Listening to it makes me feel smart. I learn about things that I would never know about otherwise. I like to have it on in the background, when I'm in the house on my own. It stops you jumping at creaking pipes and the wind banging branches on the windows. All of those terrible things that happen in those scary films could have been avoided if only they had radio 4 on in the background. It's the kind of radio that suits someone with a mind that is easily derailed or bored by hearing the same things over and over again. I've never been able to have breakfast TV on because they repeat the same 'news' every fifteen minutes; there's nothing new about news you hear four times an hour. Where else can you flit between feminist comedy, Vinegar Valentines, a play about the Ghurkas in Aldershot, hearing the most eloquent 91 year old woman talk about dying, The Archers, a new Harold Pinter Play, the panel game to end all panel games, insightful news and comment and hearing complete idiots pretending to know stuff they don't?
I was only a little disappointed recently when even the Today programme was discussing 50 Shades of Grey at 6.30 in the morning. Nobody wants to hear John Humphreys discuss 'bedroom titillation'.
The BBC are currently running a project called 'Get Creative; a celebration of world class arts, culture and creativity that happens every day across the UK", which I am wholeheartedly in favour of. I like arts, culture and creativity. We are born creative and this should be nurtured. This project has then caused the commissioning of discussion shows about Art and Radio 4 often gets the best of them. On Front Row today they were discussing the funding of the Arts. Apart from the problem, inevitably being the fault of schools (I'm not going to get into that because I might start uncontrollably growling) it was a very interesting programme and it included the best moment on radio that I have ever heard. This is what you get if you ask an economist about the arts.
"I disapprove very strongly about what I might gratuitously call the pornography on the plinth in Trafalgar Square and that's fine, other people can approve of it."
"Why is that pornographic?"
"Well, didn't I hear you correctly when you described it as a....."
"It's a COCKEREL!"
"a cockerel!"
*Audience laughter
"Well OK, putting that aside, I disapprove very strongly when the National Gallery displayed some extremely offensive religious pornographic pictures..."
"Well, let me just ask you, now that you know that what Echo has helped put on that plinth isn't a giant penis but a large (pause for laughter) blue (pause for more laughter) cockerel, what about the principal of that? You obviously haven't seen it but you would support it in principal?"
"I think art and culture should, by and large, develop from the bottom up..."
Bottoms? I thought he was against bottoms, or maybe he really is against farmyard birds.
In the news following this programme it was announced that it is National Toast day (which I think is actually tomorrow) and I couldn't help thinking how stupid that was. Toast doesn't need a day. Toast is something we all do all the time. Toast is our National go-to snack. Toast holds our breakfast or lunch. Maybe, I've missed something and Toast is under threat from government targets. Maybe schools are not doing enough to get children to eat toast. Maybe the funding for toast has been cut to puny levels and now we should all be getting more creative with our toast.
I like to think of Radio 4 as creative toast. Something you eat every day, with a variety of toppings.
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