POETS must be used to long periods of isolation; and the announcement that The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His Shed (Radio 4, Saturday) should come as no great surprise. But this is the season for making a virtue out of necessity — and, if you can get a com­­­­­­missioned radio series out of it, all the better.

Simon Armitage certainly ranks high in the league of lockdown virtue: he is translating the 13th-century moralistic poem The Owl and the Nightingale, a follow-up to his successful renditions of Gawain and the Green Knight and other medi­eval masterpieces.

To share in his reflections on the challenges of the pro­ject, he invites a weekly guest, and, last week, we heard from Professor Laura Ashe, who knows a thing or two about med­i­eval Eng. Lit. Best of all, she makes a convincing fist of declaim­ing it, although she admits that most of the pronunciation is made up.

Armitage’s 14th-century author had a lavatory humour all his own, revealed through the contrast of prud­ish Owl and worldly Nightin­gale. And yet neither bird is a simple archetype: their range of characteris­tics are more nuanced, providing Armitage with the excuse to play an “Owl and Nightingale” game. Are you: night or day, north or south, Woman’s Hour or In Our Time? Through identification with a suc­ces­­sion of apparently random polar­ities, we might establish character and affiliation far more accurately than asking direct questions about wealth, education, or politics.

This is the approach increasingly taken by sociologists who are ex­­am­ining attitudes to Brexit. In Analysis: Identity wars (Radio 4, Monday of last week), we heard about the “values scale”, which does a much better job of correlation than tradi­tional psephology. Brexit was an issue which, far from representing a class division, exposed differences even within families; and as such,
as the presenter, Professor Anand Menon, argued, is reminiscent of the enduring divisions revealed in France a century ago by the Dreyfus Affair. Such experiments in his­­tor­ical comparison are somewhat hit-and-miss, and it was noticeable that few of Menon’s guests were prepared to indulge the analogy.

The Archers (Radio 4, weekdays) are getting so bored during lock­down that they have started talking to themselves. Having been stalled with back-catalogue editions, devo­tees last week were treated to soli­loquies from David, Josh, and Tracey on topics ranging from the proper dispersion of silage to the futil­ity of existence.

Streams of con­sciousness are not a natural feature of the Borsetshire psychological land­­scape, and, in cre­ating them, the scriptwriters have drawn inspiration from an eclectic group of engineers, including Dylan Thomas and Alan Bennett. And, in David’s med­itations, are we not hear­­­­ing the strains of Samuel Beckett, his determination to “keep battling on” a version of Beckett’s heroic cry, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on”?