Just close your eyes, and listen
Charlotte Higgins
Forget visual gratification. From the Reith lectures to Radiotopia to Serial, behold the resurgence of sound
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Sun 14 Dec 2014 12.47 EST Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017 22.12 EST
Radio radio. 'The most important thing about this year's Reith lectures is that they are perfect for their form. Why would you want to see it on television?' Photograph: Jonathan Araldi/Getty Images/EyeEm
It's not every day that a radio show makes you tear up, stop everything else, stand still, curse the delivery man who is ringing your doorbell. It is certainly not the kind of reaction that one might normally associate with the Reith lectures, which is traditionally, if unfairly, regarded as the wholemeal bread of the Radio 4 calendar – worthy, healthful but just not terribly enjoyable (at least until Grayson Perry sashayed along to cheer them up last year). This year's lectures, which conclude on Tuesday, have been quite something.
The speaker is Atul Gawande, the American surgeon, author, and New Yorker essayist. He has many and weighty theses to convey about the medicalisation of death, the importance of systems in healthcare, and the reasons doctors, on occasion, fail.
However, what has made these lectures so compelling is not just Gawande's broad intellectual compass (he studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford and worked for Bill Clinton before training as a surgeon) but his gift for storytelling. Each of his lectures so far has shimmered with narrative delight. The story that made me tear up was of the cancer of his daughter's piano teacher – which served painfully to illuminate questions about what we do when life is drawing to its close. Must a life be extended to its maximum at all costs? Can other priorities be voiced, discussed, accommodated? In a previous lecture he told the arresting tale of a young girl who, one winter's day, had slipped into a lake and been trapped under the ice for 30 minutes – by way of illustrating the apparently not very gripping subject of systems and checklists in healthcare.
Atul Gawande, the American surgeon, author, and New Yorker essayist, gave this year's Reith lectures. Photograph: Tim Llewellyn
This is the skill of the public intellectual. In Britain figures such as Mary Beard, Neil MacGregor (surely Reith lecturers in waiting) and Onora O'Neill (who has already given them) are scarce. Perhaps such individuals – those who combine deep scholarship, a lively intellect and an ability to communicate vividly beyond the academy – are indeed rarer now than they were in previous generations. We live in a world where academic research has fragmented into ever more minute specialisation and where mass-marketised higher education means teaching has become, too often, a matter of processing students through examinations. Freewheeling intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell, Eric Hobsbawm, Richard Hoggart and EP Thompson seem now like figures from a distant age.
Meanwhile, events such as the Reith lectures are an exception rather than a rule for the BBC. The notion of the single great mind, given the space to communicate authoritatively on a subject, has fallen from favour. When I was researching the BBC for a Guardian project this year, I spoke to David Attenborough about how, when he was controller of BBC2, he had commissioned Kenneth Clark's Civilisation. It was easy, he told me. He just felt it would be a good idea. Broadcasting, he said, "should be the cream of thinkers in society who have been given by the BBC a platform on which they may speak. But the BBC doesn't believe that now."
And yet there is no shortage of public appetite for ideas, the spoken word, for the conveying and exchange of fresh thought. The rise and rise of the literary festival, and the success of events such as the London Review of Books winter lectures, bear testimony to this hunger to hear "the cream of thinkers in society". Gawande's skill as a storyteller reminds me, too, of another powerful listening experience. I am talking about Serial, the podcast made by This American Life, the radio show that has ushered in a new wave of imaginative, serious American radio broadcasting and podcasting. Serial has been a hit in the US, a cult listen in the UK, and is currently airing nightly on Radio 4 Extra (if you're new to it, do go online and start from the beginning). Serial is an investigation, by journalist Sarah Koenig, into a 15-year-old murder case. It combines the careful pacing and tension of a thriller with the best kind of dogged reporting skills. Koenig brings us intimately into her world, shares with us her thought processes and anxieties, takes us through the patient work of checking and crosschecking sources, shares her reactions to those whom she interviews. It is completely addictive. It is the kind of programme that, downloaded and played on the move, banishes the surrounding world – the crowded bus, the tedious waiting room.
Serial podcast presenter Sarah Koenig. Photograph: Meredith Heuer
A second season, its makers have just announced, has been successfully funded through sponsorship and donations from listeners. Serial is the standout example, but there are many other American podcasts pushing the limits of the form, harnessing imaginative means of storytelling and finding that its online audiences will fund them to grow. Radiotopia, for example, is an American collective of story-led podcasts, including the engaging design and architecture show 99% Invisible. Radiotopia has crowdfunded $620,000 – outstripping its $250,000 target – to support the work of members. The rise of digital media, far from quashing sound and the spoken word, is ushering in a creative age of distinctive, imaginative audio that is finding a loyal and growing audience.
The most important thing about Serial and this year's Reith lectures is that they are perfect for their form. Why would you want to see the Reith lectures on television? The only way we can visualise the little girl trapped under the ice, her discovery, the ambulance, the CPR by the water's edge, the theatre, the surgeon's cut through her chest, is through the imagination. Serial, likewise, would make dreadful TV (and be vastly more expensive to make). There would be a lot of Koenig's calling up a prison inmate on the telephone and playing tapes of 15-year-old police interviews. Serial is the ideal audio tale because it is a story of truth, lies and memory. Our mind's eye can summon up the school library, the park, the high-school homecoming, the domestic life of the dramatis personae. Pinning down these impressions, these inwardly assembled imaginative scenes, into a visual medium (through filmed reconstructions or animation, say) would be to serve Koenig's story ill. The whole point is that these mental images are fuzzy, provisional, apt to dissolve when the next account of an event is given. Serial's only necessary screen is the mind.
We live in an era of visual gratification, where Google can summon up any image, where YouTube slakes every appetite of the eye. But Gawande's Reith lectures and Serial remind us of the power of the spoken word, the story, the sound. I recollect something that the broadcaster and sound recordist Ludwig Koch said to introduce one of programmes for BBC radio in the 1950s. He was talking about our attentiveness to the sounds around us rather than speech, but it still serves as a useful injunction. "Throughout the ages, the eye of mankind has always been kept in training … but sound has never been preserved for us. I notice that very few people really listen, either to the radio or natural sounds … Most people still use their radio as a daily background to work or conversation. I want you to concentrate … Close your eyes. Do not fall to sleep. Simply listen."
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