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From Ed Stourton
Can you imagine sitting down and writing the words “Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb”? Someone must have done it. I am at a Carol Service at St Bride’s, the journalists’ church in Fleet Street, and we are raising money for a charity called Adfam, which deals with addiction. But while giving it plenty of welly in a lusty rendition of “Come All Ye Faithful” I get caught on this very odd phrase, and worry a lot about the person who wrote it.
I mentioned this to Kevin Marsh and he smiled discreetly and nodded in that way he has. Kevin has a fantasy life as an Oxford don and likes to let you know – in a really very modest and understated sort of way – that his Latin and Greek are still pretty hot stuff. “Well”, he said, “in the original Adeste Fideles….” You know it is all going to take rather a long time when he goes into tutorial mode, so I made the usual feeble excuse about having to be live on the air interviewing a Cabinet Minister and left him talking to the toast trolley.
The reason we still go on singing about the Virgin’s womb year after year is of course that it is part of Traditional Ritual, and if you think about it there are lots of other rum rituals at this time of year. Like the Chancellor’s pre-budget report - or the Turner Prize, come to that. On Monday Jim sighed into his coffee “At least I’m spared the ritual of the annual discussion with the Turner Winner”. Since I was the only other presenter around that probably meant that I had drawn the short straw – and it seemed especially short owing to this year’s winner being a transvestite potter.
It’s always tricky to manage the “tone” of these things, so I asked Kevin for his advice; he knocked his pipe out on the heel of one of his comfortable brown brogues and started talking about the use of the chorus by Aeschylus in the Orestes trilogy. As it happened I needn’t have worried - the potter turned out to be a thoroughly good egg and talked about both his art and his cross-dressing in an intelligent and engaging way. Unfortunately he had not appreciated the visual possibilities offered by radio these days – see the origami man who made hats for Sarah a couple of weeks ago – so he was wearing a pair of rather uninspiring trousers and had left his pots and that worryingly well-oiled looking gun of his behind.
Tuesday’s programme turned quite unexpectedly into a practical in chaos theory. It wasn’t the beat of a butterfly’s wing that did the damage, but a police officer who, poor chap, had been involved in a traffic accident the previous evening and so was understandably reluctant to come on for his pre-booked interview about a murder case. That meant moving items around the running order, and the whole thing started coming apart at the seams in the most appalling way. At one stage we tried to record an interview about the Rugby World Cup at rather short notice, only to find that the interviewee was in his bath and wouldn’t come out.
The trouble with this kind of programme is that you suddenly find yourself conducting interviews you haven’t yet done the swotting for, and I’m driven to asking vague open-ended questions like “Hmm, sounds serious, doesn’t it”, or “tell us more” or even a tough sounding “so how do your answer your critics?” – while all the time trying desperately to work out what we are talking about. It used to be said that you could always keep an interview going on a foreign story by asking “And what’s happening in the south of the country?”, but I have never quite dared to try that.
The programme ended in a suitably surreal way when Hunter Davies came on to be interviewed by Jim, and kicked off by questioning me about an interview I had done with Alastair Darling earlier in the programme. Very post-modern.
Kevin wasn’t at all pleased with this. There was a good deal of stuffing the pipe with Old Dyke’s Richly Aromatic Mixture and fiddling with the bow tie. And a couple of junior producers where sent off to translate the whole of the ĂŰŃż´«Ă˝â€™s Producer Guidelines into a sequence of Horatian Odes by way of punishment. Kevin said he wanted the results “in my pigeon-hole at the Porter’s Lodge by Evensong” – tough talk indeed.
Ed
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