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Radio review: Perfect Pitch (From Choir Stalls to Cricket Balls), The Church of Social Justice, and The Reunion

26 August 2022

Richard Watt/Church Times

Perfect Pitch (From Choir Stalls to Cricket Balls) (Radio 4, Monday) explored similarities between choral singing and cricket

Perfect Pitch (From Choir Stalls to Cricket Balls) (Radio 4, Monday) explored similarities between choral singing and cricket

IT IS entirely possible to delight in a radio programme that is talking rot. In Perfect Pitch (From Choir Stalls to Cricket Balls) (Radio 4, Monday), Eleanor Oldroyd argued that singing in a church choir and playing cricket had important similarities. She drew on, as witnesses, the former Test cricketers Sir Alastair Cook, who was a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral, and Sir Clive Lloyd, who sang in St George’s Cathedral, Georgetown. Oldroyd herself was both a chorister and a BBC cricket correspondent.

As they often say on Radio 4’s More or Less: correlation is not the same as causation. For all the elaborate analogies presented here — that singing a long psalm was like facing ball after ball in a Test match; that the solo in Allegri’s Miserere was a challenge equal to batting at number 3 — the only clear connection between the two seems to be that the sorts of people who like choral evensong are often the sorts of people who like cricket.

But it hardly matters. If you like either pastime, it is a joy to hear Andrew Nethsingha (soon to take up the music directorship at Westminster Abbey) speak of vestry culture, just as it is to hear Graeme Fowler reminiscing about the dressing room. Curiously, nobody mentioned the elegant rituals of Test Match Special — the pigeons, the cake, the red buses on Harleyford Road — which are second in liturgical elegance only to Radio 3’s Choral Evensong.

In The Church of Social Justice (Radio 4, Tuesday), the correlation under discussion was between religious faith and social-justice activism. The presenter, Helen Lewis, was happy to admit that her childhood Roman Catholicism had been displaced by an enthusiasm for feminist causes; and that it was transgender politics rather than transubstantiation which was likely to galvanise her generation. In her analysis, Lewis brought in some excellent commentators — among them Tomiwa Owolade and Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner — and reinforced the oft-cited claim that social activists can behave like puritan witch-hunters when it comes to heretical views.

Missing from all this was even passing acknowledgement of those world-changing movements driven by people for whom social activism and faith were inextricable. Nor could the essentially conversational, interview-based approach of the programme engage with more profound philosophical and spiritual questions around what exactly the difference is between religious faith and faith in a “progressive” social agenda. Elizabeth Oldfield, formerly of the think tank Theos, whetted the appetite for such a discussion when she talked about her conversations with environmentalists who were burned out, and who recognised that activism on its own could not sustain them.

All of this leads neatly on to The Reunion (Radio 4, Sunday), in which members of the Occupy London movement, veterans of the St Paul’s encampment of 2011-12, were given the chance to reminisce. The lack of representation here from other groups — the police, the cathedral, or the Corporation of London — rendered this a rather ineffectual exercise, although it is clear that the protest had a more profound effect on their individual lives than it ever had on the operations of global capitalism.

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