Author: Peter Lewis

Letter from America

I planned to write about a loved radio programme for each of twenty treatments for prostrate cancer. I managed just four before other demands and maybe some side-effect fatigue crowded in. The treatment is finished now but I wanted to record some precious radio memories jogged by an American friend who spent part of her childhood in 1970’s England.

For my friend’s family, I can only imagine the importance of tuning in to hear from home; there was no CNN or internet for most of the programme’s run. For its own part, my small English family listened rapt each Sunday morning to Letter from America by Englishman Alistair Cooke. Post-war Britain was in awe of its affluent ally over the pond; land of skyscrapers, ostentatious, winged automobiles, colour TV and refrigerators. We wanted to know what might be coming our way as well as try to understand how the final of the National Baseball competition came to be The World Series.

Letter from America was first broadcast in 1946 and Cooke broadcast his weekly, 15 minute, letters until shortly before his death in 2004 aged 95. His voice had acquired a soft, mid-Atlantic twang but remained recognisably English. His subjects ranged across topical, mundane, obscure and quirky. The Presidential Election campaign sat comfortably alongside the evident relief the broadcaster felt as September arrived in New York City and cooler, fresher air replaced the stifling humidity of summer. There was always an undertone of dry humour. His love of golf also came to the fore in quite a few of his letters.

The concept of a trans-atlantic broadcast correspondence pre-dated the Second World War, when Cooke was NBC’s correspondent in London. London Letter became Letter from America.

Cooke was able to provide a unique perspective on important parts of the history of the 20th Century. He was yards from Bobby Kennedy when he was assassinated. He narrated the progress of the awful Vietnam war to a British audience that was happy, for once, to be mere onlookers.

Alistair Cooke was a prolific journalist and broadcaster. Letter from America represents a mighty legacy but just the tip of his output iceberg. Americans enjoyed his role as the host of Masterpiece Theatre, a Public Broadcasting showcase for British television which continues today. His character and this series were parodied in Sesame Street.

Cooke loved America but he never lost his English perspective and the ability to take a wry look at the culture of his adopted country. The admiration we felt for our cousins across the pond was nicely balanced by his reassurance that we still had the edge in the important areas of life; politics, sport, weather and our ability to laugh at ourselves.

I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue

I am writing daily, during my cancer treatment, about a radio show that has brightened up my life.

A Canadian colleague, when asked how he had enjoyed his first vacation to the UK, responded in mild outrage that he had been shocked by the state control of the media here and the dirth of anything other than BBC radio and television. Meanwhile, the ruling party is often complaining of the BBC’s left-wing bias. Perhaps that suggests they have it about right so I will not apologise for picking another BBC Radio 4 show for my fourth treatment.

I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, the antidote to panel games, was first broadcast in 1972, when I was well into my teenage years. The format consists of a series of absurd parlour games and the panellists must have lightening wit to survive. Like all the best panel games, the winning is of absolutely no importance. In this case, no points are actually awarded. The repartee that accompanies the games is all important. The audience is often reduced to stitches.

The programme was chaired by jazz musician, Humphrey Littleton, until his death in 2008. He loved a good, old-fashioned innuendo. The current chair is the Sahara dry Jack Dee. Panelists have included Tim Brook-Taylor, Willie Rushton and Sandi Toksvig. The scorer is the mysterious and “lovely Samantha” .

Of the several games played during each episode, Mornington Crescent is one of my favourites and perhaps the most absurd since it is entirely meaningless. The game involves a tour of London streets and its Underground system in which a logical response to the street or station suggested by the previous panelist is proffered after a, sometimes long, pause for faux strategic thought. The logic can be challenged at any point and the objective of the game is to avoid giving the game to the next panelist with an answer that can be unfathomably followed by “Mornington Crescent”. Sometimes the game is played to special rules which, of course, are doubly opaque and totally flexible at the chair’s discretion.

If you can listen to I’m Sorry I haven’t a Clue and keep a straight face, you are already dead.

Test Match Special

I am writing about my favourite radio programmes from a lifetime of avid listening. One show each day of my cancer treatment.

Test Match Special, from the BBC, covers international cricket matches. Ball by ball. For up to five days, depending on the format. The programme comes live from the ground wherever the game is taking place in the test cricket playing world; that can mean any of eleven countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

I first listened to TMS in the 1960s. In those days the game was shown free and live on (black and white) terrestrial television and, like other cricket lovers, I would listen to the TMS commentary with the TV sound muted. This is not so successful in the days of live streaming as the streams are usually slightly out of synchronisation. Sound wins over picture for me.

The games in these early days were graced with the likes of batsmen Ted Dexter, Colin Cowdrey and the young Geoff Boycott (now a grumpy, opinionated commentator himself). Bowlers included John Snow and Derek Underwood. The commentary team was headed up by the great John Arlott with his gravelly Hampshire accented voice and poetic descriptions of the game. A notable sidebar (find it on Youtube) was his description of a streaker who ran onto the pitch at Lords (HQ of the game in London) in 1975.

TMS typically has a team of rotating commentators who do a thirty minute stint in pairs. The ball by ball detail is handled by one of the core team members while a retired player usually provides some insights or banter between overs (six balls are bowled at the receiving batsmen to complete an over in typically three to five minutes). The core team is a mix of ex-professionals and sports journalists. The most important qualification is a deep knowledge of the game. The ability to entertain the audience through prolonged rain stoppages or periods of bad light is crucial. Humour and old rivalries provide an engaging backdrop to the game itself. The team is completed by a mostly silent scorer/statistician who is ever ready to answer deliberately obscure questions and announce records as they fall. Cricket was a game of statistics long before baseball.

Test Match Cricket, the best kind, is played over five days. The match situation develops slowly. There can be long spells of quiet, attritional cricket. The TMS team fill in the gaps with detailed descriptions of the pigeons, buses, trains and planes passing close by or over the ground. When commentating from oversees venues, there may be a little local colour provided, for example, by the grazing hadida ibis at the Wanderers in Johannesburg and their remarkable sangfroid when the ball is hit hard in their direction.

Another feature of the broadcasts are the luxuriant chocolate cakes sent in by listeners for the sustenance of the TMS team on languid summer afternoons when the players are beginning to tire and the action has fallen into a period of somnolence.

Recent years have seen the welcome addition of women to the TMS commentary team, reflecting the increasing importance of the women’s game. The likes of ex-players, Ebony Rainford-Brent and Alison Mitchell have eased seamlessly into the commentators seat.

Test Match cricket gets underway, without the crowds, on the 8th July when England meet the West Indies. Whatever your level of interest in cricket, give TMS a try.

The Archers

Today I am starting a four-week course of treatment for prostrate cancer. I plan to track the course of the treatment by writing about my favourite radio shows. One radio show for each dose of treatment. Twenty then.

Throughout my life, radio has been an important influence and a place to go for respite from the stresses of everyday life. In the UK, we are very fortunate to have the most amazing BBC Radio 4 (previously the BBC Home Service) which is a companion for many people. Regular presenters become friends. Formats run for decades and attempts to remove them from the schedule are met with protest and outrage. Radio 4 is the anchor; the thing that does not change when everything else in life is in flux

Over the years, it has got easier to listen to radio wherever I am in the world. Twenty years ago, living in Brussels, it was just about possible to tune into the BBC on Long Wave on a real radio set. The reception was not great and highly weather dependent. The advent of radio streaming services changed everything. Now, I can listen to the BBC in a remote anchorage in the Andaman Sea or at home in South Africa.

Over the next month, I will trawl up memories of radio shows from the US, South Africa and elsewhere, but inevitably, I will often return to Radio 4.

For my first treatment, I want to share my love of The Archers. This radio soap started four years before I was born and in normal times features six, thirteen minute episodes each week and an omnibus edition on Sunday mornings. Its characters live in a fictional village, Ambridge, in the English Midlands, where I grew up. The Archer family at the story’s heart are farmers. The programme was originally devised with a public service sub-plot that was designed to communicate with and educate farmers in a post- war Britain that was struggling to adapt to the new world order and feed itself. In recent years, the story lines have broadened to include domestic abuse and gay marriage while still touching on Bovine TB and honeybee colony collapse disorder. The seasons are marked, of course, with lambing, harvesting, ploughing, and hedging.

Each episode is announced by the unmistakeable signature tune “Barwick Green”. The standard arrangement is occasionally varied to play out an especially dramatic episode.

The characters in The Archers tend to have very long lives. Jill Archer has been played by Patricia Greene since 1957. She is 86 in real life and her character is 90.

Joe Grundy, played by Edward Kelsey and two earlier actors, was 98 when he died in 2019. As I remember it, he had an old man’s voice from very early on and he suffered for years with farmers lung, presumably as a result of inhaling hay dust when he was not making cider.

The Archers is a celebration of Midland accents which are often maligned by other Brits; neither northern enough for a Lancastrian nor couth enough for the nouveau riche of Surrey. The rural accent of the West Midlands is softer than those found in the West Country. The urban Birmingham blow-ins have everso slightly sanitised brummie accents, perhaps to avoid putting off the national audience.

Like many soap operas, the pub is at the centre of the drama. Ambridge has The Bull which has followed the development of English hostelries from spit and sawdust to gastropub. The landlords recently employed a consultant who recommended changing the name to “The B at Ambridge”. Needless to say this did not go down well with the more conservative inhabitants and the old name is now back to stay.

That life in Ambridge is a little behind the times is best illustrated by regular appearances of the village cricket team on summer Sunday afternoons, the annual church fete and Linda Snell’s amateur dramatics.

For weeks, in the early phase of the Coronavirus emergency, Ambridge was a CoVid free oasis. Now it has evolved into a series of monologues from the village inhabitants recorded in their homes.

The Archers is a British institution. Listening everyday is preferred but a gap of a few days or even months can be quickly repaired by tuning into a couple of episodes. The pace of change is not rapid.

You can visit Ambridge by downloading the BBC Sounds App..

One down, nineteen to go.