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The cast of famous characters are jumbled up in weirdly different combinations or have their idiosyncrasies blown up to absurd proportions. John Humphrys gets worked up over a banana, Jools Holland is kidnapped by an obsessive compulsive taxi driver, Arthur Scargill has given up politics and is running a massage parlour where Ronnie Corbett turns up for a reiki. Bad move, Corbett. Scargill is still on the warpath. He’s mad as hell because we’ve all forgotten him while all those TV stars of the 1980s such as Corbett and Ken Dodd, Rolf Harris and Bruce Forsyth, with whom he once shared prime-time ratings, are still at the top of their game.
Life in the Secret World is incredibly simple: we follow just one day from first thing in the morning to last thing at night. An announcer tells us what time it is and where we are, which could be anywhere from the bowels of Broadcasting House overhearing a Today programme production meeting (Humphrys still going on about bananas) to a beach in Barbados, from where the film director Mike Leigh is phoning the Hollywood actors he has fixed up with real awful jobs to provide them with improvising ‘experience’ (Keira Knightley has been on the deli counter of a WalMart for months while Robert De Niro has spent two years waffle-packing). The trick is to make us believe we are actually listening to these people, and to rein in the temptation to go over the top.
It’s not often a radio programme makes me laugh these days (have we lost the ability to be funny without being scatalogical or vindictive) and yet, as Sue MacGregor’s The Reunion series (Radio Four, Sundays) so often shows, it’s laughter that bonds people and helps them through crisis situations. This week she brought together again for the first time four key figures from the Beirut hostage crisis of the mid- to late-1980s — Terry Waite, Brian Keenan, John McCarthy and Jill Morrell. McCarthy was flung into a room blindfold when he first met Keenan. He described with vivid recall how once the blindfold was removed he looked up first at a pair of shoes and then blue jeans and finally a very hairy face (Keenan had already been incarcerated for four months) and thought that he’d met a character straight out of Treasure Island. ‘Ben Gunn,’ he shrieked, terrifying Keenan who wondered how he was going to get on with this new cellmate. Meanwhile, McCarthy’s first encounter with Terry Waite was in the boot of a car, when Waite, all six foot six of him, was flung in on top of him tied up in a sack. What kind of car could have had such a large boot, they now wondered.
Jill Morrell, in contrast, said very little. Her life was turned upside down when McCarthy, her boyfriend, was kidnapped, finding herself as the spearhead for the campaign to release the hostages. But when McCarthy was eventually released in August 1991 after five years in captivity, much of which was spent in a small cell with Brian Keenan, she felt jealous of their friendship. He knew John better than she did.
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