If someone tapped you on the shoulder and asked you about propping open the "doors of perception", you'd look at them, scan their flip-flops, guess their favourite album was Bob Marley's Legend and probably make a swift exit. But things weren't always so. Taking the Edge Off (Radio 4) piggybacks on to the 60th anniversary of Aldous Huxley's classic novel The Doors of Perception to explore its legacy. It does a good job of myth-busting: we find out that the author "deplored" the "turn on, tune in, drop out" counterculture he was associated with (the Doors nicked their name from him, and Huxley's likeness appeared on the cover of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band).
Instead, he viewed his drug experiments as anthropological necessities, an attempt to peer into the beating heart of humanity and "increase clarity rather than oblivion". Reality was a damp squib compared with the fiction he created, however. We hear Huxley chatting about the pleasure drug Soma from Brave New World: if it became a reality, he foresaw its power as a "political weapon". Biographer Nicholas Murray irks the fans a bit by pointing out that "the whole drug experiment didn't work (for Huxley). He didn't see the visions he wished he had."
The programme itself is a bit like a bad trip, meandering out of Huxley's own experience into a rather generic analysis of "altered states", with some stultifying segments, such as delving into a typical 19th-century medicine cabinet, for one. There's also the problem of the programme lumping coffee and endorphins with Huxley's beloved mescaline. It's a shame because there are some interesting threads about AI stimulation in the future, self-medication culture and the colonisation of psychotropic plants in indigenous cultures. Too often, though, I wanted to shout: "Guys, this is a radio show – not a lecture from Open University."
Despite the title of NPR's Why We've Been Seeing More Yellowface In Recent Months, the question never really gets answered. Instead, listeners learn about a recent production of The Mikado, where an Asian-American director has rewritten Gilbert and Sullivan's Japan-based opera without the offending bits.
