Radio: The still un-Birtised music of humanity

Sometimes the world stops looking like a conspiracy against the decent; if only infrequently, and for an instant. The indicators are unpredictable. I noticed one on Monday, the result of a breakdown of communication somewhere in the BBC, and I am still feeling good about it nearly a week later. It was the 1 o'clock news report on Radio 3.

Radio 3 has always, you get the impression, considered the news to be somewhat infra dig but Birt can imagine no higher public good than the continuous delivery of factual pap; so there it is. Anyway, the lady reading the news ended by saying, "And the FT share index is at, I am sorry, I haven't been given the figure."

She might not even have said "I am sorry", such was the measure of her apparent indifference to the non-arrival of the FT index. Maybe, one suddenly realised, it is not all that important for us to hear what the FT share index is every hour. It is not only a very crude barometer of economical health, and thus, in its normally insignificant fluctuations, of almost zero news value, but those who care about or depend on such matters probably have the damn figure already.

It is moments like these that make you realise that Radio 3 remains our last, best hope for the preservation of the human race. When it talks rather than plays music, it makes you think it is like Radio 4 once was, or once should have been. True, Radio 4 has Melvyn, Paxo, The News Quiz and The Very World of Milton Jones but otherwise all is a bleak and featureless terrain of consumer chit-chat and interviews with bishops.

I had been giving the Sounding the Century lectures a miss ever since the first one, which featured power-worshipper and complacent janitor to the status quo, Anthony "Third Way" Giddens; but someone tipped me off about Peter Matthie-ssen's lecture last week and yesterday's by Christopher Hitch- ens. Both were excellent and important, and you would have been a fool, or doing something else, to have missed them.

Matthiessen basically confirmed something that many people have been thinking for some time now: that homo sapiens sapiens is not that sapiens at all; it has, in fact, reached an evolutionary dead end and is about to go the same way as the sabre-toothed tiger. Only at least when the sabre-toothed tiger went, it did not take half the animal kingdom down with it.

One left that lecture feeling pretty doomed, and one wondered what Christopher Hitchens could do to make us feel even more so. Hitchens - I am talking about the one from this universe, not his anti-matter evil brother, whom you can recognise by his goatee, carcinogenic right-wing opinions, and long, curly-pointed tail - has been exposing the hypocrisy of our rulers with such unfailing accuracy for some time that it is a marvel that he still has a sense of humour. Perhaps that is all that keeps him going.

Hitchens surprised us by having, as the title of his lecture, "A Few Kind Words in Closing". The idea being that while this century has been in many ways unspeakable, there are a few things about it that are worth praising. He acknowledged that he had been mollified by the fact that his name now appears - by virtue of having introduced the book - on the flyleaf of PG Wodehouse's The Mating Season, and so has nothing more to strive for.

His main hurrahs were for the triumph of civil rights movements around the world, "the rapid emergence of a single standard of human rights", and the decline in religious belief. In his words: "The root cause of all absolutism, and all totalitarianism as well as the chief justification for torpor and fatalism about such matters as slavery or exploitation, lies in the religious and worshipping impulse. Millions of people lead ethical lives without any help at all from any church. This is a cultural achievement that deserves far more celebration than it receives." Stirring stuff, although I had to have a quick peek at my own idolatrous worship of Hitchens if only to make sure that it did not lead to any absolutism or totalitarianism.

It was a cleverly delivered speech, full of modest pauses and unaccustomed- as-I-am wordbreaks. "I can almost do this from memory. I can do it from memory," he said when about to quote from Auden's poem "1968". That was a rhetorical device if ever I heard one, but so brazen as to be quite charming. Read the poem. It is worth remembering.