You could hardly switch on the radio at one time without hearing something in the spirit of Pepys. It was always on Radio 4. Christopher Matthew’s Diary of a Somebody was followed by Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾; The Benn Diaries; Alan Clark’s diaries; Nick Clarke’s Fighting to Be Normal, chronicling his cancer and the amputation of his leg; Cherie Blair reading her own Speaking for Myself; and the former Labour MP Chris Mullin’s A View from the Foothills, last year, for which he was honest enough to disclose the exact fee he received (£2,100) in the register of members’ interests.
Diaries are scarcer today. The slot that housed all but one of the above is busy. The mid-morning reading slot, once 8.45am and now 9.45am on weekdays on FM, has been occupied for months by Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects, the great saga in three tranches, of which the second ends next week.
(It is a phenomenon, particularly the recent edition on the vanished kingdom of Lotharingia, but it is a little like gazing at a succession of jewels without seeing how they fit into the crown.) One station, however, has stepped into the breach. Jack FM, in Oxford, offers an oasis in the diary desert. It is doing so with Ali Booker’s Cancer Diaries, in which one of the station’s employees, 46-year-old Alison Booker, provides a regular, first-person report on what it is like living with a disease that she has been told is inoperable, and that has spread from her breasts to her lungs.
Booker's programme proves that radio, with its personal, intimate nature, could almost have been invented for the diary form
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Over the past 18 months, she has talked about mood swings, pulling her hair out, panic attacks, the severity of the pain compared with childbirth, trips to a hospice in Headington, her husband and two teenage children, the varying reaction of friends, the K-Y Jelly she puts up her nose to facilitate an oxygen tube, and much more. Some of this is hard to take (it is part of the breakfast show), but made easier by the fact that Booker, who was on BBC Radio Oxford for 12 years, has a wry, graceful, good-humoured manner and an attractive voice.
Ten days ago, this series won Special Programme of the Year in the Arqiva Commercial Radio Awards, having already taken a silver in the Sonys. It is a candid, useful, inspiring piece of radio, facing up to a strangely taboo subject (death).
It proves that radio, with its personal, intimate nature, could almost have been invented for the diary form.
“Basically, she left the BBC and went home to die,” says Jack FM’s programme director, Sue Carter. “She contacted us later and we hired her as a producer and newsreader. She does these diaries when she can, usually twice a week. It is four years since she was told she had terminal cancer and, thank God, she is still with us. We hope she will be around for some time to come.”
Nobody can tell how long Ali Booker’s Cancer Diaries will continue. As for Radio 4, A History of the World in 100 Objects will return on September 13. In the nine-week gap, Book of the Week will return — and is almost certain to accommodate Tony Blair’s or Peter Mandelson’s diaries, both of which are being published in late summer. (The former PM has already recorded an audio version of his book.) What kind of audience they get, however, and whether they will enhance listeners’ lives, is another matter altogether.