometimes its features are gentle, sometimes whimsical, sometimes worthy, often serious. And sometimes, just sometimes, they can whiten the hair and curdle the blood, so agonisingly brutal and terrifying are the topics they tackle.
Last week I was listening to it as the latter scenario unfolded. It was all I could do not to smash myself into a truck and be granted death’s instant mercy, such was the almost incomprehensible unspeakableness of it all. A guest had been invited on to the show to discuss the kind of harrowing, life-or-death, high-stakes suburban hell hitherto only contended with by the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. Something dark. Something you dread. Something you hope and pray will never happen to you. Yes, I think you know what I’m talking about here.
That’s right…
The nightmare of poor cumin management.
Take a second to imagine the horror. You open the kitchen cupboard one day to find not one, not two, not three, but SEVEN tubs of cumin. SEVEN? Lord Jesus, how could I have been so careless? you ask yourself. What have I become? WHO IS THIS MONSTER I SEE REFLECTED IN THIS GLASS (FREE-TRADE OF COURSE) JAR OF ETHICALLY-SOURCED BASMATI RICE? SEVEN tubs of cumin? What next? TWELVE carafes of ALMOND MILK? I THINK I SHOULD JUST FUCKING KILL MYSELF NOW BEFORE I INVADE AUSTRIA!
The guest was a drawling, well-to-do woman called Deborah Robertson, who was on to promote her new book about de-cluttering your home. Isn’t that just ‘tidying up’, I hear you ask? No, you fool. It’s a lot more complex than that. For starters, Deborah’s method is a kinder, gentler, ‘less absolutist’ one, whatever the blustering fuck that means.
Many years ago, you see, Deborah’s house started to become so full of stuff that she didn’t know what to do with it all. Naturally, she read all of the books about it (books about tidying PLURAL?), but she just couldn’t get it (or she just couldn’t afford a cleaner, more than likely – but that’ll be the first thing she gets if the book sells well).
During Deborah’s short segment I learned about ‘Swedish death-cleaning’ (sounds like one of Radio 1’s musical sub-genres), the 10 De-cluttering Commandments, the hell of surplus cumin (sorry to keep opening that wound), and the necessity of always taking things you don’t need anymore to the charity shop. What a whirlwind; what a whistle-stop education in what you must agree is a vital life-science.
“What am I going to do? I’ve got too much stuff? The Africans who walk fifty miles to a well each morning to get the water they need to survive don’t know they’re born, they really don’t.”
“I’ll tell you what steps you can take to help remove the clutter of unnecessary items from your house: buy my wholly unnecessary bloody book, that’s what you can do. I’ll even throw in my new one: ‘Why it’s Always a Good Idea to Wipe Your Arse After a Shit’.”
I’m sure the book will be on every member of the ‘ladies who lunch’ and the chattering classes’ Christmas lists this year, and thereafter available in charity shops the country over come January the 2nd.
You depressed me, Woman’s Hour, so much so that I switched channels in disgust, and found myself listening to Radio 1 for longer than a second. Thwump-thwump-fizzle-fizzle-chizzle-thwappa-fizzle-chizzle, went the music. Thwump-thwump-fizzle-fizzle-chizzle-thwappa-fizzle-chiz…CLICK went my finger.
Fzzt.
I drove the rest of the way home in silence.
What frequency is Radio 5 on?
PS: ‘incremental, chrono-evolutionary‘ – I’ve no idea if this weird hybrid word I invented earlier in the article is apt, or if it even makes any kind of sense at all, but by Christ it sounds impressive, right? And that’s the main thing.