For the second week running Max Clifford has treated Talk Radio as part of his personal fiefdom: first Gary Glitter's accuser, and now Jeffrey Archer's nemesis, have occupied key slots on the station. This is not a new relationship. Ex-MP Jerry Hayes's alleged gay lover, Paul Stone, and the octuplets-bearing Mandy Allwood were also Clifford clients who got to air their stuff on the station, after the Sundays had done with them. For Clifford, the radio station is a useful adjunct to the press, a mopper-up of tabloid titbits, a place where the scandal-monger speaks (exclusively).
Talk Radio promoted the inter view heavily, so that its 10 o'clock and 11 o'clock news bulletins ("Ted Francis is about to speak publicly for the first time") turned into the news-as-trail, or the trail-as-news. (The 12 o'clock bulletin, of course, also carried it, as a station- engendered story - a tactic of which Radios 4 and 5 Live are fond.)
We were promised "further revelations" about the Archer affair, but it was mere elaboration. This was not an interview in the normal sense. Derek Hatton occupied the role less of interlocutor than of patient's friend. The fact that Clifford was present in the studio and intervened meant that spin was happening before our very ears. (At one point Hatton reminded Clifford, "You're a considerate man". Yeah, and so was Rasputin.) The story here was not the Archer affair. The story was the story.
Any claims to journalistic ethics were abandoned before the interview's end, when Francis was allowed to tout at length for a publisher for his novel (clearly part of the deal with Talk Radio). Francis is not a natural raconteur. He claims he has five more books inside him. If his writing is as painfully prolix as his speech, let's hope they stay there.
Susan Sontag is the woman many of us would like to be - the beautiful, creative, engaged intellectual. Yet the first half of Viewing the Century (Radio 3) was disappointing, with too many generalities. And then suddenly it took off, as Sontag explained why she visits war zones, as roving witness of brutality rather than ghoulish tourist, and decried the loss of a sense of altruism and self- sacrifice since the 60s and early 70s.
It was striking stuff from the 5.45pm Radio 3 slot, which has hosted the consistently excellent Viewing the Century programmes, in which philosophers and writers - such as Chomsky and Seamus Heaney - have, over the past year, addressed cultural and political issues.
The Sontag programme took the form of a nicely edgy interview with Noah Richler, the ex-BBC producer whom Sontag rightly treated as an equal. Pity that the new BBC could find no place for the features output of this idiosyncratic voice, obliging him to return to his native Canada.
When I hear the words "comic fable", I begin to dread the inevitable overacting, inflated effects and selfconscious sense of ha-ha. Instead, Claire Grove gave Lesley Bruce's deliciously grotesque Vanilla (Radio 4) a splendidly restrained yet zestful production. This was the picaresque tale of a "homuncular kind of man", breastfed until his mother dies when he is 18. Thereafter he finds a succession of replacements, who make thriving livings with their mother's-milk vanilla ice-cream.
In America this is probably no fable; 5 Live went there to investigate Designer Babies, whereby infertile women and couples get to choose their sperm donor. This is a land where jargon has penetrated so deep that ordinary people use words like "age-appropriate".
Among the list of desired donor attributes one woman specified "tanning ability". Another, a postie, opted for a professor of chemistry as donor because she hated maths. The resulting offspring is good at addition but hates subtraction. The case for genetics remains unproven.
