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Echoes of silence

15 March 2013

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Listeners to the BBC World Service last Friday were treated to a rare, if not unique, radio experience: 15 seconds of silence. Extended periods of silence on the radio are said to set off alarm bells in Broadcasting House - recordings of guitar music are poised to be deployed, and, if the rumours are true, our nuclear-submarine fleet is put on high alert. Nor was this just an ordinary silence. This was a deluxe-quality silence, brought to you from the anechoic (echo-free) chamber of University College, London - said to be the quietest room on the planet.

All this excitement came courtesy of The Why Factor, in which Mike Williams explored the power and spiritual benefits of silence - except, of course, that what we think about silence is generally nothing of the sort. We heard from Evelyn Glennie, the percussionist whose deafness does not preclude her feeling rhythm; and there was a reference to John Cage's 4'33", which is not about silence at all, but about the noise that lies behind any foreground auditory experience.

So, when you do encounter real silence, it is a profoundly unnerving and oppressive sensation. It is a dry, confining silence, where the noise of your own body becomes the loudest stimulus; and you can understand George Eliot's phrase from Middlemarch about dying from "the roar that lies on the other side of silence".

Not even the tomb can compete; at least, in the case of the late President Hugo Chavez, whose embalmed body will be visited for years to come. In the spirit of incisive journalism, the team on Radio 5 Live's Weekend Breakfast on Saturday did a piece on the art of embalming, and went so far as to interview the President of the British Institute of Embalmers, Phil Hogarth. As one might expect from a proud professional, Mr Hogarth was keen to impress on us that embalming was an art and a science. It works for Lenin, who has been going since the 1920s.

"History has a hard heart" is something that you might expect Lenin to have said. But, last week, we heard it from the lips of a professor at the University of Baghdad, as he explained why ten years of violence in Iraq may yet be regarded as a reasonable exchange for the overthrow of dictatorship. The country, he went on to explain, is now in a mood of "neither-nor": finely balanced between pessimism and optimism.

Hugh Sykes's survey of the ten years since the invasion of Iraq - After Saddam (Radio 4, Sunday) - has been an exercise in splicing together archives rather than producing fresh commentary on the situation today; and, as such, it was patchy and disconnected.

 necdotes of atrocities could fill many programmes, but only listeners with a heroic stamina could endure more than a few examples. Interviews with soldiers from the United States provided a different tone - one that was surprisingly candid and self-aware. "We came here, we broke a lot of stuff, and we'll be a laughing stock if we don't fix it before we leave," one said.

What "fixing it" means is a moot point. We met an Iraqi woman who was now employed in a new General Motors showroom in Baghdad, who was delighted to be able to walk the streets in relative safety. And with only two explosions a week.

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