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It’s all about ‘enriching’ our experience of radio; and reaching out to the new techno generations, who can text, type, watch and listen all at the same time. It will, of course, only be available to those with the right digital ‘platforms’ — laptops, TVs, smartphones. Not for visualisation the ancient Roberts on the bedside table. But if you’re fully prepared for the ‘in-vision show’, you can now watch Simon Mayo on radio as he interviews Harriet Harman and Martin Sheen.
Harman, ‘I think Tony Blair is more good-looking, actually.’ Big guffaws. A few minutes later, after Harman has left the studio, an envelope is handed to Sheen, with the House of Commons logo in the left-hand corner. He holds it up in front of the in-studio camera; Mayo explains what is happening for all those out there without a screen in front of them. Then Sheen reads out Harman’s fulsome apology for her indiscretion (you can still catch it online if you’re quick).
It’s all very amusing, but is this radio? I thought most of us listen while we’re doing something else — ironing environmentally friendly handkerchiefs, chopping garlic, driving on the M62. Is there anyone out there who truly wants to catch sight of Mike Tucker in the act, as he kisses the buxom Vicky? In any case the picture quality is often rubbish; the voices not quite synched with the images, the digital time-lag making everything move in a rather stilted way like an old-fashioned black-and-white newsreel. The trouble with multiplatform media is that amazing though it is that we can now transmit images via fibre-optic cables and digital codes, and watch them on a screen the size of a postage stamp, the received quality of those images is not always as good as they used to be with pre-digital technology. Just because we can do it does not always mean that it’s worth doing.
On Saturday night, Radio Three repeated one of its Sony award-winning programmes, Staring at the Wall (produced by Sara Jane Hall). Alain Dein talked to people living within sight of Pentonville Prison, creating a montage of what it sounds and feels like to be on either side of the wall. What’s it like to get up every morning, draw back your curtains and see in front of you a 15-foot-high brick wall, knowing that behind it are 1,200 men for whom freedom is a mirage?
A former prison governor told Dein, ‘The ear is the most telling of your receptors as regarding the mood and temperature of the prison.’ He had witnessed several riots in his 26 years of service. ‘If you’ve ever heard a riot, it’s very frightening. A baying sound. Bad sound…Bad sound.’
Next week, on The Essay (Radio Three), the sculptor Antony Gormley talks about five works of art that have influenced him. A tough listen, as it’s all words and no pictures, but so provoking. Take the first talk, in which he compares Duchamp and Jacob Epstein. Duchamp, he says, is ‘radical, delightful’ but ultimately an ‘effete, intellectual dilettante’. Epstein, on the other hand, in ‘The Rock Drill’, created a totemic, almost magic object, which is also a warning about technology, both ‘an amplification of human potential’ but also, explains Gormley, ‘a destructive and potentially catastrophic force’.
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