BOOKS & ARTS
was as interviewer of the Midweek birthday
guest. In 1988 James Boyle wanted to cut
the programme (and Melvyn Bragg’s Start
the Week) down to 28 minutes, but he was
persuaded to compromise to 43, and the
birthday guest went. In those days Start the
Week, famous for having people on to pro-
mote their new books and plays, had the
nickname ‘Pluggers’; Midweek was known
as ‘Nutters’ and Robert Robinson’s Stop
the Week, with its argumentatively eloquent
guests, was known as ‘Wankers’.
BBC rules and diktats trickled down
from on high. During the late 1980s a decree
went out that ‘there should be no, repeat no,
disobliging references to the prime minis-
ter. No Thatcher-bashing’. ‘Ah, how we
tried,’ Purves writes. But almost every guest
seemed to take some kind of swipe at her.
Then there was the rule that you weren’t
allowed to say the word ‘bugger’ in a south-
ern accent but you could say ‘booger’ if you
were northern. The no-swearing rule wasbroken when Jeremy Irons said, ‘Like say-
ing fuck on the radio?’ ‘Officially,’ writes
Purves, ‘we’re supposed to “apologise to the
audience on behalf of the guest”, an instruc-
tion which I find downright creepy.’
The trickiest guests were the rare drunk
ones, the aloof ones, and the ones who didn’t
take their sunglasses off. Christina Foyle, of
bookshop fame, ‘answered the questions
monosyllabically and with disdain’. Enoch
Powell ‘created a vacuum of joviality’. The
nicest guests were Judi Dench and Jimmy
Osmond. The most nervous guest was Lord
Snowdon. The angriest guests were Joan
Rivers and Darcus Howe, who had a blazing
row about racism, which Libby eventually
diffused with the immortal words, ‘OK, let’s
turn to talking about plant photography.’
There was a period when every aged
thespian who came onto the programme
told an unfunny anecdote about their
encounter with Noël Coward, usually end-
ing, ‘He was marvellous, Noël. Marvellous.’
Libby had to clamp down on that.
I remember being impressed by the way
she came back to work on Midweek so soon
after her son died. She writes movingly about
that. ‘I firmly told the producer not to have
any inhibitions about putting me with peo-
ple with parallel stories to tell.’ The only
time she had to ‘choke back a rising flood
of inappropriate personal emotion’ was
when David Shepherd talked about his nine
grandchildren and the pleasure of watching
enthusiasms and talents flowing on down the
generations. Libby was suddenly brought
up short by the realisation ‘that one branch
of our own small family would never
flower now’.A gaping hole in the week
Ysenda Maxtone Graham
That Was the Midweek That Was
by Libby Purves
Songsend Books, £5, pp. 71;
email [email protected]This is a gem of a book for Radio 4 lovers,
particularly those of us who work out which
day of the week it is by who’s speaking on
the station at 9.02 a.m. Published the week
that Midweek was abolished for ever, it is
Libby Purves’s story of the programme she
presented for 33 years. In this brief memoir
she has not only immortalised the distinc-
tive flavour of the ‘And now for some lively
conversation’ Wednesday-morning 45 min-
utes. She has also reminded us that Radio 4
is ‘basically, a marvel’: for many people, it is
‘their university and their friend’.
All presenters, Purves writes, are aware
that they are obsolescent. ‘One day, you
know perfectly well, the management will
look at you with the kind of amazed horror
that one feels on opening a forgotten kitch-
en drawer, bin bag in hand.’ But it came as
a shock that both she and the programme
were to be axed at the same time. Midweek
managed to survive the 1990s when radio
departments came under the ‘dark wing’ of
television executives who didn’t understand
radio. ‘Cain has been given the key to his
brother Abel’s life-support machine’ was
how Purves summed up that dire situation.
And the programme survived — until last
month — the constant pressure for BBC
producers to come up with ‘exciting new
formats’.
With its unshowy presentation of four
disparate guests sitting round a table chat-
ting live on air, Midweek had ‘a perfectly
simple chemistry’. A 9/11 firefighter would
find himself beside an inventor of word
games; a surgeon next to a cabaret artist,
and so on. Lord Denning appeared with the
newly crowned Miss UK, who asked him,
‘how long does it take to get your judge
kit on?’, which led him to talk about the
putting on of tights. Richard Ingrams met
Naim Attalah across the Midweek table;
that meeting eventually led to the founding
of The Oldie.
The main thing that kept the programme
on air year after year was that over two mil-
lion of us tuned in each week and loved its
humanity. Purves’s aim, she writes, was ‘not
to challenge guests, Today-style, on every
point, but to encourage them to be the
strongest possible flavour of themselves, so
that listeners could make their own judg-
ments’.
I had forgotten that the programme
used to be an hour long and have a ‘birth-
day guest’ each week, interviewed by some-
body else. That seems rather quaint now.
James Naughtie’s first-ever live broadcastChristina Foyle was monosyllabic
and disdainful, while Enoch Powell
created a vacuum of jovialityHilaire Belloc, Edward Lear and Harry
Graham’s Ruthless Rhymes. The stories,
many originally written in French or Span-
ish, are arranged chronologically. Some of
the later ones become a little congested and
more overtly satirical. Nothing, to my mind,
quite approaches her first story, ‘The Debu-
tante’ (and for the convent-educated there
are some irresistible jokes in ‘As They Rode
Along the Edge’) but her fantastic inven-
tion never fails.
Moorhead’s style is sometimes a lit-
tle breathless (‘she and Max were hope-
lessly, totally and entirely in love’), but
she provides much new and interest-
ing detail, including the discovery that
the house in Provence which the lov-
ers shared in 1939 remains virtually
untouched — their decorations intact,
letters in drawers, books on shelves and
Carrington’s golf clubs in the basement.
‘Romantic heroines, beautiful and ter-
rible... come to life in women like Leon-
ora Carrington,’ wrote Octavio Paz, one
of her many lovers. Warner, ‘enthralled
by her originality and captivated by her
endearing magnetism’ found her ‘droll and
warm-hearted and beautiful’, and she will
undoubtedly continue to captivate. Can it
be true that when she ran away to join Max
Ernst and the surrealists she took her golf
clubs with her?