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When Wiggins gives up his bike (not for four or five years, he promises), he could always take up radio. He’s got a great voice, with perfect pitch and always right on the beat. He and Weller don’t say much between tracks. Just enough. Words matter to them; not only music and sideburns. The best way to listen to their programme on 6 (at lunchtime on Boxing Day) will be with the door firmly shut against the family and the volume up as high as it will go.
Elsewhere on radio this is most definitely an Austerity Christmas, light on specials, big on keeping to the budget. Back in 1923, Lord Reith promised ‘Northern listeners’ they ‘may be lucky enough to skate to wireless music — if the ice holds’. The schedule for that first wireless Christmas was stuffed full of dance music, Dickens and Shakespeare.
Imagine the excitement back then of having your own ready-made entertainment in the house, after centuries of relying on charades and booze to keep the peace. ‘The loudspeaker,’ writes Reith in the Radio Times for Christmas 1923, ‘is so ready to oblige when wanted…. He doesn’t feel hurt if a cracker is pulled in the middle of a song, or offended if the son grows riotous during his performance.’
It’s a bit odd to burden the loudspeaker with gender but you can see what Reith means. Where would we be now without our gadgets to release us?
Grimm Thoughts on Radio 4 promises to breathe life into that 15-minute slot just before the lunchtime Archers, which so often doesn’t quite work. Fifteen minutes is a long time to fill if you don’t have enough vocal character or passion. Marina Warner, who calls herself a mythographer, talks with authority, enthusiasm and such grace about the dark, often peculiar, forest-fuelled tales, first published by the German Grimm brothers 200 years ago. Even if we don’t like them, these stories are now so deeply embedded in cultures around the world they’re unmistakably part of our imaginative make-up, from The Frog Prince and The Fisherman’s Wife to Rumpelstiltskin and Cinderella.
Where did they come from? Why do they have such lasting power, now translated into more than 160 languages? It’s the bleak, deadpan tone, Warner reckons, ‘culminating in a sudden, joyful turn of events’. Maybe. But perhaps more potent, as she suggests, is the way the Grimms allow us to experience (if only in our dreams) the satisfaction of revenge.
Fifteen minutes a day is just enough to tantalise us, leaving us each time wanting to go back and read the original Children’s and Household Tales, to find out whether the Grimms still do have the power, the frisson of recognition, generated by the ‘blithe callousness’ of those supposedly happy endings. On the World Service, The Language of Lullabies (Saturday and Sunday) has been looking at their role in child development, both here and abroad. Cue babies gurgling and chuckling down the microphone.
At the Royal London Hospital they encourage mothers to sing to their just-arrived babies and to swap lullabies from their own childhoods. Since it’s in multicultural London, there are many traditions to call on, from China to Italy via Bangladesh and Blackpool, the mothers sharing centuries of hard-earned knowledge about how to calm a crying babe. A professor of child psychology in Edinburgh has studied these first post-natal interactions between mother and child and discovered how babies will reply (in gurgles) to what their mother sings, exactly on the beat as if understanding already the music of language.
We’ll no doubt be hearing an awful lot about antenatal developments in the coming months, but this series has a wonderfully calming effect, all that cooing and chuckling and soft, sweet murmuring.
When wireless, true wireless, was a new invention, back in 1923, some feared it was the closest thing to witchcraft. It certainly can be like alchemy. Take, for instance, the reading (by Robert Glenister) of a Nabokov short story on Radio 4 (tune in at teatime on Christmas Day). There’s snow, there’s grief, a cabinet of butterfly specimens and a very large chrysalid. At the time it’s poignant, atmospheric, a perfect seasonal gift, full of hope and redemption. Only later does the slightly menacing aftertaste begin to kick in.
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