Aural Fixation

A week of being unwell and I am once again noticing the elastic qualities of time whenever illness strikes. Whether as a consequence of illness itself, which can cause grogginess and confusion in the best of us, or as a result of the sometimes disorienting effects of specific medication, days bulge and stretch at times, constrict and fly by at others.

I tend to listen to the radio far more when I am confined to bed. Radio 4 mostly as the otherwise exciting and memory-laden fare of 6Music often smashes too hard against my frontal lobes. The cyclical nature of Radio 4’s schedules, with certain dramas or book readings repeated morning and evening, at least adds an alternative means of checking the passing of the day beyond peering at the world walking past my window.

At times I marvel at the audacity (or absurdity?) of some of the programming. Yesterday, for instance, there was a piece on composing music to accompany still images, such as a Constable’s ‘The Cornfield’. I rather enjoyed the music but felt that my lack of awareness of the details of the painting was compounded by the inability of radio to show me images. Don’t get me wrong, I far prefer radio to the soul-sucking of 99% of what television has to offer, but it seemed an incongruous mix of media to try to combine through a purely aural source.

There is a deceptive middle-England liberalism conveyed by the overall tone of Radio 4, a sense of striving to maintain an understanding of the ever-shifting definition of nationhood and culture for a certain class of people. It can all sound a little too bourgeois on occasion. Maybe that’s the point, for me: maybe I want to feel I can peer in through the window at bourgeois life without having to sacrifice one inch of the distance I prefer to keep between that life and myself. Intellectually I am always fascinated with how the biorhythms of evolving culture throw dust and sand into the workings of the base and superstructure of our societies; how the dust can trace delightful patterns where there might only have been chaotic spaces; how the sand sometimes provides the grit in the oyster so essential for the development of the pearls we lucky swine eagerly devour.

But emotionally Radio 4 World is not really my world. It is too removed, too pleased with itself, too ready to insinuate that however the rest of the world may behave, the BBC remains the standard-bearer for the values by which one ought to live one’s life. No wonder the revolutionary middle classes in J.G. Ballard’s sharp satire ‘Millennium People’ attack the BBC buildings:

“For more than sixty years the BBC had played a leading role in brainwashing the middle classes. Its regime of moderation and good sense, its commitment to the Reithian aims of education and enlightenment, had been an elaborate cover behind which it imposed an ideology of passivity and self-restraint. The BBC had defined the national culture, a swindle in which the middle classes had colluded, assuming that moderation and civic responsibility were in their own interest.”

Well said, Mr Ballard, but hey, if the revolution brought down the BBC, who would televise it?