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Words are so much more powerful than images, as Orwell so cogently argued in his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’. That’s why radio’s survival prospects in the battle of technologies are always going to be higher than those of its suddenly poor relation, television. Words matter and radio’s USP is its vital relationship with language and the way it draws its listeners in, cutting through to the very essence.
In Jean (Radio Four, Thursday), Mary Stephenson recalled the months she spent with the writer Jean Rhys, arriving with her portable typewriter each afternoon at two o’clock to type up what turned out to be Rhys’s last book before she died, aged 87. Rhys had been asked to write an autobiography, especially of her years in Paris in the 1920s when she had been part of the creative circle that included Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. But she began with her childhood, growing up in the West Indies on the island of Dominica. She was ‘word perfect’ on her own life, Stephenson remembered, beginning in their first session with page one: ‘ “Smile please!”, the man said. “Not quite so serious.” ’
There’s been quite a lot about Rhys in the papers recently, on the 30th anniversary of her death. This touching, atmospheric documentary (produced by Sara Davies) gave us so much more in just 30 minutes. All we had were Stephenson’s memories, threaded through with those of Rhys’s own words (voiced by Merelina Kendall) and those of her publisher Diana Athill, but by the end you could almost feel Rhys’s presence in the room.
As Athill told us, Rhys was an inadequate person, battered by life, her tiny frame shrouded in hopelessness and disappointment. She terrified the children of the village of Cheriton Fitzpaine where she lived, said Stephenson, the wicked witch in the woods, just as she herself had been terrified as a child by the voodoo magic of Dominica. Inside her, though, there was this writer; a writer who did not flinch from admitting to her demons, but always with the eyes of a poet, so that her books never leave you feeling hopelessly akin to suicide but determined to survive — just as she somehow did.
Radio Three’s Mendelssohn Weekend culminated with an imaginative performance of the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the composer himself would have heard it — within a performance of the play. I was lucky enough to be in the Middle Temple Hall on the night and was hugely entertained by the cleverness of the direction (by Tim Carroll), casting a magic spell over this very solid Tudor edifice with its heavy wooden panelling and hammerbeam roof. Nothing much was lost by listening to it on the radio on Sunday evening, hearing again that light-as-a-feather music and having the chance somehow to savour Shakespeare’s dancing prose. I did wonder whether the voices of Oberon, Bottom and co., would have been lost in transit from Hall to sitting-room. But I should not have doubted the sophistication of the BBC’s production values (masterminded on the night by David Papp). And, after 27 years of the Sony Awards, Radio Three has at last been recognised as UK Station of the Year.
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