Broadcasting: Some tapes you've got to hide from

NICHOLAS LEZARD ON RADIO

Here is what I have not been listening to on the radio this past week:

1. A forbidding pile of cassettes on my desk called "The Century Speaks". This is part of a programme to find some ancient characters dredged from obscurity by local radio teams and have them tell us all the fascinating things that have happened to them over the years. The tapes I have so far are from BBC Radios Nottingham, Gloucestershire, West Midlands, Merseyside and the Asian Network. The idea is that we get a wonderfully demotic and endlessly spellbinding portrait of the lives of ordinary people from around the country. What I keep hearing instead, running through my head, is a sentence from Garrison Keillor's novel Radio Romance, the one that ends with the words, "Now, with the purchase of a radio ... you were easy prey to every bore in the tribe, every toothless jojo who wanted to deposit his life story all over you." So the tapes stare at me and I stare back at them. Impasse. I will get round to them soon, I promise.

2. Radio 3's Shakespeare for the Millennium series. This is a markedly ambitious and worthy project, to do Shakespeare on the radio. For the Millennium. They started with Hamlet. Last week they did A Midsummer Night's Dream. How they got the sound effects to convey the sight of a man with a donkey's head is beyond me. Tonight they're doing Julius Caesar. One of the nice things about not being at school again, along with not having your great friend Sam Landell-Mills sit on your head and then fart, is not having to have anything to do with Julius Caesar ever again. You can even avoid it while studying Eng Lit at university if you're careful. And I intend to avoid it now. But, as with item one, I will get round to the Millennium Bard, when I am up to it. But I am beginning to weary in advance of anything that ends with the words "millennium" or "century", and it's not even October. Radio is a particularly intimate, habit-driven medium, and I'm not sure it can sustain the grand schemes and narratives everyone in programming is so keen on.

One curious series that I have been listening to is Mark Radcliffe's appraisal of his favourite northern comedians. I must admit that when I heard his voice on Radio 4 the alarm bells went off. It reminded me of that gag of P G Wodehouse's, when he writes of the shifty, furtive, hangdog expression that announces that an Englishman is about to talk French: the suddenly muted and stifled voice of the Radio 1 DJ when he (it is usually "he") crosses over to the grown-up station; the sound of someone minding his Ps and Qs. He also sounded lonely without his co-presenter Marc "Lard" Riley, but that could have been my imagination, like the consciousness of a phantom limb.

Any normal Radio 4 listener coming to him, though, would have found nothing to complain about. The show, which this week was about Ken Dodd, answered in some depth the question that Dodd put to himself when he realised he wanted to be a comedian ("how does one comede?"). You would not have been able to guess that Radcliffe is a man who finds it amusing to burp over the beginnings of records he plays on his daytime Radio 1 show. (It's actually Lard who does the burping; and it is, in fact, very amusing and sophisticated when he does it, but I do not have the time or space to explain why.) Nor would you have guessed that Radcliffe himself, for two hours a day every week, is funnier than anything else on the radio. I am particularly fond of a slot in his show called "Vague News", in which a male and female announcer speak with the utmost plausibility and gravitas while not actually delivering any useful information at all. The "Vague Roadwatch", for example, goes like this: "One or two lanes on a bridge had to be closed up north, on the road leading to the junction at the top. Police say this could affect traffic, and advise drivers to turn right or left at the lights."

You can tell this is good because it becomes impossible to take the real news seriously again, and indeed a listener wrote in to Radcliffe to point out that Alan Beith, on Thursday's Today programme, had taken up the banner of Vagueness when extolling the plans and merits of the Liberal Democrats' new leader. He said that he couldn't be "too specific" about these, that to say he was excited "might be a little precise", and that their policies would be welcomed by "some public employees at some point in the near future".

One last word. It appears that Fred Trueman has been taken off Test Match Special by the Powers That Be. I feel awful about this, as during the summer I let slip one or two references to how irritating I found Mr Trueman's delivery and opinions. Now, I always knew this column was influential, but even in my most self-aggrandising fantasies I had no idea how seriously it was taken. What started out as a mere jeu d'esprit, a mild venting of the spleen, has turned into one old man's livelihood irrevocably ruined, and it makes me feel guilty. Bring Freddie back, I say - it is actually nice to have people you hate on the radio from time to time (why do you think anyone listens to The Archers?) - and in the meantime I shall consider some more deserving victims of the Curse of The Radio Column. Suggestions welcomed.