World at One (Radio 4) | iPlayer
Simon Mayo (Radio 2) | iPlayer
At this year's Radio Festival, held in Salford, all talk was of the BBC. Unfortunately for this most august of institutions, such chatter did not centre on BBC radio's 90th birthday celebrations, its still-successful Reithian remit, its enviable reputation around the world. All gossip was, of course, of George Entwistle and his unfeasibly useless Today interview. Crikey, he was ill-prepared. And yet, according to BBC types at the festival, Entwistle's close advisers were the heads of in-house departments entitled communications and strategy. Which, if true, is laughable. Entwistle had to resign, not because he couldn't do the job, but because of his appalling communication skills and apparent lack of strategy.
Still, everything's going to be OK now, because the adviser to Tim Davie, acting DG, is… Alan Yentob. I know! But, quoth the insiders, this is good. Yentob knows the BBC inside out, he's a journalist and he's a fighter. Davie, head of BBC radio for the past few years, is certainly clever and more worldly than Entwistle. Which means that he won't want the job full-time. The consensus is that whoever ends up as boss of the BBC has an impossible task: he or she has to be both head of journalism and chief executive and the two jobs pull in completely different directions.
Oh, it's all such a terrible shame: for Newsnight, for the BBC in general, and for poor, wrongly accused Lord McAlpine, who gave an interview to Radio 4's World at One on Thursday lunchtime. McAlpine is elderly. He wheezes, his words arrive like leaves on the wind. But those words were devastating. "Horrendous", "shattered", "it gets into your soul, you think there's something wrong with the world". If Newsnight had simply bothered to call him, he would have told them the accusations were rubbish. But, presumably, they thought they didn't need to, because no one in the programme actually said his name.
McAlpine was gracious, generous, intelligent and sympathetic. He said he'd been angry, but tried to stop himself, as "anger gets in your bones, it rots your life". He also said that abuse victim Steven Messham, who'd wrongly identified him, had "suffered a lot". "I've been blessed in my life," said McAlpine. "He's had a terrible time."
And behind all this humanity and inhumanity, this mess that someone else is clearing up, the Savile scandal rumbled on. On Thursday, another ex-Radio 1 DJ, Dave Lee Travis, was arrested, accused of molesting two women (not children).
No wonder last week's celebrations of 90 years of BBC Radio were muted. The pivotal moment was at 5.33pm on Wednesday, when a 90-second audio composition by Damon Albarn was broadcast on every single BBC radio station worldwide to an audience of 120 million. I listened on Radio 2, with Simon Mayo doing his cheerful best in a live broadcast from the Science Museum in London. "Here's Scouting For Girls. Ummm, that doesn't seem to be working. How about Video Killed the Radio Star instead."
Mayo, ex-Radio 1, was careful on the topic of the station. He spoke to Tony Blackburn, very briefly, about his move from Radio Caroline to Radio 1 (Blackburn's was the first voice heard on Radio 1). He had a longer chat with Tim Davie, straight after Albarn's composition was played. Davie was cool and collected, a straight bat, informing us that moments like this, when we're reminded of the good that the BBC can do, make his job worthwhile. No need for a communications strategist here.
Damon's piece, called 2LO Calling, after the 2LO transmitter used in the first BBC radio broadcast, was very Albarn: crunchy, baffling, whirligig-rhythmed, resolving into a pretty piano piece played over the pips. I liked the children's voices, fading in and out, as though we were spinning our dials across the radio waves… of the past, the future?
"Music is everything; without it there's nothing, just silence," said one of the voices. "In 90 years' time we'll be living on Mars so we don't, like, die from the sun coming into us," explained another. And, my favourite, in a strong Northern Irish accent: "I think there'll be more people and because there'll be more people, I would tell them to be careful not to get lost. Because it might be really, really busy." That part was strangely moving. Be careful, people. Don't get lost.
