I love the BBC!! no, really I do!

A Letter to 'Feedback' at BBC radio 4.

I wish to complain about the damage being done to my portable wireless set by “Something Understood” (Radio 4 Sunday night and morning). A few minutes into the program and the speaker exudes a syrupy, viscous fluid that seeps onto my bedside table and into the drawer below. If I don’t turn it off quickly enough, I can feel my brain dissolving in oily soup of platitudes. (I should add that I don’t actually have a bedside table, as such. I am speaking here more metaphorically than accurately, in keeping perhaps with the nature of the program I am complaining about. If I had a bedside table, the drawer would contain pills, indigestion tablets, various half used tubes of stuff, ball-point pens that don’t work, a pair of nail scissors that don’t cut very well, an old crepe bandage, various rubber bands, dead batteries and some foot powder. All this and other oddments would be coagulated, cemented, stuck together, fused into a filthy mess by the oozing wireless set.)

Mark Tylly is surely an admirable presenter, and for all I know, a pillar of his community, lover of animals and a member of his Neighborhood Watch Committee, but his unctuous voice and portentous delivery is not doing my radio any good at all; nor is the ‘significant’ music and poetry. How does the producer manage to find so much sugary ‘sacred’ stuff each week? Perhaps the title of the program should be “Something Misunderstood”, as the rambling search for some spiritual meaning never manages to find one. Mark Tully has something of the poet’s voice combined with that of a vicar. (Do you ever wonder how Christ’s Vicars acquire that kind of sound? You know the one I mean; it combines a smug, singsong righteousness with an holy dying- fall. Do they attend special elocution lessons at their seminaries? If so, where to poets go to learn their weird delivery? Why did dear old Roger McGough, ‘Poetry Please’, develop that peculiar paused and breathy speech-form? Does he think it makes the poetry more significant, more spiritual? Does he talk like that all the time, even in bed or at breakfast? He sounds as though he is talking to a group of four year olds.)

I am sending a sample of the fluid local laboratory for analysis, in the hope that I might have discovered a useful new kind of anesthetic.

Pip, pip, The Leg.