As a lifelong Radio 4 listener, by temperament and milieu as much as choice, few things are more evocative of earlier parts of my life than the title music of shows. The strange consensus that ‘Take Me On’ by Aha is the canonical 1980’s song is not an incomprehensible choice, merely a wrong one, the correct answer should of course have been…..’Party Fears Two’ by the Associates. Now for me the opening bars of the song will always be the signal that ‘Week Ending’ a satirical summary of the week is coming on – pedants will point out that the song was only used on the last few years of the show but this is my memories we are talking about. Equally evocative was the sound of Alistair Cooke with his famous ‘Letter from America’ – his deep and rich voice narrated a perfectly constructed vignette from the some aspect of American news in precisely 15 min. The show ran from 1946 to 2004.
At the beginning it must have been a real insight into the America the location of so many dreams for the post-war English in their more austere and seemingly ever smaller nation. Even with Hollywood and the arrival of TV from ‘I love Lucy’ to Starsky and Hutch’ – America was still a foreign place and Alistair with his well-educated but still discernible Lancashire accent was a gifted tour guide / anthropologist. At some point, evolution not revolution, however the nature of the program changed, Alastair become less a guide to a foreign country but a foreign time. His memories of the end of World War II, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon became increasing distant from the surrounding culture and perhaps specifically from his Upper East Side apartment in Anglophile New York. He still described the news from America but increasingly his point was about the changes from then to now, not there to here. I wonder if America in 2004 seemed more foreign than the one he arrived in 58 years earlier. [Just parenthetically to add an Alistair Cooke story, as the founder of Cambridge acting group the ‘Mummers’ he rejected the young James Mason..]
I am aways from 95 and I sincerely hope to make it but I have already started to notice that I am not entirely living in this World. I don’t reject it or feel it is wrong, I am just not as committed to it as I used to be – though as the place my children inhabit I feel very passionately we should take care of it. It is faster, of course, but also more emotional and more angry and tragic than I am comfortable with. People are both kinder and angrier, more prone to offense and more careless about giving it. This is of course Boomer talk and to my boys reminds them of why generation is wrong and should relinquish control as soon as possible. Increasing I agree, though down the line I see their successors as more light-hearted and easy-going and perhaps more effective for being a little more head than heart. One day I hope to record letters to them, they will not listen, but perhaps the one day even further ahead in time they will remember my voice.
6moreSleeps 