POOR-QUALITY student essays come in a variety of forms. There are the ill-informed and the unstructured; and then there is that category that — to borrow a phrase from Rory Stewart’s latest series for Radio 4 — operates in “that astonishing event-horizon between knowledge and ignorance”. The phrase is perfectly homological, though a more efficient description requires only the letters B and S.
Rory Stewart: The Long History of. . . Ignorance (Thursdays) follows a format established in 2022 (Radio, 29 July 2022), and I rather enjoyed his “Long History of. . .” argument. But here the breezy pretension is too much even for a morning Radio 4 slot. Buddha, Confucius, and St Paul are invoked in a single breath, the Dark Ages are really dark, and the Enlightenment is dazzlingly bright.
Our fear of ignorance is obsessive. Ignorance prowls like a wolf around the camp. Professor Mary Beard exclaims with horror: “I could die any moment and haven’t even dipped into Japanese literature!” And yet, the “astonishing, disturbing claim” of this series is that ignorance is good for you. We hear how ignorance makes us more humble, creative, and wise.
These claims might sound more authentic were they not expressed by people — such as Professor Beard and Lord Williams — whose public personae are founded on their being brainiacs. Could we not have heard from people who are really dim, to have them reflect on their state of blissful ignorance, that we might have a chance to admire their preternatural humility and creativity? The only thing that would induce me to listen to more of Mr Stewart’s musings is if Mary and Rowan promised to take on a real wolf-pack.
The business of running as fast as you can is not of itself an obviously poetic activity. Yet, sports reporting is not immune to its own style of pretension. So, it is to his credit that the commentator Mike Costello delivered his series on the five greatest Olympic 100-metre sprints — Ten Second Showdown (Radio 4, weekdays last week) — with restraint, while providing us with the rich contextual information that turns great athletic achievement into iconic sporting moments.
Allan Wells in Moscow 1980; Ben Johnson in Seoul, 1988; Usain Bolt in Beijing, 2008 — each race is closely identified with an era of Olympic history. And, with athletes from Russia and Belarus now competing as independents, we appear to have returned to something like the situation in 1980.
In light of Radio 3’s ever-shrinking budget, one cannot but be impressed by the way in which the network seeks to reinvent the playlist. Thus Music Map (Radio 3, Sundays) offers a musical journey-planner, taking us the scenic route from an unlikely starting point to a climactic destination. Last week, we were taken to Tallis’s 40-part motet “Spem in alium”, via far-flung spots by Bach, Michael Torke, Steve Reich, and others. There will be some who would prefer the tour guide, Sara Mohr-Pietsch, to restrict her commentary to a minimum; but the cost of the fare must somehow be justified.