In Our Time
Although the BBC has come in for a fair bit of stick on The Rust and elsewhere, I’m here to praise another radio programme – In Our Time on Radio 4.
This is presented by Melvyn Bragg and each week a subject is examined by him and three academics.
Yesterday’s subject was the French novelist George Sand. Other than her association with Chopin I knew little of the French writer but after 45 minutes a lot more.
Her father was landed gentry, her mother a working class dancer, probably a courtesan. She was brought up by her grandmother on her estate which Sand later managed. She was a highly-spirited girl who eventually her grandmother could not control.
She was to marry an aristo unhappily, forming the basis of her first novel before her ten year relationship with Chopin.
She wore trousers, dressed as a man and there is speculation about her sexuality.
One of the academics Belinda Jack from Christ Church, Oxford, attributed this to her desire to be anonymous in her attire.
She can call herself the mother of the French female novel, influencing Simone de Beauvoir and – further afield – Walt Whitman and Robert Louis Stevenson who lived in Hyeres in the South of France.
The advantage of the programme is that the academics really know their subject.
They only meet 30 minutes before broadcast and Bragg is a stern task master.
If their contribution is too vague he will demand more precision. He has mugged up on the subject too and like all good broadcasters he is representing the listener.
Academics form a whole corpus of modern humourous British literature from Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim to the novels of David Lodge and they can be very competitive.
Who is the cleverest of them all is an issue that motivates them. We saw an example of this from Angela Ryan, a French literature professor from Cork University.
She noticed an unattributed reference to George Sand in a Robert Louis Stevenson novel emphasising that she still noted it.
My only concern is that when the BBC does shift to seeking a more youthful audience Melvyn Bragg and this programme will suffer in a cull.
