Disgressed

I staggered into the bathroom as usual this morning at about ten past six and clumsily stabbed at the button on the radio. These days someone has usually retuned it to some music station (Radio Jackie? I never listen for long enough to find out) but today it had been left on good old Radio Four, where, on the Today programme, they were talking about reform of the banking system.

“now hmhm nurhh hmm nmhhhur Finney nnumrm murmmm”

Oh, they were interviewing someone called Finney – that’s Katharine’s madien name.

“mmmnhm nmmrh (By the way – this stuff is meant to represent my inattention rather than the quality of the reception or the actual sounds being made.) mmnnr mmnr Denton Wilde Sapte”

Denton Wilde Sapte? The firm of solicitors where Katharine’s brother works?

And then,  sure enough, my brother-in-law’s Edinburgh accent came through loud and clear. Well, not loud; more calm and measured, really. By now I had shaving foam over a substantial part of my chin, but I seized the radio and took it in to Katharine, who must initially have assumed that my sudden appearance meant they’d just announced the destruction of London by an opportunistic nuclear suitcase bomb, or something.

Strange to suddenly hear someone you know on the radio; it’s happened to me a couple of times with old school or university acquaintances,  and once I switched on the radio in a hotel room I’d just dumped my suitcase in, only to hear immediately a news item about a house fire in the street where my parents lived – the item so perfectly timed that in a film they would have taken the incident out or re-shot it as being too implausibly neat.

Then there was one occasion when I saw a family being interviewed on TV: they had the same surname as a colleague of mine, and the male members of the family looked so much like him they could surely only be his brothers. It was an item about Kids Who Never Leave Home; when I asked my colleague later he confirmed that it had been his family (he wasn’t there himself). They had been a little startled by the finished piece, as they had been told the item was about the medical problem suffered by his handicapped brother, which perhaps provides an insight into the general ethics and outlook of television production companies.

Radio 4’s not like that of course, though they’re not always brilliant interviewers. At least they seem to have got over the problem they had a few years ago of constsntly attempting to interview people who couldn’t really speak English. You spent half the interview listening to that nasal noise people make to show they haven’t finished speaking but have no idea what the word they’re after is. The journalists made no allowance for their standard of comprehension, either.

“So, it has been reported that the advent of the new Premier Serge Trouserin heralds a re-examination of contingencies in respect of the bruited liberalisation of the fiscal regime so lately denounced as dissimulation by sources close to the former regime. In that regard, what measures to demonstrate fidelity is the former likely to espouse?”

“Nnnnnuh. Mnnnnuh (OK, this time it represents the actual sound) Trouserein, Trouser…”

“I  mean, the circumstances inherently lend themselves to tergiversation at this point, or would you characterise that as a tendentious generalisation?”

“Nnnng. Nmnurnnn. Trouserin… nngnn Trouserin good…”

Robert’s interview seemed to go pretty well.