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‘What I loved in my old life, I haven’t forgotten. It lives in my spine,’ wrote Cohen in his poem ‘Days of Kindness’. But now, he said in conversation, ‘I have very little interest in the past and very little interest in the man I was then. It doesn’t present a mystery to me, a puzzle that has to be solved…’ I want to think like that when I’m 73.
Over on Two there’s been a series that sounds tailor-made for Four — until you look at the guest list. The Novel that Changed My Life (Fridays) has given Cherie Blair, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, Vic Reeves, Kathy Lette, Mel Smith and Alex James the chance to sound off about their favourite books. It was not just the choice of guests. I know, I know it’s a bit spooky to think that each waveband has its own peculiar etherbound sound. But I’m convinced that Cherie and co. would have sounded completely different if they’d been talking on Four. The tuning is just not quite the same. For a start there was lots of background music, cleverly chosen but still jolly irritating when what you want to hear is something clever about the books under discussion. But there was also something liberating about hearing ‘literature’ talked about without the hushed awe of a typical Four production.
Cherie Blair took us to Afghanistan to hear from women living in Kabul the experiences written about as ‘fiction’ in A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. It was a bit offputting to hear her saying that the book resonated with her because one of the characters is abandoned by her father just as she and her sister were back in Liverpool in the Sixties. Surely, there’s a chasm of difference between growing up without a father figure in the UK and being abandoned to the Taleban in Kabul. And yet I found myself drawn into her programme because it was so well researched, and took the book (which she admitted was ‘not what you might call literature’) out of the library and into the strange, violent world of Afghanistan since the 1979 communist invasion.
This week Vic Reeves talks about Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which he attempted to recreate, aged 19, by hitching down the A1 from Darlington to Grantham and sleeping in a field of corn stubble. Fortunately, he didn’t spend too much time on his own free-wheeling experiments but instead took us back to the source: Kerouac, Carolyn Cassady and co. in 1950s America. Reeves spoke not just to Kerouac’s biographer but also to Cassady and Joyce Pinchbeck, who were there, and could verify that Kerouac really did write the book, all 180,000 words of it, in just 21 days fuelled not by classified drugs but by caffeine, potloads of it.
As for those Grundy boys. As I write, we’re still on tenterhooks as to Will’s whereabouts. I’m not sure I can take any more dramas like these in Ambridge, and may have to give it up, as I did for years after John Archer was killed by a tractor.
James Delingpole is away.
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