Radio, Television, and That Man Again

 Ever since I broke with Radio 4 and made Radio 3 my default network, with all my radios tuned to it, I have of course been a happier, healthier, wiser and saner man. Although Radio 3 has its faults – it is, after all, a branch of the BBC – it offers a musical menu that is rarely unlistenable and in its totality includes the greatest, most beautiful and soul-enriching music ever written. However, speaking as a semi-insomniac – one who has no trouble falling asleep but often finds it hard to stay that way in the small hours, and resorts to low-volume radio as a soporific – I find the musical menu on offer during those difficult hours thoroughly unsatisfactory. Whenever I turn to Radio 3 for something quiet and calming, I find that there is nothing on offer but thumping, bombastic orchestral music, symphony after symphony, concerto after concerto, with little or nothing in the way of chamber music – and, what's worse, it's mostly live, so if I have managed to nod off despite everything, I'm liable to be jolted awake by a burst of applause. This goes on right through to 6.30, when Petroc Trelawny comes on with a  more varied and altogether less jolting musical menu. I've no idea why 3 fills the small hours with all those orchestral fireworks, just when 'relaxing classics' (as Classic FM likes to call its own output) are what is called for. What's worse, when in small-hours desperation I turn to Classic FM, I usually find that even they are playing the same sort of stuff as 3. Why do both networks do this? Are they going for the Antipodean audience? I wish there was a night-time radio station playing only chamber music, with maybe a bit of soothing choral stuff – I'd be tuning in to that. 
  From radio to television (I don't suppose I'l be writing again about either any time soon) – I was astonished to discover recently that the massively 'transgressive' comedy Little Britain is available for all to see on one of the outlying digital channels. David Walliams and Matt Lucas's show got into a fair bit of trouble when it first went out (2003-6), but in these woke times there is not the slightest chance it would ever get made. With sketches revolving around a revolting, supposedly disabled man who is actually faking it, two unmistakably male men who insist on behaving like and being treated as 'ladies', and the extravagantly caricatured young homosexualist, Daffyd, who insists, in the teeth of all the evidence, that he's 'the only gay in the village', I think it's safe to say that Little Britain would be shot down in flames and Walliams and Lucas barred from polite society, at the very least. Anyway – to my point: the village in which Daffyd believes himself to be 'the only gay' is called Llanddewi-Brefi, and at first I assumed this was an invented name. Later I discovered that it is a real village in west Wales (Cardiganshire), and one of some historical importance, as the site of the sixth-century Synod of Brefi, a gathering of Welsh saints and bishops (in those days practically every bishop was a saint), and the scene of various miracles performed by, among others, St David (Dewi), the patron saint of Wales. On one occasion during the synod, the ground mysteriously rose up under David while he was preaching, allowing him to be seen and heard by the whole of the large crowd that had gathered around him. This miracle is recalled in a poem by R.S. Thomas – yes, it's that man again...

Llanddewi-Brefi

One day this summer I will go to Llanddewi,
And buy a cottage and stand at the door
In the long evenings, watching the moor
Where the sheep pasture and the shadows fall
Thick as swathes under the sun's blade.
And there I will see somewhere beyond the wall
Of the old church the moles lifting the ground,
And think of the saint's cunning and how he stood
Preaching to the people from his secret mound,
A head's breadth above them, and they silent around.