Listening To Radio Four- Part 1

I was thinking to myself the other day how my interest in such things as literature, theatre and comedy have been influenced by BBC Radio Four. Most people, as they grow from adolescence to adulthood, listen mainly to what is commonly known as 'pop' music, and the form of delivery for this is via radio. In the 1960's we had pirate radio, such as Radio Caroline, which operated illegally from just outside the mainland of Great Britain. I do have a slight connection to this station (but only slightly, I may add.) Radio Caroline was broadcast from a ship which was anchored in the North Sea just off the Essex coast near where my family spent it's summer holidays, at Frinton-On-Sea. You could see this ship clearly from the promenade at Frinton, where we rented a beach hut for the two weeks at the beginning of September each year. One year there was a mighty storm at night and the ship on which Radio Caroline was broadcast from came adrift from its anchorage and ran aground on the Frinton beach. It made the headlines in the national newspapers over the next week of or two. In 1967 (or thereabouts) the then Labour government, under Harold Wilson, made pirate radio stations illegal, apparently because they were supposed to interfere with broadcasts for the lifeguard service. Radio Caroline (and other similar pirate stations) were put out of business and the good old BBC was tasked with creating a replacement radio station, which was to be called, rather unimaginatively, Radio One (because the remaining BBC radio stations were to become Radio 2 (formerly The Light Programme), Radio 3 (formerly The Third Programme), The Home Service became Radio Four. No doubt it was the obvious numbering of these stations that gave them their names, so to have a new station called Radio One was logical. I've not actually been a particular fan of 'pop' music, preferring classical music, but I do enjoy some bits of pop. I think if I have to have any sort of pop radio station on I prefer Radio 2, because, frankly, I can't stand commercial pop stations such as Heart which is awful. The adverts are really appalling and seem to play to the lowest common denominator. It was better when it was Chiltern and Horizon. They've just made it into a sort of mush, basically for financial reasons. Terrible. They must think their audience are really dim or something, the tone of the presenters.

Why am I mentioning all this? I suppose because when I was growing up I tended to listen to Radio Four. My parents always had it on in the house.  My father had to listen to the weather forecast because he was a farmer and the weather was important to him, particularly at harvest-time.) It was probably the main source of news and always seemed to be on at lunchtime. We had an ancient radio in the kitchen at Malting Farm, kept on a shelf high up on a wall, which took a time to warm up before it worked (I think most things needed 'warming up' in those days, before transistors became popular and replaced valves in things. The television we had, a black and white model, took some time to warm up. A good many years before the introduction of colour in the early 1970's.)

Radio Four must be unique. It's an all-speech channel. I can't imagine a commercial version because I don't imagine the audience figures are particularly high, so it would never survive on advertising alone. It broadcasts a wide range of material across such things as documentaries, arts, media, light entertainment, comedy (light entertainment covers panel shows and sitcoms and sketch shows.) as well as soap opera (The Archers would fall into this category. It's supposed to be the longest running drama or soap in the world, running for something like 65 years. In fact, it's one year younger than me.)

I got hooked on adaptations of books which were (and probably still are) broadcast on Radio Four. For example, some of Daphne Du Maurier's novels. which lead me to read many of them, particularly 'Rebecca' and 'Jamaica Inn.' I think I'd written them off as being somewhat female-orientated (which perhaps they are, to some extent.) but then, once I'd read them, I discovered that there was far more to them, particularly 'Rebecca' which is really gripping and has a mystery about it. She does atmosphere and character really well. Definitely page turners. The books have been adapted for both radio and television, and of course 'Rebecca' was famously made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, with Laurence Olivier in the role of Max DeWinter. She also wrote another, the later novel which was called 'The House On The Strand' which was done well on the radio. There's something about a radio adaptation, you have to concentrate more than with a visual medium. There's no way you can get away with the scenery dominating, flashy camera-work etc with a totally aural adaptation of course.

Recent Reading . . . and some Writing . . . Part 1

I have quite a wide taste in what I enjoy reading. I've had a passion for good reading since I was quite a young age. When I was at school we were always supposed to have something to read, taken out of the school library or else bought from a local shop. Infant, it's a habit which I have continued to this day. I always have a book to read and once one is read I have another to read.  I read Arthur Ransome's "Swallows and Amazons" and the later books which featured the same characters. "We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea" which I believe was set in and around Essex, along the coast from where we used to go on holiday when I was a child, Frinton-On-Sea, Walton-On-Naze and all the little inlets along that stretch of coast. The characters were real to me, and the stories were good. I'm not sure whether children read them today. I think they were written in the 1920's and 30's so perhaps they wouldn't appeal to modern children, bought up with iPads, Gameboys, Nintendo etc. My father was a sailor and had yachts which were sailed along that bit of coast, around the Colne Estuary, Brightlingsea as well as Frinton (see earlier blog posts on our family holidays.) So a series of books featuring children who sailed was of interest to me, not that I was a sailor myself. My father put me off, to some extent, as he wasn't the most patient of people, when it came to his children in a boat he was sailing. When I went to work as a D.S.M. at Century Theatre in Keswick in the early 1970's they were in the process of making a film version of "Swallows and Amazons" on Lake Windermere, although I was too busy with the season of plays we were producing to be able to watch any of the filming, which was a real shame.

I got hooked on anything with a really good plot. I was a radio drama fan (something I doubt children of today can say.) Radio Four (or the good old Home Service it was named up until about 1967 when the B.B.C. introduced us to Radio 1, 2, 3 and 4. No doubt it was easier to give the stations numbers than to come up with any other name.) I think it's the fact that, with a radio adaptation, you have to use your imagination far wore than when it's done in a visual medium, such as film or television or even stage. For that I think Radio Four is quite unique. Where else can you get such a rich selection of drama? Nowhere I can think of. I got hooked on adaptations of novels, done as "Saturday Night Theatre" as well as a Sunday night adaptation of books as well as stage plays. It was through an adaptation of "Rebecca" by Daphne Du Maurier, that I discovered not only that novel, but all, or about all, her other novels, such as "Frenchman's Cove", "Jamaica Inn" as well as her later novels such as "The House On The Strand." Such an incredible author, how she could evoke a place, such as Cornwall where most of her earlier novels are set. "The House On The Strand" is a particularly clever piece of writing, and it worked so well as a radio piece and wouldn't work as a film or a television series (thankfully.) and knowing today's television it would be ruined. "Rebecca" is perhaps best known as being made into a film by Albert Hitchcock and starring Laurence Olivier as Max DeWinter. It has been adapted for television a couple of times, the first with Joanna David as "The Girl" and then much more recently with Charles Dance. More of Daphne DuMaurier's stories have  been made into films, most famously, another Hitchcock adaptation being "The Birds" as well as "Don't Look Now" with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland and directed by Nicholas Roeg. It's a really scary film and, although a good 40-plus years old, well worth a view if you get a chance to see it. It's shown regularly on television although you could get it on DVD. I supposed DuMaurier would be considered a 'woman's novelist' and I suppose, when I first came across her, not having then read anything of hers, it would have put me off,  as I think I might have thought the novels to be sort of 'Mills and Boon-ish', but how wrong could I be, as her books are so well plotted and the characters so captivating, particularly "Rebecca" that I was soon hooked and had to read more of them.

In the late 1960's Radio Four did a quite brilliant serialisation of the J.R.R. Tolkien novel "The Hobbit." It was done in eight episodes. I have recently managed to purchase this adaptation of a set of CD's from "The Works" in Milton Keynes. As a result of the radio adaptation I read the book and later on I discovered "The Lord of The Rings" (also adapted for B.B.C. Radio and part of the CD set.) I had it originally in a very thick paperback edition which I think I bought on a trip into London and took with me when I went to work as an A.S.M. at Liverpool Playhouse in the early 1970's. I read it every decade or so after that, and had it in three hard-bound editions, I think purchased from Book Club Associates and later I had an illustrated, one volume edition. So I know the trilogy very well and enjoyed the Peter Jackson movie trilogy which was pretty faithful to the original. At the time of writing this I haven't seen "The Hobbit." It seems unnecessary to me to make it into three films, because it's a relatively straightforward book. No doubt it was done for financial reasons, which seems a shame. I may eventually get round to viewing it on D.V.D.