Radio
Seeing the light
Kate Chisholm
‘You can’t lie... on radio,’ says Liza Tarbuck.
The Radio 2 DJ was being interviewed for
the network’s birthday portrait, celebrat-
ing 50 years since it morphed from the Light
Programme into its present status as the
UK’s best-loved radio station — with almost
15 million listeners each week. ‘The intimacy
of radio dictates you can’t lie because peo-
ple can hear it.’
She’s absolutely right. As she went on
to explain, when you’re driving and it’s just
the radio and you, no distraction, ‘You can
hear things in my voice that I don’t even
know I’m giving away.’ It’s what makes
radio so testing for politicians, you can see
right through them, and why so many of the
DJs on Radio 2 have become household
names. We love Ken Bruce, Jo Whiley, Liza
Tarbuck, Clare Teal, Steve Wright — and
so many of those who have gone before —
because they sound as if they really want to
talk to us, really know how we are feeling,
really want to make our days a little more
cheerful.
Even when, as Ken Bruce told us in the
rather clumsily titled Bryan Adams: Radio
2 — a Birthday Portrait (produced by Susan
Marling), it used to take four days for a lis-
tener’s comment to reach him in the stu-
dio, there was always an immediacy about
the connection between presenter and lis-
tener. On this has been built Radio 2’s suc-
cess. You might not like the music but it’s
hard to switch off when the chat between
tracks is so engaging, so energised, so keen
to please, without being patronising, over-
eager or complacent. Your attention is
never taken for granted.
It’s always been a go-to place for me
when I need a pick-me-up, a more light-
hearted look at the world, an alternative
to gloom and despair. The new season of
One to One (produced by Mark Smalley)
on Radio 4 is focusing on practical, every-
day ways to counteract more serious bouts
of despair. Isabel Hardman, assistant edi-
tor of this magazine, talked about her own
struggles with mental illness and in the
first programme on Tuesday took us out-
doors, into the countryside, to hear from
the psychiatrist Dr Alan Kellas what he
has learned about the benefits to health
of reconnecting ourselves with the natural
world.
Kellas is working on research into ‘sus-
tainable’ mental health, suggesting that
being outdoors can help us to become
aware, to switch on our hearing, engage with
the world, while being active may provide
a sense of purpose. Hardman recalled how
she has been helped by engaging in ‘method-
ical activities’, forcing herself to go for walks50 rackets, feeling the tension with his bare
feet. Meanwhile, McEnroe (‘Superbrat’) is
shown losing his cool every which way. He
loses his cool on court, with interviewers,
and does not obsessively test his rackets
the night before. Instead, he goes clubbing.
I think that if the chat-show host hadn’t
pointed out that they’re as different as two
people can be, we might possibly even have
worked it out for ourselves.
Except they aren’t, essentially. That dif-
ferent. The film’s big reversal comes at
around the halfway mark when we spool
back in time to see that Borg was furi-
ously angry as a youngster, but had been
taught to channel it by his trainer, Berge-
lin (Stellan Skarsgard). ‘All that rage, fear
and panic,’ Bergelin tells him. ‘Load it in
every stroke.’ The young Borg runs into the
forest, screams, hits trees, gets over himself,
emerges a new man. (What is this therapy
and where can I get some?) But where did
all the anger come from initially? There’s
some suggestion that he suffered from dis-
crimination as a boy, wasn’t considered the
right class for tennis, but this isn’t a suffi-
cient explanation. And as an adult, he had
all these weird superstitious rituals — his
parents were only allowed to watch him
at Wimbledon every second year and had
to wear the same clothes; he always had
to have the same hire car — which are
explained to us in montage but are never
interwoven into his psyche.
Meanwhile, McEnroe is so barely col-
oured-in he’s more of a sideshow. LaBeouf
does capture his scrappy volatility, but it’s
that, over and over. And Gudnason’s per-
formance is ultimately as shallow because
he’s never required to show anything
beyond that cool detachment. But what is
he thinking, ffs? Nope, still haven’t a clue.
It does make you long for scriptwrit-
er Peter Morgan to have taken it on. He is
the master of warring rivalries: Rush, The
Damned United, Frost/Nixon, even The
Queen, which was, in effect, the Queen vs
Tony Blair. He would have given us a dra-
matic through line, as well as an understand-
ing as to why any of this might matter, plus
those smarts — the ones that bring tension
and excitement to familiar events. The final
match, told in a 20-minute sequence, may
or may not be a decent re-enactment —I’m
not enough of a tennis nut to know — but
because we’ve never properly understood
what’s at stake for both players psychologi-
cally, there is little at stake for us. Also, the
pacing is so workmanlike that it does not
feel like any kind of thrilling culmination.
It has simply pt-pt-pt-pt-ed its way to here.
This is, in short, a standard sports biopic
which, like I said, does the job. But it cer-
tainly does not ace it. (Look! I had a third!)
The film simply pt-pt-pt-pts its way
from A to B, like a stolid baseline rallyalong the shoreline near her home with a
notebook and pen. ‘Just writing down every
wildflower that I saw... It does seem to help
take my mind away from the torture cham-
ber inside my head and to focus on the sea
campion or thistles...’
This week on the World Service its
daily afternoon programme, BBC OS,
presented by Nuala McGovern, has been
looking at the experiences of Syrian refu-
gees across Europe and the Middle East
in an unusual collaboration with Germa-
ny’s Westdeutscher Rundfunk radio sta-
tion and Swedish Radio (both of which are
funded at least in part by licence fee). The
intention, part of a European Broadcast-
ing Union initiative, is to find out wheth-
er those who have been forced to flee are
recovering from being uprooted, from
those terrifying journeys by sea and long
treks across Europe in the hope of find-
ing refuge. Are they beginning to feel inte-
grated with the communities where they
ended up?
WDR has established its own digital sta-
tion for refugees, edited and presented by
them. WDRforyou reaches its audience,
in Farsi, Pashtu, Arabic and other Middle
Eastern languages, mostly through Face-
book. Monday’s ‘live’ broadcast on theWorld Service (produced by Zoe Murphy)
was from the WDR studios in Cologne and
was streamed throughout Europe via the
EBU. Salama and May, both from Syria and
trained as journalists by WDR and Swed-
ish Radio respectively, gave us their take
on what it means to be a refugee. Salama
wanted to investigate attitudes to death in
Germany. What will happen when I die?
Where should I be buried? If in Germany,
none of my Syrian relatives will be able to
visit my grave.
May, who arrived in Sweden in 2012, was
married at 15 to an abusive husband. She is
now divorced and no longer wears the hijab.
She wanted to find out how other Syrian
women have been affected by moving to a
country where attitudes to marriage, gender
equality, the woman’s place are so different.
‘I feel like a teenager,’ she says. ‘I’m finding
out who I really am.’
Later in the week we heard from Syr-
ians living in Malmo in Sweden, Berlin,
Beirut, Cairo and Athens. What emerges
is how different the stories of integration
can be, and how surprising, the newcom-
ers to Beirut sometimes finding it far more
difficult to settle than those who ended up
in Malmo.
If you missed them, the reports and live
programme can be found online. It’s an
opportunity to catch up on stories that have
slipped off the agenda.‘Writing down every wildflower I saw
seem ed to t ak e my min d away f rom
the torture chamber in my head’