COMPARED with Radio 4, the format of Times Radio is much less varied, but far more flexible. The benefits of flexibility were on clear display in the hours after last Friday’s imbroglio in the White House, especially on Friday Evening with Geoff Norcott. Its production team will have moved like lightning to rearrange what is normally a culture-focused show in a matter of hours.
The Times’s Assistant US Editor, David Charter, shone as a rare expert willing to provide a calm, rational, clear-headed, and frankly depressing assessment, while others were stuck in immediate emotional responses and wishful thinking.
President Trump was everywhere on the radio, even on Moral Maze’s latest episode, How Should Britain Deal with Donald Trump? Radio 4 suffered bad luck in having the show go out on Wednesday of last week, before the tumultuous week reached its nadir. Given the wide-ranging policy areas that the Trump presidency will probably cause difficulties for in the UK, it might have been more enlightening had the programme not focused solely on Ukraine, despite its obvious current importance.
Although the panellists were universally and obviously pro-Kyiv — including Tim Stanley, who sometimes enjoys being a bit of a right-wing edgelord provocateur — even the Ukrainian think-tanker dialling in from Kyiv was not given an easy ride. The exception among the witnesses was Peter Hitchens, who, in his splendid isolationism, was as provocative and highly entertaining and utterly wrong as ever, although it would also be too easy and very unwise, given the much declined state of the British armed forces, to dismiss too casually his description of himself as the man pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.
Much entertainment was provided by Jan Halper-Hayes, who often acts as the de facto London-based press attaché for the Trump movement, who clearly is deeply embarrassed by the President’s approach to Ukraine, while also not wanting to burn her bridges with the administration.
Far away from all that, and of direct relevance to churches and cathedrals dealing with how to contextualise memorials whose historical provenance is now “problematic”, was the The Times/British Museum Debate (Times Radio, Saturday). It is somewhat frustrating that we were effectively provided with a 48-minutes highlights show from a longer live event on the future of museums, but the programme still managed to generate light rather than heat.
Sir Grayson Perry, perhaps inevitably, stole the show, and spoke for many in saying that he actively wanted to support better representation of the historically marginalised in exhibitions, while also bemoaning the sanctimonious scolding that often accompanies such efforts. Wiltshire’s most famous Anglican, the historian Tom Holland, concurred. The counterblast, an interestingly balanced one, came from the British-Ghanaian lawyer Margaret Casely-Hayford, who referred both to slaves and slave-traders among her ancestors.