Sue Arnold
Sunday January 2, 2005
The Observer

How about this variation of Desert Island Discs. Instead of eight records
the castaway has to choose eight things, public and personal that make this
country, despite the weather, the trains, the traffic and the Hutton Report,
the best and still the most civilised place to live. Here are mine: the
sleeper to Fort William; Private Eye; Sunday lunch; Albert Bridge at night;
Armando Iannucci, the RNIB talking book library; my garden in June; BBC
radio. And if you could take only one with you, says Miss Lawley, no
contest, BBC radio of course which keeps me and millions of others informed,
entertained and just plain sane.

I'm basically a Hausfrau. I have a family and I work from home but I cannot
see myself submitting to the banality and tedium of housewifery if I didn't
have a radio in every room. When you hear people grumbling on Feedback about
this programme, or that presenter, or how fed up they are with You and
Yours, you tend to forget that these are mere dots in the BIG RADIO PICTURE
that includes such gems as The Proms on Radio 3, sport on Radio 5 Live, the
Today programme on Radio 4 and the most comprehensive and objective global
news coverage anywhere on the World Service.

We all have our bugbears. Mine include phone ins, quiz shows, You and Yours
and plays that begin with a door slamming and a bright female voice calling,
'Is that you darling?'. I met some Americans from Colorado the other day who
come to London for a month every year as much to listen to the radio as to
visit theatres and galleries, and a neighbour who has recently downsized and
gone off to live in a remote French farmhouse says that if she weren't able
to get Radio 4 on her laptop she would have come home after a month.

We take radio for granted, and we're incredibly spoilt for choice. At the
last count, and it changes every day, there were 642 radio stations digital
and analogue. New stations spring up overnight like mushrooms of which a
high percentage, like mushrooms, don't last that long. Music stations come
and go, religious stations without charismatic presenters (and I've yet to
hear one in the UK), tedious and repetitive as is Classic FM a lot of the
time. Grown-up radio is pretty much limited to five stations, all BBC -
Radios 2, 3, 4, 5 Live and the World Service, none of which I hope will be
subjected to the swingeing staff cuts that BBC director general Mark
Thompson was talking about recently. Everyone knows that television is
overstaffed and that radio operates on a shoestring. Make it any shorter and
some of the truly memorable programmes we heard this year would have to be
ditched. I'm talking about programmes such as the John Cage weekend and the
60th anniversary of the D-Day landings. The latter especially, which lasted
a whole week, was a radio classic. It gave us not just eyewitness accounts
but dozens of companion programmes about its historical, social and military
significance, discussions between historians and the military strategists,
musical reminiscences and best of all, half a dozen specially commissioned
plays based on personal diaries and contemporary memorabilia.

The downside of 2004 is that, with the death of Alistair Cooke and John
Peel, radio lost two of its most familiar and best loved voices. It's almost
a year since Cooke delivered his last Letter from America (his first was in
March 1946) but I still haven't quite got the hang of Sunday mornings
without him. The best thing about those letters is that you never knew until
he started talking - and sometimes not even then - what they were going to
be about. Cooke did not follow the herd and neither did Peel whose lifetime
contribution to pop music on Radio 1 passed me by but whose idiosyncratic
presentation of Home Truths was the only reason that I listened to it.

Cosy, folksy, schmaltzy, cute stories about the foibles of other people's
toddlers, labradors, dishwashers and driving instructors normally make me
want to throw up but somehow Peel made them palatable. They've tried filling
the gap with other presenters but, professional as they are, they lack
Peel's essentially downbeat style of panache.

What else do I remember about this last year? Hugh Sykes reporting from
Baghdad; Kazuo Ishiguro on the World Service's World Book Club explaining
why globalism has made a novelist's job so difficult (will readers in
Denmark understand his irony?); an eccentric documentary about a
14th-century house in Cambridgeshire whose owner is happy to observe it
slowly being reclaimed by insects, rodents, birds and the weather; some
dazzling lunchtime concerts on Radio 3; and Jack Straw's favourite joke
retold by Edward Sturton in a documentary about the Foreign Office. 'Name
three fishes that begin and end with the letter K: killer shark, Kwik-Save
frozen haddock and Kilmarnock.' Why Kilmarnock? 'Because it's a place in
Scotland.'

Radio Top 10, 2004
1.Beslan the Survivors Stories, World Service
2. The Sounds of Life, Radio 4
3. In Tune, Radio 3
4. The Permanent Way, Radio 3
5. Olympic Coverage, Radio 5
6. The 99p Challenge, Radio 4
7. Hancock's Whole Evening, Radio 2
8. Islamic Pride, Radio 1 Extra
9. The Jigsaw In Pieces, World Service.
10. Pamela, Radio 4.