In the Dark at the Radio Festival

Earlier this week at the Radio Festival in Salford, I led the inaugural session of “In the Dark at the Radio Festival” – a personal take on some the deep pleasures to be experienced in radio as I see them. I wanted to use this post to share the selection of clips I presented during the session.

It's not a definitive take. I have stuck to BBC excerpts though I love and admire a lot of other radio especially This American Life and Radio Lab from the States. And I have a bias to speech radio as you would expect from a former Controller of Radio 4.

Before the session at the Radio Festival started we played out a track from Laura Mvula, simply because my earliest memories are of radio and music: dancing round the kitchen with my mum to the hits of My Fair Lady which she told me was on something called the Light Programme...

For those under forty, there used to be two BBC radio stations: the Light Programme and the Home Service which, in a brilliant strategic move in the Seventies, the BBC changed into Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4. 

My Fair Lady gave way to a later love of Motown, soul and funk (and not a little Joni Mitchell...) which Tony Blackburn has a lot to answer for.

But my real relationship with radio started like this:

For me, radio tells stories better than any other medium. And I have told a few of those stories in my time. I began my professional life as a radio reporter first in commercial and then BBC local radio.

In 1985, I had moved from Local to Network radio based in Manchester. I was working on Radio 4's flagship current affairs programme, File on 4 and I found myself in East Africa reporting on a strange epidemic sweeping the country which the local people called Slim Disease which was killing entire families. I had spotted news of this illness in an obscure paper and researched it. And to my genuine amazement, was sent with a producer to Uganda to report on it. In the clip below, I am talking to some Kenyan prostitutes about their lives, trying to get some sense of how the infection might be spreading.

"Slim" was of course HIV Aids. And in the Eighties, you need to remember that many people in the West and in Africa, believed HIV was not a heterosexual disease and only gay men could get it. How wrong they were.

That programme won the Sony Gold in 1986. But the women I spoke to may well have been dead from full blown Aids before then. If you tell other people's stories, you have a huge responsibility too to get it right. And that means really listening. Not just asking the questions.

One of the great listeners on Radio 4 is Eddie Mair, a radio genius in my view (though don't tell him that because he'll definitely blush).

You can tell Eddie loves the medium of radio. He uses its intimacy to move effortlessly from a tender interview with someone in crisis to a forensic unpicking of political platitudes. Woe betides the politician who underestimates his apparent politeness.

And in the middle of a daily current affairs programme, he starts to play.

When I came back from BBC News to BBC Radio 18 months ago, I realised what a rut I had got into. I had forgotten that News stories are just one version of reality. Radio reminded me of just how many creative and different ways there are to tell stories. Drama, literal story telling - Book at Bedtime, 500 Words, documentaries, features, interviews, songs - lyrics and music. They are all narratives and radio is a brilliant medium for them all.

But sometimes your ears are pinned back by the unexpected.

This piece of storytelling blew me away when it landed in my in box as visualized radio from Radio One's Live Lounge. It's George the Poet and his incredibly powerful piece: I Need

That mixture of the cello and the poetry is a very moving combination for me.

I love the fact that technology means it's so easy to find and replay and send to your friends the bits of radio you love. But since radio is still overwhelmingly consumed as a live medium, we should never take for granted the power that "liveness" brings all on its own. The immediacy, the vividness, sometimes the shock. This is Libby Purvis and guests on the normally good natured Midweek on Radio 4. Two of her guests, Darcus Howe and Joan Rivers, have not exactly hit it off… And it's about to get worse.

Libby is one of the great radio experts...handling an explosive situation with that wonderful dry humour and wry tone so characteristic of her. I think some of the most creative programmes on British radio in recent years have been new ways of using live broadcasting to illustrate the past. Bomber on Radio 4 in 1995 broadcast a real time dramatisation of Len Deighton's novel. It was ground breaking.

And in Titanic, D-Day and The Kennedy assassinations, Phil Critchlow and his team working closely with BBC staff, took that "real life moment to moment" idea to new creative heights. Using first-hand testimony, historical analysis, social media and music to recreate what happened, as a listener I found it radio I could not switch off. In Titanic, Jeremy Vine is the curator. In real time and on the Titanic, it is 1am in the morning.

At this point you may be worrying that my radio life is rather over full of death, disaster and tragedy. And we do those things rather well. But, I loved commissioning comedy when I ran Radio 4 and flatter myself I had a bit of knack for it.

With Caroline Raphael, Radio 4's expert commissioner of comedy, we spotted the potential of Little Britain. It went on to be a huge hit on BBC Television. Here's a clip from the very first episode on Radio 4.

I had some other hits too: the Mighty Boosh which Radio London first put on air; Ed Reardon, Claire in the Community and Giles Wembley Hogg.

What I did NOT commission was a storyline in The Archers which you have never heard.

This was the murder of Helen Archer's deeply boring Game Keeper boyfriend Greg followed by Ed Grundy being banged up for life a killing he did not commit - which would have lead to a long running rough justice story.

Murders in country villages by people you have never met are unbelievably rare. And this felt so far fetched that I banned it. To the great chagrin of the then Editor. But as a consequence of my decision, she and her team came up with the brilliant and much more authentic Siobhan and Brian adultery story which gripped Middle England for over a year.

Indeed, so real was it that on one of those huge Countryside Alliance marches in London, someone held up a large poster saying " Jennifer. Brian is the father of Siobhan's baby." Jennifer eventually discovered her husband's betrayal without the help of that poster - but forgave him. Then the cliff hanger was whether or not he would stay with her or go to Siobhan, now the mother of his only son.

In EastEnders resolving this issue of love and loyalty would have involved a lot of shouting and possibly some violent crime. In The Archers, such things are decided over the washing up:

And here is a sign of the regard felt for The Archers by Deadringers:

Who says Radio 4 can't laugh at itself?

What struck me listening to a lot of clips for this post was the sheer pleasure of radio.

I think good radio always has an underlying self-confidence. Its presenters feel completely confident in their relationship with you, the listeners. And in return, you trust them with your time, attention, emotions and opinion.

Good radio allows you to feel both intimately involved - the presenter is talking uniquely to you; and at the same time you feel part of a special club. Even if, as in the case of Radio 2, that club is made up of 15 million listeners. When people suggest that radio is on its last legs because the hours being consumer are dropping, I remind them of Radio 2.

The wit, energy and intelligence of the station should remind us all why radio as radio will last longer than the sceptics believe. Because, it's full of people on both sides of the glass who care passionately about it. And audiences can feel that.

Finally, I want you to shut your eyes and listen to a quite challenging but ultimately lovely piece of music first played by Mary Anne Hobbs on 6Music and then replayed on Radio 3 when she was presenting Saturday Classics. As a listener, I have learned a lot from Mary Anne and the rest of the 6Music line up. They always surprise and amuse.

This caught my ear and I've chosen it to end because it is perfect for the dark. But more than that, it's a reminder that the radio can take you to places you never knew you might like. It's by a young German composer called Nils Frahm and it's called Says. Mary Anne believes it represents the complex textures of love.

The clips in this post were first presented at the Radio Festival 2014. The words are derived from the speech Helen Boaden gave at the inaugural session of the “In the Dark at Radio Festival”.

Helen Boaden is Director, BBC Radio