Next week's radio: from Meeting Myself Coming Back to Paul Jones Jul 20th 2013, 05:00
David Hepworth ponders the art of the interview, the rise of the pen-pusher, and the tree-farming Stone
"No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy" is attributed to Prussian Helmuth von Moltke the Elder. The field marshal never did a celebrity interview but he'd be pleased to know his observation applies no less in the world of the microphone. Every interviewer turns up with hundreds of questions designed to coax the subject into dilating on familiar themes. But it's often the case that the prepared questions don't lead anywhere, and the subject prefers to tell you something more interesting instead. At which point good interviewers, who are always listening, shut up and nod encouragement.
There's a case of this in Meeting Myself Coming Back (Sat, 8pm, R4) in which presenter John Wilson invites Martin Amis to comment on excerpts from his past radio and TV appearances. Amis doesn't seem to be meeting Wilson halfway. The clips of his 14-year-old self in the film High Wind In Jamaica are flat-batted with the news that it isn't him at all, his breaking voice having been dubbed by an elderly lady. Since Amis's trademark drawl never betrays his humour, Wilson has to tell us that he's smiling while listening to a clip of his father, Kingsley. When he's played some dialogue from Saturn 3, the 1980 film he helped script, he points out that he only recognises half a dozen words. But then the novelist volunteers some fascinating reminiscences about this brief period as a script doctor: about how the actors all wanted special lines, "lines that made them seem better than they were", how Kirk Douglas was "a sweet man" who was the model for Lorne Guyland in his 1984 novel Money (and was prepared to play himself in a film version) and how Farrah Fawcett was the sanest person on the set. It's the most illuminating thing anyone's likely to say about films on the radio this week and nobody asked him to say it. Maybe we shouldn't snigger at the deferential newsreel interviewers who would simper "is there anything you want to say, Minister?" It's an underrated question.
Walking around London I see enough office blocks that seem destined never to be filled, regardless of what happens with the economy, to wonder whether this is really the best time for Lucy Kellaway's History Of Office Life (Weekdays, 1.45pm, R4) to be saying this is the way we live now. "We're all paper pushers now," she says as the theme tune plays out over the deeply anachronistic sound of a typewriter. In the first episodes, she talks to historians of bureaucracy to find out how the East India Company managed a workflow that was tide-dependent, how the man who wrenched the civil service away from its patronage base still happily practised nepotism on his own account, and about the very prejudicial things that a Victorian boss would write in a clerk's personal file.
American musician Chuck Leavell played one of the most famous piano parts in popular music. It's on Jessica by the Allman Brothers Band and you hear it every time Top Gear comes on, which is often. The BBC prefer to bill him for his far less interesting contributions as the 'fifth member' of the Rolling Stones. He's the guest of Paul Jones (Mon, 7pm, R2), where he talks about the evolution of blues piano and, it's to be hoped, how he became an award-winning tree farmer, which must be as socially useful a sideline as any member of the Rolling Stones' extended family ever had.
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