You need three qualities to be able to deliver good speech radio: fierce energy, strong communication skills and a good command of information. It’s not uncommon to have the first two but it’s very rare to have all three. This may explain why Vanessa Feltz is on double duty at the BBC. Most weeks she starts at 5am every weekday morning on Radio 2’s early breakfast show, which is a standard mix of music, chat and bits from the morning papers. (Apart from this week, when she’s standing in for Jeremy Vine at midday.) When that show finishes at 6.30am, she has just half an hour to vacate the studio, change buildings and then be ready to do battle with politicians and representatives of interest groups as she presents the breakfast show on BBC Radio London (Weekdays, 7am). This takes her through to 10am, at which point most people wouldn’t have much left to give. I know from my own small experience that live radio is physically draining; I simply don’t understand how a body can go straight from one show to another and still have anything left to say or the energy to say it. Feltz somehow manages it and even later the same day she is unlikely to be stuck for what to say next, as I discovered recently on taping an episode of A Good Read with her in the late afternoon. Like Danny Baker, another Radio London alumnus, she’s a force of nature.
Lenny Henry leads a strong cast in God Of Carnage (Saturday, 2.15pm, Radio 4), Christopher Hampton’s translation of Yasmina Reza’s successful stage play about four parents meeting to resolve an ugly incident involving their children. Hampton’s impeccable ear asserts itself near the beginning when the parents share their relief over finding that this incident took place in Waterlow Park rather than the more dangerous Finsbury Park, a small difference to most listeners but a cultural chasm for affluent residents of north London. As the play progresses and drink is taken, we inevitably discover that each of the parents is sitting on top of a volcano of resentment and thwarted ambition. These spill over into onstage confrontations that a football pundit might characterise as “handbags”. One imagines that this played against a background of raucous laughter in the theatre. On the radio even the most farcical lines – particularly the one involving sexual congress with a rodent – land in a silence that can’t help but sound shocked.
The excellent Russell Davies interviews Boy George in his series Art Of Artists (Monday, 11pm, Radio 2), talking about the full range of George’s career, and playing a soundtrack to go with it. Stephen Hawking presents the first of his Reith Lectures (Tuesday, 9am, Radio 4) on black holes. These were recorded in front of an audience of experts and Radio 4 listeners in London.
The Czech Tomáš Sedláček arrives on stage on a bike, which is what you would expect from someone billed as a rock star economist. Sedláček’s area of expertise has been simplified as “humanonics”. Talking to Evan Davis in Analysis (Monday, 8.30pm, Radio 4) he spins his theory that it’s all to do with our values. He points out that if Plato returned today he would look at what most of us do during the day as play, and most what we do at the weekend as work. He quotes the character in Fight Club who says we do work we hate to buy things we don’t need. It’s model-flipping everywhere you look, but not without its persuasive charm.
