Michael Vestey

Wednesday

30 Aug 2006
Michael Vestey

Poetic valediction

It is with great sadness that we heard of the sudden death of Michael Vestey on Friday. For more than ten years, he had been The Spectator’s radio critic — indeed the first and only one. His column was perceptive, authoritative, witty, sometimes caustic and opinionated, but always immensely readable. We asked him to file his column early this week because of the Bank Holiday and, professional to the last, he did. It follows below. Michael will be much missed.I’m glad Radio Four had the good sense to mark the centenary of the birth of John Betjeman as I feared the BBC might overlook it. But the network did and some fine programmes have resulted. The one I liked most was Doubts and Demons: The Inner John Betjeman (Monday), presented by A.

Thursday

3 Aug 2006
Michael Vestey

About turn

It must be a nightmare when you spend weeks making a current-affairs programme only to find that days before it’s broadcast the subject you’ve been exploring is turned upside-down. That’s what happened to Radio Four’s Inside Money, the sister programme to the excellent Money Box, almost a fortnight ago (Saturday, repeated Monday last week). The producers had put together a programme about the government’s ludicrous Home Information Packs, the HIPs, that are due to come into force next June, only for the crucial home inspections paid for by the vendors to be scrapped overnight as unworkable. We all knew that but at least this hopeless Labour government woke up to it in the nick of time.So what did Inside Money do? The interviews had been done, the programme already put together.

Wednesday

5 Jul 2006
Michael Vestey

Personal rapport

What really goes on between world leaders at summits? Sir Christopher Meyer, former press secretary to John Major and later ambassador to Washington, told us in How to Succeed at Summits (Sundays, repeated Wednesdays), an entertaining two-part series on Radio Four. Meyer told us that, for example, when President Bush made a jokey reference to Tony Blair using Colgate toothpaste at Camp David, assembled journalists wondered how on earth he knew: did they share a bathroom? In fact, Meyer knew that all the bathrooms there were supplied with this particular brand because he was part of the entourage. Summits remain a secret world because quite often two world leaders will meet in private without their officials present, and only an interpreter, if one is needed, will witness it.

Thursday

25 May 2006
Michael Vestey

The good things in life

Listening to The Archive Hour: Down Your Way Revisited on Radio Four (Saturday) made me wonder why the network got rid of the programme in 1995. It had been running since 1946, with a simple formula of interviews and music, the idea of a producer called Leslie Perowne. It visited towns and villages across the country, and in its heyday attracted an audience of ten million a week. It avoided controversy and looked for the good in people and places, and while some thought it bland and cosy, most liked it. It occurred to me that when the awful Home Truths on Saturday mornings is eventually replaced, Radio Four could do worse than reviving it.Down Your Way was fortunate in its choice of presenters over the years: Stewart MacPherson, Richard Dimbleby, Franklin Engleman and Brian Johnston, with various stand-ins.

Friday

19 May 2006
Michael Vestey

Office politics

The slot at the end of The Westminster Hour on Sunday evenings (repeated Wednesdays) is rarely dull and often quite informative. The last two maintained the consistency — the first, ‘The Gentleman Usher’, had an interview with a former Black Rod, Sir Edward Jones, explaining the nature of his work; and last Sunday’s, ‘The Lloyd George Papers’, presented by Trevor Fishlock, took a two-part look at the letters of Lloyd George. The office of Black Rod, by its traditional nature, seems to irritate many people, particularly those who hate the past or who are ignorant or unappreciative of history. Jones, a retired army officer, as most office holders appear to have been, described how Malcolm Rifkind, when defence secretary, warned him about Dennis Skinner’s heckling at the state opening of Parliament.

Wednesday

17 May 2006
Michael Vestey

Honest John

Although writing a biography of John Osborne can’t be the most difficult task as Osborne left voluminous and laceratingly honest diariesAlthough writing a biography of John Osborne can’t be the most difficult task as Osborne left voluminous and laceratingly honest diaries, as well as the two volumes of autobiography, I thought John Heilpern’s new book about him, A Patriot for Us, the Book of the Week on Radio Four last week, was quite compelling. Abridged by Robert Evans and read by Gareth Thomas, the book made it clear that Osborne was incapable of self-censorship and that, as Heilpern put it, his life was governed by ‘self-disgust and unconquerable clenched fear’. As the playwright wrote, ‘It is fear. I cannot rid myself of it, it numbs me.

Saturday

22 Apr 2006
Michael Vestey

Honours and rebels

With the government and the opposition flogging peerages to raise money for party funds, Radio Four decided to look back at the 1920s master of this practice, the former Liberal prime minister David Lloyd George, and J. Arthur Maundy Gregory, the crook he used to negotiate prices (The Man Who Sold Peerages, Easter Saturday). Matthew Parris told the presenter Shaun Ley that it was one of the three worst political scandals of the 20th century. We don’t know for how long the present government has been doing this and the exact going rates it charges, but back then a knighthood would set you back £10,000, a huge sum, more than £25,000 for a baronetcy and goodness knows what for a hereditary peerage. Lloyd George’s problem after the first world war was that he was estranged from the Liberals, governing with the Conservatives in a coalition, and he needed money for his election campaigns, which was collected in an account known as the Lloyd George Fund.

Saturday

15 Apr 2006
Michael Vestey

The murky side of Murano

This is Donna Leon’s 15th Commissario Guido Brunetti novel set in Venice and once again the author succeeds in capturing the light and shade of a city that has plenty of both. As in this edition she even provides maps, including the island of Murano, so that the reader can follow the detective’s various per- ambulations in search of the solution to a mystery, also slipping into the story details of which vaporetti stops he uses when he’s not summoning a police launch to take him out across the lagoon to an inhospitable outcrop where, perhaps, a body has been found. Leon is good at portraying the social tensions, the rivalry between and even the resentments of, say, the people of Murano and those who live in other districts.

Saturday

25 Mar 2006

Saturday

18 Mar 2006
Michael Vestey

Fighting talk

Radio Four listeners have been complaining about the John Humphrys ‘interview’ with David Cameron on Today a fortnight or so ago. So they must have been even more irritated to hear the programme’s deputy editor, Gavin Allen, defending the encounter on Feedback last week (Friday, repeated Sunday), even going so far as to describe it as a successful interview in which he thought Humphrys didn’t interrupt too much. The presenter, Roger Bolton, put it to him that according to the head of radio news even Humphrys didn’t think the interview had gone as he intended. Allen doggedly stuck to his line that he wasn’t at all disappointed by it. Obviously, there’s a need to defend your staff but, really, no one can honestly say the interview was successful.

Saturday

28 Jan 2006

Saturday

14 Jan 2006
Michael Vestey

Abuse and censorship

The distaste for torture and abuse of prisoners or detainees has never been shared by everyone in this country, though on the whole we’re better than those in many other countries. We have our own sadists who somehow end up in charge of others as well as those who, under pressure to provide results, overstep the mark. Document: Recruiting the Reich on Radio Four this week (Monday) uncovered some examples from the post-war period which, needless to say, were covered up. Using the Freedom of Information Act, the presenter Mike Thomson examined documents alleging abuse and even torture committed by Intelligence officers after the war, and he wondered if it had been widespread and systematic. I suspect neither but one can’t be sure.

Saturday

31 Dec 2005
Michael Vestey

Mercy killing

The good end-of-year news was that Home Truths on Radio Four (Saturdays) is to be taken off the air in the spring. Unfortunately, it seems likely to be replaced by something similar. The new show, says Mark Damazer, the network controller, ‘will continue to feature the sometimes extraordinary experiences of its listeners’. Damazer explained that the late John Peel’s ‘unique personality’ was bound up with Home Truths and now it was time to look for a different programme. I must say I hated it when Peel presented it and I don’t feel any differently now. The only good thing about it for me was that it was sheer bliss not to have the radio on for a whole hour; in fact, more than that because what follows, Excess Baggage, presented by Sandi Toksvig, is almost as ghastly, though nothing else on Radio Four quite matches the awfulness of Home Truths.

Saturday

26 Nov 2005
Michael Vestey

Anything goes

Concern for the English language is one thing but diehard pedantry is another. It seems that Stephen Fry has started shouting at the radio when Radio Four listeners write to or email Feedback to complain about grammatical errors and solecisms they’ve heard on the network. There are certainly more mistakes than there used to be, particularly in news. Fry has a point about absolute pedantry but he gives the impression that for him anything goes — which for someone who speaks and writes impeccably is rather strange. He told the presenter Roger Bolton that ‘language is alive and there are no grammatical rules that make real sense’ and that ‘we all occasionally say things like bestest [Oh, no, we don’t], it’s a reinforcing kind of way of speaking and, yes, it’s not mathematically correct but then language isn’t and shouldn’t be’.

Saturday

29 Oct 2005
Michael Vestey

Schoolboy favourites

I suppose if I had to name my favourite children’s author it would have to be Richmal Crompton and the William stories, followed not far behind by Anthony Buckeridge and Jennings, and Enid Blyton with the adventures of the famous five. There are numerous others, of course, but I enjoyed reading these three the most when I was a child. Buckeridge, who died last year at the age of 92, was the subject of The Archive Hour: Fossilised Fish Hooks! Jennings at the BBC on Radio Four (Saturday), an affectionate tribute as well as an exploration of Buckeridge’s influence on radio comedy. The presenter Miles Kington said that in returning to Jennings after all these years he was surprised to discover that, although the stories were full of schoolboy jokes and slang, they were very funny and cleverly plotted.

Saturday

22 Oct 2005
Michael Vestey

Digital watch | 22 October 2005

As we’ve seen in the past week, the full cost of providing services that no one asked for, digital radio and television, will fall on the licence-fee payer, with the BBC demanding annual increases of 2.5 per cent above inflation. It wasn’t entirely obvious in the early days of digital promotion that this was something the government was pushing hard for; the BBC case was based largely on how vital it was that broadcasting should become digital, as this was a superior form of broadcasting to the existing analogue signal, and our lives would be immeasurably improved if we all went digital. Does anyone, apart from the BBC, really believe that now? At the time I argued that the BBC should improve its core programmes, many of which remain abysmal today, and should leave the development of digital to others.

Saturday

1 Oct 2005
Michael Vestey

Bush bashing

America, more than any other country I can think of, encourages such extreme opinions that it’s sometimes difficult to analyse why such views are held. There are rigid anti-Americans, of course, who variously dislike its capitalist and free-market system, its silent majority’s lack of sophistication, or its military and technological might. Much of this is just plain envy. Others define the country through its president. At the moment Bush-haters are in the ascendancy, hence the gloating tone of much of the broadcasting coverage of Hurricane Katrina. It was, as the mad Michael Moore put it, all the fault of George W. himself. I dare say Moore is already finding ways of blaming Bush for the Ice Age. It was all very well for Rupert Murdoch to quote his shoeshine boy Tony Blair on the BBC’s anti-American coverage of the hurricane, but in fact he should have been watching his own channel’s Sky News, which itself was very quickly into the blame-game and Guardian mode.

Saturday

24 Sep 2005
Michael Vestey

A victory and a sell-out

News of England’s Ashes victory spread rapidly though Cortona’s ancient streets last Monday evening, as those with satellite TV rang the mobile phones of friends and families to pass on the momentous news. It was not, of course, Italians calling; Tuscans observed uncomprehendingly as the holidaying English roared at the result; and one resident Englishwoman let out a primal Home Counties scream of joy in a clothes shop, unnerving the proprietor. Only those with Channel 4 were in the know; the BBC World Service, I was told, boringly reported football results. Mysteriously, Test Match Special on Radio Four long wave doesn’t seem to be available abroad and, as we know, for the next four years Test cricket will be on an expensive Sky subscription channel only.

Saturday

3 Sep 2005

Saturday

16 Jul 2005
Michael Vestey

After the bombs

When I heard of the London explosions last Thursday — I was rung shortly before leaving to catch a train to London, which I had to abandon — my first thought was, why did it take them so long? We knew the manpower was here, either coming in as bogus asylum-seekers or by using false passports, easily accomplished since the government gave up preventing entry. Whether the bombers came from their ranks or are brainwashed, resentful Muslim youths born here — and at the time of writing it appears they were born here — only the investigation will reveal. I assumed the reason bombs hadn’t been used before was not the lack of people who were willing to do it but the difficulty of finding or bringing in explosives, a problem they’ve now clearly solved.

Saturday

18 Jun 2005
Michael Vestey

Force for change

It was something of a shock to hear the first episode this week of Radio Four’s adaptation of BBC television’s popular 1950s series Dixon of Dock Green (Wednesday). Were policemen ever like the bluff, wise, shrewd and avuncular constable George Dixon? As a child watching the series, I thought they were, and we expected them all to bend their knees and say, ‘Evenin’ all.’ Audiences also believed it, as the series, written by Ted, later Lord, Willis, ran for 21 years. By the time Jack Warner, who played Dixon, retired, he was 80 and hardly looking like a police constable, let alone being able to bend the knees. Even if Dixons really did exist, they certainly don’t today. Cocooned in their hermetically sealed patrol cars, abandoning the solving of burglaries for motoring offences, shooting men armed with table legs and arresting householders who defend themselves from attack: that’s our image of the police today, rightly or wrongly.

Friday

10 Jun 2005
Michael Vestey

Diary - 10 June 2005

You don’t have to love the budget airlines to find them useful for travelling in Europe. Since I belatedly discovered them I’ve become a habitué and fly to and from Italy several times a year. At first it was from Stansted to Rome Ciampino which receives Ryanair, easyJet and others, then Bristol which is closer. Recently Thomsonfly began cheap flights from our nearest airport, dear old Bournemouth International (as it grandly calls itself), to Pisa, and what an old-fashioned pleasure that is. The terminal is small and staffed by friendly people who’ve yet to become disillusioned by handling large numbers of travellers. The man checking our boarding passes actually wished us a good trip. I was so shocked by this courtesy that I forgot to buy The Spectator from the bookstall.

Saturday

14 May 2005
Michael Vestey

Changing lives

It’s always useful to be reminded of the remarkable stoicism and bravery of the generation of people that lived through the second world war. It’s hard to imagine it being repeated today. I felt it this week listening to Coming Home, a five-part series celebrating the 60th anniversary of VE Day. Charles Wheeler, who in 1945 was a Royal Marine crossing into Germany from Holland, examined how people saw the ending of the war in Europe and how the conflict had altered their lives. Across the BBC as a whole, the occasion is being marked by a plethora of programmes. The depravity of those involved in the fall of Berlin was remembered: the raping and looting by Russian soldiers, and the SS killing those Germans who flew a white flag from their buildings.

Saturday

7 May 2005
Michael Vestey

Death in Venice

When you are so addicted to writers’ works and feel bereft after finishing all their novels, you become restless and fretful. It happened to me last year with the Aurelio Zen detective novels of Michael Dibdin, as I lamented in The Spectator Diary column. Zen is the Italian policeman who is sent to different parts of Italy to solve crimes sensitive in nature; he’s a louche, corner-cutting cop with a hopeless domestic life. When I’d read the last novel, I wondered listlessly what I’d do until the next Zen book, which I surmised would be in two years’ time. And so it is: another is promised for August. Bit of a sad case, you might think; yes, probably, and I’m not, as a rule, even a particular fan of the genre. Apart from the fine writing and ingenious plotting, I can only assume it must be my interest in all things Italian.

Saturday

9 Apr 2005
Michael Vestey

The Prince and the press

When you’ve seen how much vilification Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles have endured from the tabloids and the republican broadsheets over the years, you wouldn’t have been surprised to see or hear the Prince’s muttered comments about the BBC’s royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell in Klosters last week. Witchell, known inexplicably among his colleagues as the ‘poisoned carrot’, is in fact one of the more respectful of the reporters who follow the royals. But the seemingly innocuous question he threw at the three princes — how were they feeling about the forthcoming wedding — was not as bland as it first appeared. It would have been if addressed only to Charles, but it took on a certain tension with William and Harry expected to answer it.

Saturday

2 Apr 2005
Michael Vestey

Transatlantic relations

When I spotted that the conservative American writer and wit P.J. O’Rourke was giving two 20-minute talks on Radio Four, the first on Easter Sunday, I rubbed my eyes thinking there must have been some mistake. Or maybe a printing error. How did he get past the Guardianistas at the BBC? Did he slip in the back way disguised as a delivery man? He even gained access to a microphone and spoke into it. Twice! Well, I suppose as listeners we can be tossed the odd crumb or two now and again to keep us quiet. Whether Islingtonian listeners can tolerate it we’ll have to wait to hear in the next Feedback season. O’Rourke was on fine form, too, as he reassessed transatlantic relations. When younger and living in a basement flat in Maida Vale, he admired Britain.

Saturday

26 Mar 2005

Saturday

19 Mar 2005
Michael Vestey

Evolution, not revolution

On the whole, Radio Four has had some good controllers over the years, the better ones being those who introduced gradual change. The two who were the least successful in my view both tried to rearrange the furniture after moving in; I’m thinking of Ian McIntyre in the late 1970s who, one felt, wanted to return radio to the 1950s, and, in the 1990s, James Boyle, who, enslaved by focus groups, brought in many pointless changes. He was succeeded by the successful Helen Boaden and last year Mark Damazer replaced her. Wisely, perhaps, he hasn’t said much about his plans for the network, though he does have a few in mind. He gave an inconclusive interview in the Radio Times last month and answered listeners’ questions and concerns on Feedback on Radio Four last week (Friday) without giving much away.

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