Why being told radio is ‘fun’ puts me off really good shows

Fun. My brain curls up like a caterpillar whenever my radio implies that what follows, be it fashion, food, history or politics, is going to be “fun”. The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry (Radio 4, all week) is fun science. Hannah Fry is a mathematician, Adam Rutherford is a geneticist; together they have fun showing how science matters in everything we do. On Monday, they competed to make sponge cakes to prove the chemistry of fat, sugar, flour and heat in separate recipes, clattering their cake tins to show what fun it all was. They brought in Jay Rayner, the nation’s favourite food funster, to judge the results. Rutherford won. He would, wouldn’t he, having made his with the right kinds of fat, sugar, flour and heat.

As it happens, I was up very early last Sunday, making cake and listening to 5 Live Science (Radio 5 Live). The group named as makers of this show, The Naked Scientists, prepared my brain for curling. Curiously, that didn’t happen, even in the grimmer moments. The first half-hour covered new therapies for multiple sclerosis, the latest on global warming, what space exploration craft Cassini sent back on its final voyage. The second half was all about memory, how it works, why we lose it, how to erase some memories and plant others. Maybe it was listening to this that made my cakes turn out better than usual.

The Listeners’ Stories (Radio 2, last night and tonight) are part of the BBC’s celebration of how, 50 years ago, it launched one new network, Radio 1, and renamed its other three – Light, Third and Home – as Radios 2, 3 and 4. All four would thereafter evolve at different speeds but as the Light/Radio 2 had the biggest audience it was, and would be, central to all of BBC radio’s continuing health. So here are lots of listeners saying how much they love the network, the presenters, their voices, the music, the way it’s gone from being all Max Jaffa and the Palm Court Orchestra in the Seventies to The Craig Charles House Party on Saturday nights now. As someone who listened (occasionally under protest) to the first of those and is a fervent fan of the second, I can understand the enthusiasms, the devotions to everyone from Terry Wogan to Steve Wright. What might have added a pinch of necessary salt to this shedload of sugar would have been an occasional grumble. For example, this one from a Telegraph reader: why does Radio 2 turn to fading TV “personalities” as presenters so often these days? Alas, no grumblers were admitted.

The Essay (Radio 3, all last week) was by writer and broadcaster Michael Goldfarb, remembering the Seventies when he was trying to be an actor but earned a living as a New York cab driver, hence the title Trip Sheets 2 – an Actor’s Life, “trip sheets” being a cabbie’s record of his day’s work. Each episode was a gem, capturing hope (raised and lost), lessons (formal and incidental), a cumulative account of how adults must go on growing up for the rest of their lives. As Goldfarb showed, sometimes it hurts but, when you look back, it can be funny.

The Golden Age of American Radio(Radio 4 Extra, Saturday) brought three hours of delight and insight in a remarkably deft production. American radio’s golden age (1934-55) coincided with Hollywood’s, resulting in the many crossovers of voices in plays and other programmes. There were surprises, Marilyn Monroe as a starlet chatting to the sponsors of the Lux Radio Theatre, Vincent Price as Simon Templar, the gentleman ’tec better known as The Saint, Joan Crawford making the 1949 airwaves tremble in Suspense. There was a complete episode of The Jack Benny Program from 1950, which is still funny after all these years. Here were salutes to such great of the past as Lurene Tuttle (1907-86), a radio actor who could play any role, coach to many a star of today. Then came the legendary voice of Jack Webb (later a major TV star in Dragnet) in a show that dramatised recent controversial episodes in current affairs, this being a powerfully ironic one from 1946, excoriating the (then recent) racist diatribes of Senator Theodore Bilbo. Running beside it, mostly off-air, across its three hours, was a continuous reading of titles of all 1,800 great shows from the era. The whole thing, presented by Toby Hadoke with spark, written and produced by Dominic Delargy with flair and imagination, heads Radio 4 Extra’s choices on iPlayer and is there for another month. Try it. It’s fun.

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