AUDIENCES on Any Questions? (Radio 4, Friday) sound increasingly like football crowds — a tendency that reached fever pitch in this edition, from Spalding. Solar farms were the first topic to electrify the Lincolnshire audience. Richard Tice, the local Reform UK baron, roused his followers in the audience with a forthright defence of Lincolnshire’s farmland from the potential predations of foreign silicon.
When Hamish Falconer — 21st-century Labour is as defined by family dynasties as the 19th-century Church of England — pointed out that failing to expand solar power meant fracking under Gainsborough, Mr Tice readily agreed. What a pleasant surprise to have two politicians having an open and avowed disagreement about actual policy!
Mr Tice’s platoon in the audience were, however, devastatingly out-roared by the environmental journalist George Monbiot’s barmy army. Their most sustained cheer was for his calling Brexit “a massive self-own”. The presenter, Alex Forsyth, found this noteworthy in the Brexit stronghold of Lincolnshire, never considering whether an Any Questions? studio audience might be unrepresentative of the whole population. The programme left me no better informed about the actual decisions facing the country — nor, frankly, did it leave me feeling entertained, but, instead, rather dispirited.
Perhaps surprisingly, it was Rod Liddle (Times Radio, Saturday) who transported us to a more edifying plane. He admitted that the scene in The Odyssey in which Odysseus returns to Ithaca after 20 years at war, to be greeted by his decrepit, dying dog, Argos, moved him like little else in literature.
This was occasioned by an interview with the classicist and translator Emily Wilson, promoting her new essay collection, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea, exploring the tensions inherent in translation and the benefits of engaging with classical literature.
Mr Liddle and Professor Wilson engaged in an intelligent discussion about the ways in which our world-view and emotional register have changed from those of the ancient world, and the ways in which they have not changed at all.
One thing changing dramatically is the landscape facing commissioners of TV programmes. The Media Show (Radio 4, 27 May) was threaded through by a long conversation between the presenter, Katie Razzall, and British television’s éminence grise and recently departed chairman of Ofcom, Lord Grade.
In the past, he argued, broadcasters could take more risks, or be patient with series that, they knew, had potential but were slow to attract audiences. Ironically, the competition for audiences in a saturated market makes commissioning more risk-averse — or else exploitative, as exemplified by Channel 4’s Married at First Sight.
Wolf Hall and Mr Bates vs the Post Office were examples of important programmes that would never be commissioned by streamers, he said, and BBC and commercial TV would need assistance to continue to commission programmes of specific interest to British audiences.