It’s a curious feature of Britain – and, no doubt to do with its insular nature – that while it’s been a swaggering presence in geopolitics for several centuries, liberally projecting its dubious values and curious customs through the barrels of many, many guns, it remains an oddly parochial sort of culture. Among those in public life, the ambience can be suffocatingly cosy: everyone knows everyone, and tunes in each morning to the Today programme on Radio-Four-People-We-Know.
Indeed, it’s this capability – of swathing its listeners in aural warm flannelette – that typifies the state broadcaster. People are right to talk in terms of the BBC’s “soft power”: listening to the contemporary network – rather, say, than the clipped tones of John Snagge in the second world war – benighted Ukrainian frontline troops, could be forgiven for thinking reinforcements – if they ever come – will be in the form of a division of teddy bears armed with a biscuit assortment and cups of milky tea.
And when it comes to ultimate cosiness – a sort of counterintuitive orgasm of the anodyne – no programme is better at it than Desert Island Discs. True, under its first three presenters, up to and including the patrician Sue Lawley, there was some attempt at psychological analysis of its subjects; but for the last 18 years, firstly under Kirsty Young, and latterly Lauren Laverne, DID, as it’s known within the precincts of W1, has become a surpassingly saccharine exercise in shining up the superficialities of celebrity. The record and other choices are now, rather than being some sort of Rorschach test, revealing the ulterior of the interviewees’ minds, a mere pretext for a string of self-congratulatory anecdotes.
Be that as it may, Desert Island Discs remains unsurpassed, also, as a strangely accurate assay of its subjects, their strengths and weaknesses. Highlights in this regard have to be the late JG Ballard’s inspired choice of the Henry Hall Orchestra’s Teddy Bear’s Picnic as both his first record choice, and – faute de mieux – his only one to wind down the long years of insular solitude. This song is the very essence of the uncanny, its sinister evocation of innocent sylvan escapades eliding an interwar middle-class nursery of the mind, with some far darker realm. Thus, unerringly, Ballard exposed the sourness of all that British saccharine – a culture in which a sentimental attitude towards children, has often concealed their neglect and abuse.
Exposed it – and in the process, revealed that sensibility which made him a peerless prophet of the ever-expanding present: a permanent Now, in which Tony Blair is forever choosing Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe as a book more meaningful to him than any other, so the perfect companion for his theoretical reclusion. That no one had read Ivanhoe for over a century, Blair included, was widely noted at the time – and while Blair’s turn on DID cannot compare to the almighty clusterfucks of Iraq, Afghanistan and the privatisation of higher education, nonetheless it holed perceptions of him below the waterline, such that throughout his premiership he was slowly foundering in the public’s salty regard.
Or at least a certain sector of the public – those who, perversely, regard themselves as privy to the practice of power, precisely because they listen to programmes like DID. It’s the intimacy of radio as a medium that does this – you may be snuggled up under the covers, yet you still feel yourself to be occupying a ringside seat. This gifts an intuitive grasp of the way DID interviewees modulate the interplay between public and private personae; how, in short, they present themselves. In turn, this leads to a powerful sense of like or dislike: politicians, rightly, fear DID.
This makes me worry for Keir Starmer. I mean, I very much liked JK Rowling when she appeared on DID – she achieved that modulation effortlessly, her punkish record choices nicely undercutting any mumsiness of demeanour, which goes some way to explaining the otherwise inexplicable success of her books. Nevertheless, I sensed her vulnerability, and wasn’t surprised when the traumas underlying this drove her down Diagon Alley, and into the darkness of transphobia.
Starmer, I liked as well – and vibed to his ineffably dull, yet out-there upbringing in the ’burban utopia that was, is, and always will be, gulp, Hurst Green, Surrey. One aspect of life Chez Starmer struck me in particular – and relates, in an interesting way, to the idea of British suburbia as rus in urbe: one of four brothers, whenever a Starmer son left home, he was replaced… with a donkey.
Sadly, this tends to be the situation with Labour cabinets as well.
