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This was pure emotion, without contrivance, or effect, designed not to entertain or compromise, but to understand. Roy Williams’s trilogy of plays, The Interrogation (Radio 4), also led us into the heart of violence, and asked us to think about who are the real victims, the real perpetrators. He filled in the details behind those black-and-white headlines, forcing us to confront our own prejudices. Who is better than whom? The bigoted white detective or the black kid under arrest?
There’s something about listening which doesn’t happen when watching TV; something about the way the hearing brain functions differently from the seeing brain that allows us to have these inner conversations with ourselves at the very same time as hearing what’s being said on air. This worked to brilliant effect with Radio 4’s five-and-a-half-hour adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, heard throughout the day on Bloomsday, 16 June, the day on which Leopold Bloom talks us through his life, with all its fears and fleeting dreams. Listening to Bloom and his rival Stephen Dedalus chasing thoughts of Molly through the streets of Dublin made me acutely aware of every passing moment, as if I were the hero of my own narrative; life turned into a radio play.
‘And I shivered as I watched a roach crawl across the toe of my high-heeled shoe’ could be the best lyric heard this year, on Radio 2’s programme about the elusive folk singer Bobbie Gentry, hosted by Roseanne (daughter of Johnny) Cash. ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ is Gentry’s most famous song, a brilliant example (although Dylan hated it) of how to tell a story in just 4 minutes 25 seconds. But this lyric comes from another of her songs, ‘Fancy’, about a girl, dressed up and sent off to be a prostitute by her mother. The lyric works so well because Gentry makes sure you hear every word, singing each line with such clarity, conviction.
The prize for producing the daftest conversations of the year must surely go to Radio 2 and its recreation with a team of studio experts of the night the Titanic went down. Titanic: Minute by Minute must have sounded like a great idea at the planning stage. Just imagine taking listeners through every horrifying detail of the night of 15 April 1912 as if it were happening in 2012? What a brilliant radio experience that would be?
‘Can they swim?’ asked the host of the show, Jeremy Vine, at 12.40 a.m., just after the first lifeboat was launched. ‘Do you think panic is breaking out yet?’
My favourite daft moment, though, was on Radio Five Live as Ann Widdecombe joined in a drunken night out with a group of young women. She wanted to find out why they’re willing to make themselves so ill for the sake of a good time. By midnight they were all paralytic; Ann was, of course, stone-cold sober, having stuck strictly to water. As she watched her new friends totter between bars, she asked them, ‘Why don’t you wear sensible shoes?’
The most inspiring thought of the year came from a Radio 3 programme presented by the philosopher Raymond Tallis. On Immortal Dreams, he explored the idea of living for ever, asserting that ageing is actually to be welcomed as a necessary alternative to the living hell of a life prolonged. This was not as reassuring as intended, until Tallis suggested that each morning when we wake up we are actually five hours’ younger because of the impact of the exponential increase in life-expectancy. Now there’s a thought to cheer the New Year.
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Also by Kate Chisholm
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