diary and embraced green spaces (my rain-sodden July garden). As for my new skill (revived from schooldays), it is singing Il était une bergère at the top of my voice. This radio therapy continued by replicating Dr Mosley’s advice in Book of the Week – Richard Mabey’s Nature Cure, his memoir about how he vanquished a severe bout of depression by reflecting, inspired by a fledgling swift, on the natural scene once more. Good advice has been much needed in lockdown, even if radio stations seemed over-keen on labelling our justifiable mood dip as ‘mental-health issues’. Even sensible Virginia Ironside acknowledged in The Oldie that a lot of us are ‘in a dreadful state just now’. I commend Horatio Clare’s excellent memoir Heavy Light, extracted in The Oldie, in which he is sectioned in a Wakefield asylum with mania and psychosis – escaping not with pills, but by reconnecting with the outdoors: ‘All my life, I have watched birds and stared at views. Did I not realise how rich and necessary that was – did I forget?’ The podcast now dominates audio coverage in papers and weeklies. When someone lately referred to ‘the doyenne of indie podcasting, Helen Zaltzman’, I was sceptical. How can podcasting have so quickly acquired a doyenne? But in fact, Helen, sister of Andy of The News Quiz, won a Sony Award for podcasting long ago, in 2010. The British Podcast Awards this year gave the top prize to Vent Documentaries, featuring presenters aged between 16 and 20. With podcasts, I steer clear of anything foodie, such as Jay Rayner’s Out to Lunch, disgustingly subtitled ‘Where famous people learn to talk with their mouth full’. The most successful are the ones that most resemble professional broadcasting, being articulate, informative and structured. Private Eye’s Page 94 arrives monthly, underscoring one’s mounting rage at cronyism and corruption in high places. And Something Rhymes with Purple, Gyles Brandreth’s weekly podcast with Susie Dent, is a vastly enjoyable ramble through the lexicon: about words, their meanings and etymology. It has anecdotes and anachronisms and anagrams. It won the award for Best Entertainment Podcast 2020 and I suspect our readers, keen players of jeux d’esprit, are among its millions of subscribers. Greg James is having fun with Rewinder, a Saturday-morning plunge into the BBC archives. Recently, he 64 The Oldie August 2021
played some truly haunting old London street cries by lavender-sellers. He also sang the praises of the late Carrie Fisher, who ‘never responded to an interviewer with a banality’. The example he played was from Hard News on TV: ‘You married Paul Simon.’ ‘Did I? Oh my god.’ ‘And Bryan Lourd. Why didn’t that one work?’ ‘Well, he’s gay. He forgot to mention it.’ From the new-look I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, check out the brilliant Rachel Parris singing My Old Man’s a Dustman to the tune of The Power of Love (staggering), and Miles Jupp’s response to ‘I shop at Waitrose because’ … ‘I might bump into my pool-cleaner in Tesco.’
TELEVISION ROGER LEWIS Growing up on a farm, I learned to detest the outdoors as a place of pain and boredom. That boiling summer of 1976, when there was no water and lavatories were not to be flushed – I was heaving hay bales about; then corn stooks. This was Glamorganshire, but it was like southern Italy. The weather was always against you, with droughts ensuring nothing grew or non-stop rain meaning wheat and barley rotted in the fields. Lambing invariably took place in mud and drizzle. Stock had to be counted daily, wormed, sheared and selected for the slaughterhouse. The sheep were always escaping and had to be rounded up – a job taking hours. Cattle broke through fences and destroyed gardens, trampling wishing wells. Gates were left open by ramblers,
Top rural gear: Jeremy Clarkson in Clarkson’s Farm
and we’d sit in the Land Rover with shotguns ready to shoot any dog that ‘worried’ pregnant ewes. It was a soul-destroying life, I felt, and monotonous. In adult life, I’ve only ever wanted to be somewhere hemmed in with nice restaurants, theatres, libraries, opera houses and other signs of civilisation. Nevertheless, such can be the call of the wild that Jeremy Clarkson, who already happened to own a thousand acres of the Cotswolds, decided in 2019 to take over from his manager and have a go at actual farming himself, ploughing and being bucolic. The result, in the eight episodes of Clarkson’s Farm, is delightfulness, beautifully filmed. On the one hand, Clarkson fully discovers for himself the ghastly thanklessness of an agricultural existence – the sheep less keen on staying in their fields than POWs content to stay put in Colditz; the baffling extent of government red tape; the vagaries of the Oxfordshire climate. But, on the other hand, he can smile with genuine joy when he sees an owl. Such is the personality the burly, rumpled Clarkson projects – irritable, bashful, oddly lovable – he seemed to me to be turning frame by frame into Stephen Fry, and the documentary soon became a brilliantly assembled unselfconscious comedy drama. His sidekick, Kaleb Cooper, a young man so happy driving a tractor he has never felt the need to travel further in his life than Chipping Norton, was as funny as Kurtan Mucklowe in This Country – another, similar masterpiece about empty meadows and traffic chaos at the village fête. I had high hopes for GB News, if it was to make a stand against wokery. But it was Acorn Antiques, with inadvertent freeze frames, failing microphones and presenters mumbling incomprehensibly in provincial accents: ‘Rowena? From Kuwait? Hello? Hello?’ The set, a blacked-out basement room, had the glamour of a garage, and I expected Mrs Overall to be in the background Hoovering and for Cousin Jerez to materialise from Spain (‘Planes are very quick these days’). Most peculiar was the way Andrew Neil, a man not slow to tell people to think on and look sharp, immediately went ‘on leave’ – unless that was code for the way he simply ran out of stomach lining and is in intensive care. But I was reminded of the character in the soap who went out for a spanner and was never heard from again. When I look at other people, I never understand why they choose to live together. Solitude is surely the most
