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Wireless Wise |
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A great deal of fuss was made last year about the BBC’s Treasure Hunt campaign. Under this initiative, former staffers and members of the general public were encouraged to return private copies of vintage programmes that the Corporation had wiped, burned, chucked into skips or lost down the back of the sofa. Much of the fuss has been justified – the return of two whole long-lost episodes of Dad’s Army having been the high watermark of the enterprise. Predictably, however, all of the attention was given to television programmes, with wireless, as ever, playing Cinderella. The header of the BBC’s own website on the venture asks "Are there TV gems in your attic?", even on the page that lists some of the campaign’s radio finds. There couldn’t be a much clearer statement of priorities. The radio programmes recovered include the pilot edition of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, an episode of Eric Sykes’ 1961 series It’s a Fair Cop, two late 1960s sessions by the Tubby Hayes Quartet from Jazz Club, Fenella Fielding and Robert Hardy in a 1965 production of Shaw’s Man and Superman and a 1968 production of Arnold Wesker’s play Their Very Old and Golden City. This embarrassment of riches is to be shoehorned into a solitary edition of Radio 4’s Archive Hour in May, while "other programme ideas are under consideration". I’m not sure what needs to be considered – just find a slot and broadcast the spoils straight, then pass copies onto BBC Worldwide for release as Radio Collection CDs. In the meantime, keep recording things off the radio. You never know when the BBC might be grateful of them. A little of what does survive, including one of the first appearances of Alastair Cooke, is finding its way onto the air in the current run of Wireless Wise (Radio 4, Thursdays) the "radio quiz about the radio". One particularly amusing round involves the reading three programme descriptions purporting to be from archive index cards – only one of which is real. In the first of the series, the programmes chosen were all on modern art and involved an artist who turned the exit door of the gallery into an exhibit, a woman who made collages of dry-cleaning tickets and a man who created art out of his own vomit. In case you’re wondering, it was the vomiter. The quiz is now hosted by I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again cast member–turned-BBC suit David Hatch, making a welcome return to his roots as a performer. The first of the run saw BBC disability correspondent Peter White and panel game perennial Sandi Toksvig playing against Radio 4 announcer Brian Perkins and Jon Culshaw, an impressionist who earns much of his crust by impersonating Perkins on the comedy show Dead Ringers. How’s that for layers of meaning? Not to mention incestuous. Is the former Home Service devouring itself? As expected, Culshaw used the programme to go through his repertoire of impersonations – including Tom Baker, which is to him as Harold Wilson was to Mike Yarwood. While Culshaw is a proficient enough mimic, his grandstanding and showboating grew tiresome very quickly. Clearly he hadn’t realised that the real stars of the show were the clips. Of course, one of the main gags on Dead Ringers is making sober and serious people like Perkins do and say unsuitable and incongruous things. Unfortunately, no-one involved with the show seems to remember that Perkins was a regular on Noel Edmonds’ Radio 1 show in the early 1980s, when I once heard him musing on what synonyms for nasal mucus would be deemed acceptable by each of the BBC’s networks. I seem to recall that Radio 1 was a ‘snot’ station, while Radio 2 was ‘gribbly’, but the others elude me. I wonder if they’ve got that in the archives? © Louis Barfe 2002 |
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