Valerie Grove
Long Wavering Radio
Life on Air: A History of Radio Four
By David Hendy
Oxford University Press 500pp £25 order from our bookshop
Something terrible happened while I was reading this book. I almost fell out of love with Radio Four. How could this be? I am one of Radio Four’s legions of champions. I fill my ‘Wireless’ column in The Oldie with praise for Desert Island Discs and The Archive Hour. Nothing about this network, born forty years ago on a September morn with Farming Today at 6.35am, could possibly bore me. But David Hendy has sorely tried my devotion. Hendy was the producer of Analysis and The World Tonight – excellent examples of what makes Radio Four the envy of the civilised world. He dissects for us the BBC office politics, the ego-trips and internecine wars that have somehow contrived to produce, over four decades, Radio Four’s audience-winning formula. Yet an encomium from Ned Sherrin (‘Revelatory in its detail – on a very special and important subject’) suggests the somewhat lifeless quality of Hendy’s history.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me
In this month's Bookends, @AdamCSDouglas looks at the curious life of Henry Labouchere: a friend of Bram Stoker, 'loose cannon', and architect of the law that outlawed homosexual activity in Britain.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-gross-indecency
'We have all twenty-nine of her Barsetshire novels, and whenever a certain longing reaches critical mass we read all twenty-nine again, straight through.'
Patricia T O'Conner on her love for Angela Thirkell. (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad