Radio: Ode to Hilversum Radio 4

Poets ought to like radio, you feel, not just because they both place such importance on language, but because radio is a solitary comfort and poets arepresumed to be solitary creatures. You picture the poet struggling in a lonesome garret while Radio 4 murmurs in the background, or a melancholic tune drifts out on Radio 3.

So Ode to Hilversum, in which poets talked about their radios and read poems inspired by the medium, must have seemed like a good idea. It was a good idea, and it produced a number of moving and entertaining moments - among them Brendan Kennelly explaining how he plays seven radios at once (tuned to the same station when he's feeling harmonious, to different stations when he's feeling chaotic); Ken Smith evoking of the soothing confusion of a night-time trawl through the shortwave bands; Alastair Elliot demonstrating how slowly his parents' ancient Bakelite wireless creaks into action; a blatantly manufactured but oddly touching depiction of a hushed family gathering around the crystal set, by Kathleen Jamie.

Taken as a whole, though, Ode to Hilversum managed to present a frustratingly narrow set of ideas about radio. For almost every poet, radio seemed to mean loneliness, insomnia or nostalgia, particularly wartime nostalgia. For Alastair Elliot, at least, there were genuine memories to draw on; Robert Crawford's surprisingly unimaginative contribution drew on borrowed memories to paint a boringly stark contrast between "Mr Churchill, speaking English" and his Gaelic-speaking audience in the Hebrides.

Gillian Clarke and John Hartley Williams also fell into the nostalgia trap; but they had fresh notions about the physics of radio (her father was a radio engineer), and how it could be used as a medium for rebellion.

Hugo Williams had nothing new to say about the World Service as a lifeline for expatriates, and said some wrongheaded things about the sense that other lonely people were listening in the dark. One of the nice things about the World Service (as opposed to BBC Europe) is that it's the one relic of the British Empire on which the sun never sets; there's a sense that other people are listening at other times of day, getting on with other bits of their lives.

Only Kennelly seemed to have any real idea of the immediacy of radio, and the way that it can give the listener access to other worlds - for him, turning the radio on is an expression of "gregariousness": "You can fill your lonely room with articulate, misunderstood people."

In between the poets, Tim Dee had slopped out a stew of music and voices which gave a feeling for the incongruity and excitement of radio that the poetry didn't seem to grasp. Which makes you wonder whether it wouldn't be more interesting to hear radio producers talking about their relationship with radio.