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How many of us, as we listen to ‘Sailing By’, with its consoling-but-sad ascending and descending scales, wait with dread for the rallentando at the end, because that means that the end of the Radio 4 day is in sight? If ‘Dogger, Fisher, German Bight’, followed by a lovely presenter wishing us a peaceful night, followed by the drumroll of the National Anthem, don’t get us to sleep, we’ll be thrust into the world of Radio 4’s brash and harsh sister station for four whole hours.
Should insomniacs switch to Five Live and listen to Up All Night instead? Perhaps. I think the Up All Night presenter, Dotun Adebayo, impressively manages to please both insomniacs and truck drivers. He has a gentle, deep voice and an easy manner. How different his long night-time phone-ins are from rushed daytime ones! To fill up the gaping minutes, Shirley from Bexhill is allowed to read a whole poem she’s written. We hear about the poems she used to like, Dotun tells us about the poems he used to like… and you just hope that someone driving an Eddie Stobart lorry hasn’t fallen asleep and crashed into the central barrier.
The reassuring thing about Dotun Adebayo and, indeed, about Shirley from Bexhill, is that you’re all in the same boat. You’re all awake in the middle of the night. But when Dotun is off duty and getting some sleep, the programme is presented by someone who is wide awake — in -Massachusetts.
Rhod Sharp (educ Perth Academy, has soft Scottish accent) broadcasts live from his own studio at the top of his house in Marblehead, Mass, so in order to present the programme he only has to be Up All Evening. Whereas we benighted souls… it’s not fair.
And the length of time he lets his interviewees talk for! Last week, we had a historian talking for six minutes, uninterrupted, on the subject of whether the bones under the carpark in Leicester were those of Richard III. Ending with the terrible pun ‘my hunch is that they are’. Again, good for insomniacs, dangerous for truck drivers.
There’s always Radio 3 and Classic FM, if music’s the thing that gets you to sleep. It’s at Radio 3, in the middle of the night, that the wonderful presenter Susan Sharpe is still to be found, introducing the pieces in her exquisite voice. But she hardly says a thing. Out of the six hours of music, from 12.30 to 6.30 a.m., only about five minutes contain the spoken words of the presenter.
As for Classic FM, they have a ‘trucker’s tune’ each night. In the small hours of this morning it was the opening part of the Carmen overture, and you were never going to fall asleep to that.
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Also by Ysenda Maxtone Graham
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