Brouhaha at Radio 4! Jane Garvey, the host of Woman’s Hour – she’s new, apparently, formerly of Five Live – says that there is a “massively middle-class bent to every programme on Radio 4”. Stung, the station’s controller – he’s a “passionate listener”, apparently – ripostes: “Over the past 30 years . . . the country has become infinitely more middle class than it used to be. Radio 4 is likely to hit that group a great deal more than [it does] any other group. That’s inevitable.”
Yes, it is inevitable. Depressingly inevitable – Radio 4 has 9.3 million listeners. However, I’m only rarely one of them. But when family, friends or colleagues laugh heartily over some weary quip on The Now Show, gabble over a livestock controversy on The Archers, muse on a File on 4 dispatch or wonder at the subject’s selection on Desert Island Discs, I tend to nod along dumbly, as if I know what they’re on about.
This minor deception is so much easier than saying I prefer to listen to international news and opinion stations on the internet (Australian talk shows are hilarious), or have a soft spot for Five Live (on which Garvey was really good), or prefer to spend my time with Norman Jay on BBC London. Because, while Radio 4’s keenest listeners will maintain that the station broadens your horizons, they can get fractious and antsy if you suggest that listening to exactly the the same thing as 9.3 million other members of the chattering classes is anything but broadening.
That this feeble class debate has caused a stir – when it has all the real significance of two beetles sparring in a matchbox – just shows how unquestioningly we accept the orthodoxy that one really must listen to Radio 4.