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The other great boon, but also huge difficulty, is ‘the closeness, the intimacy’ of Radio 4. Its most ardent listeners wake up to the station and go to sleep with it. They react to any slight change incredibly personally because alterations to the schedule provoke shifts in their domestic routine. No more quizzes while you’re eating your lunch becomes a major catastrophe. ‘You know this intellectually,’ says Williams, ‘but it takes time to feel it.’ By which she probably means it takes until your first real change is implemented for the Controller to realise just how angry listeners can become.
Williams’s new autumn schedule, adding 15 minutes to The World at One and squeezing the afternoon so that the number of original short stories commissioned and broadcast each year has been reduced, has brought forth a furore, especially from authors. What does this say about the Controller’s commitment to new writing? Is this the first of many tacks in a direction away from literature and towards news and current affairs?
Her response is to be confident that there are good reasons for the changes. Then, says Williams, you have to stick firm to them, in spite of the deluge of criticism. She argues that on Radio 4 she can develop the closeness of writers to their audience by bringing them on to the Today programme, not just to talk about their books but also to contribute their understanding of what’s happening in the world. She reminds me that one of the last innovations she made as head of World Service English was to appoint the first writer-in-residence at Bush House, Hamed Ismailov. Williams, who has published short stories herself, also intends to ‘bring back the essay’ to Radio 4. ‘It’s the perfect form for radio,’ she says, a 20-minute opportunity for writers to structure an argument, to present a coherent analysis from their perspective as lookers-on.
Perhaps a clearer sign of Williams’s intentions as Controller can be seen in the expansion in 2012 of the national short-story competition (run by Radio 4 in conjunction with Booktrust) into an international affair. Writers from around the globe, not just the UK, will be invited to compete for the prize, £15,000, which is big enough to be life-changing for the winner. The ten shortlisted stories will be broadcast on Radio 4; stories that Williams hopes will reflect a wider diversity of experience than in previous years.
‘The big issues of our time are all across borders, both geographical and intellectual,’ she says. She believes that Radio 4 is unusual in the way it brings together so many genres. You might have noticed a lot more science programming on the station in recent weeks. This is not accidental. Williams wants to bring science to the foreground of listening until it becomes part of the warp and weft of the station and not just a specialist interest. ‘It’s old-fashioned these days to talk about such syntheses of knowledge,’ says Williams, ‘but we must resist the technologically driven impulse to be genre-specific.’ The interesting answers, the useful ones, she says, ‘can all be found in the cracks between genres’. The job of Radio 4 is to look into those cracks.
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