The week in audio: Desert Island Discs; Today guest editors; The Dark Is Rising; Terry Hall

Desert Island Discs (BBC Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Today’s guest editors (BBC Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
The Dark Is Rising (BBC World Service/BBC Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Mary Ann Hobbs interviews Terry Hall – (BBC 6 Music) | BBC Sounds
Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast: Terry Hall|
Terry Hall on Piccadilly Radio, 8 April 1985

Say goodbye to the twixt time between Christmas and New Year – it was lovely, wasn’t it? Ideal for moochy listening, and there was some nice audio to accompany low-rumbling family rows/ idly picking at leftovers/ sitting in a three-hour queue to charge your electric car because trains don’t exist any more.

Desert Island Discs offered us ex-Desert Island Discs host Kirsty Young interviewed by current Desert Island Discs host Lauren Laverne. (Young retired from the best job in radio in 2019, due to chronic pain caused by fibromyalgia and rheumatism.) Laverne, who suffered from unfavourable comparisons with Young when she first started (unfairly, in my opinion), gave Young a lovely introduction, reminding us that her guest did far more in her career than that one excellent gig. She steered Young through other parts of her life – I enjoyed her story of reporting on 9/11 – and it was nice to be reminded that, underneath that delicious voice and head-girl grace, Young is a journalist. As is Laverne, who pressed her naturally private guest on what her illness did to her identity and got a revealing response. Both women wear their presenting expertise so lightly, we forget it’s there at all.

Another Radio 4 stalwart: Today’s twixt-week guest editors, a tradition that started 19 years ago. This year’s week started tamely enough, with Lord Ian “Beefy” Botham in charge on Boxing Day. He got his old cricket compadre David Gower to investigate how test match cricket and the one-day versions can best work together. Overall, Botham’s Today was… OK: a ragbag, covering cricket, small charities, grouse shooting, advances in leukaemia cures. Like passing the time with a golf-club bore. On Thursday, the show presented by the head of GCHQ, Sir Jeremy Fleming, with its emphasis on data, was as dry as a cracker without cheese.

However, Jamie Oliver gave us a great show on Tuesday. A born communicator with a one-track mind (how food and eating can improve lives, especially children’s), he used his programme to bang his point across, taking on several interviews himself. He pulled in big names too, including George Osborne and Tony Blair, grilling the latter about how Oliver could best work with politicians to achieve his aim of free school meals for every child whose parents are on universal credit. Good stuff.

And Wednesday’s programme, edited by Nazarin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, was a triumph. Like Oliver, Zaghari-Ratcliffe concentrated on one subject – freedom – and, like him, she’s a natural communicator. As an ex-prisoner of Iran’s appalling authorities, hostage for six years until her release in March, she brought the regime’s treatment of its citizens to the fore. Little moments hit hard. A conversation about humour between British-Iranian comedians Omid Djalili and Shaparak Khorsandi led to Khorsandi becoming upset when she talked about how her cousin can’t sleep on her back at the moment, because of the air pellet injuries she’s sustained while protesting. In another section, Zaghari-Ratcliffe cooked a Yotam Ottolenghi recipe she used while imprisoned, alongside Ottolenghi himself. He asked her about cooking in prison, and her answer was complicated: she loved to make meals for her daughter Gabriella when Gabriella visited her in prison, but, as time passed, Gabriella refused to eat her food. Zaghari-Ratcliffe also talked about going on hunger strike, her pragmatism – “You are risking all you have, which is your life” – more moving than any hysterics.

In the last half-hour, Zagari-Ratcliffe talked to Andy Murray, a hero of hers. When she was first taken hostage, in 2016, she was put in solitary confinement; after a few months she was allowed to watch TV. She had two channels: on one was a rubbish soap opera, and on the other, sport. She watched Murray win Wimbledon and it kept her going. Murray, an emotional man, was overcome, and later moved to tears when considering what Zaghari-Ratcliffe went through. Me too. The whole three hours of her show are worth a listen.

More Radio 4: last week gave us a jammed-together afternoon drama version of the World Service’s The Dark Is Rising (listen to the WS podcast instead). A 1973 folk-fantasy book, The Dark Is Rising is set around the winter solstice, and this was an ambitious adaptation (by Robert Macfarlane and Complicité’s Simon McBurney), dripping with high-ranking drama types, from McBurney to Toby Jones. Weirdly, the episodic, magical story gave a feeling of a video game: our young hero, 11-year-old Will, moves between set-ups in an arbitrary manner. He meets people called the Walker or the Lady, who give him significant gifts. One minute he’s contemplating an enormous white horse, the next he’s on it, without quite knowing how. The innovation was mostly in the sound design, all-encompassingly scary at times, including a chilling and tinnitus-triggering high-pitched whine at the very start. A little pompous, but fun, and anything that includes the myth of the Wild Hunt is OK by me.

Just room for a couple of recommendations for Terry Hall fans knocked sideways by his sudden death. Mary Anne Hobbs did a lovely long interview with Hall on 6 Music in 2019, and the channel has put it up again. There’s also an episode of Richard Herring’s podcast where Hall talks about some of the darker times in his life; and a 1985 show where he took over from Timmy Mallett as a DJ at Manchester’s Piccadilly Radio for one night. That last one is a proper time machine, both musically and in the way Hall speaks. Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think, etc.