‘This is exemplary bel canto opera: no gimmicks, total honesty to music and drama,’ PAGE 30


RADIO Menace abroad


John Wyndham: No Place Like Earth BBC RADIO 4


A


ccording to John Wyndham, a 1960 inter- view with whom introduced the


playwright Dan Rebellato’s excellent docu- mentary (21 December), the idea for The Day of the Triffids (1951) came from walking along a country lane at dusk and thinking that the tops of the hedgerows were bristling up in a rather alarming manner. The pundits assembled to consider


Wyndham’s achievement, in such choice sci- fi novels of the immediately post-war period as The Kraken Wakes (1953) and Trouble with Lichen (1960), were anxious to stress the out- ward innocuousness of his settings, his ability to “get under the skin of post-war England” as somebody put it, by taking such stock fic- tional landscapes as the sleepy village and twisting them gradually out of shape. Here, it soon became clear, was a series of exercises in tone – a quintessentially English voice, the novelist Christopher Priest deposed, keener on oddity than fantasy and favouring menace over terror.


All this was – at any rate temporarily – to prove Wyndham’s undoing, and come the harder-edged 1970s, he tended to be written


TELEVISION All in a good cause


When Harvey Met Bob BBC2


veryone remembers the scruffy Irishman looming out of the television screen and demanding that we “send us your ****-ing money!”. Less attention has been paid to the concert promoter who turned Live Aid from a wild idea into a reality. When Harvey Met Bob (26 December), by Joe Dunlop, was an outstanding drama which filled that gap, bringing to life the tricky relationship between Bob Geldof and Harvey Goldsmith. A cheeky caption at the beginning told us that much of what was to follow had been invented “and sometimes exaggerated, but all in a good cause, of course”. If that cause was the cele- bration of a remarkable act of altruism, it did a good job.


E Domhnall Gleeson did not look much like


Geldof, but he absolutely captured the singer’s voice and mannerisms. Ian Hart, as Goldsmith, had the easier job, because few people know what the promoter looks or sounds like. Here he most resembled Alan Sugar, with the same brusque manner and unwillingness to suffer fools. And that is how Geldof must have appeared, with his crazy plan to hold two vast concerts simultaneously in Britain and America to raise funds for the Ethiopian famine. Geldof, though, had the personal qualities to make it happen. When the play opened,


off for cosy conformity. But in his heyday, no one better illustrated that vague feeling of post-war disillusionment, with its suspicion that the scientific future might not be quite as rosy as the scientists insisted, than the author of The Midwich Cuckoos (1957). The search to uncover the roots of Wyndham’s fixation with man-eating plants and alien spawn went back to Bedales School (to which the teenaged Wyndham was sent in 1918), a short story in the school magazine which derived from H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau, and a hint that his theories of “col- laborative intelligence” and admiration for strong-minded women might have been bred in this rabbit-hutch of Fabian enlighten- ment.


If Rebellato’s spirited enquiry lacked any- thing, it was a sense of Wyndham’s personality. After a 1930s literary apprenticeship on the American pulp sci-fi magazines, he spent the war years working at the Ministry of Information before joining the Royal Signals and taking part in the Normandy landings. A four-decade stay at the Quaker-run Penn


Club in Bloomsbury was relieved by his mar- riage to a fellow resident, Grace Wilson. Although childless himself, Wyndham was fascinated by children. The Midwich Cuckoos, if stripped of its sci-fi gloss (spacemen impreg- nating local women), can be read as a story about the age-old process of young people growing up and outstripping their parents. Much was made of the ambiguity of Wyndham’s response, his habit of sympathis-


ing with both sides in these human-versus- rogue nature predicaments, or sometimes withholding sympathy altogether. His cele- brated short story “Consider Her Ways” features a woman who wakes up to find herself living in a futurist matriarchy, notable for its attitude towards children. What is the point of having them, the heroine is told, if they grow up to be unintelligent consumers? Further ambiguities surfaced in an inter-


view with the only contributor who had known the subject personally. This was “Sister Bede”, who spoke from behind the latticed grille of her convent, and disclosed that Wyndham (who died in 1969) had meant to leave her money, but as a staunch atheist cancelled the bequest when he learned that she was intend- ing to take the veil. Forty years later, shares in Wyndham con- tinue to rise, and his influence can be felt in fields far beyond literature. The soundtrack, as well as harbouring triffid whiplash noises, extended to the West Coast psychedelic ensemble Jefferson Airplane’s Crown of Creation (1968), whose lyrics are borrowed from The Chrysalids (1955). Arresting as this was, it should not stop the producer, Nicola Swords, from devising a second programme about Wyndham’s fellow-worker in post-war sci-fi, “John Christopher” (Samuel Youd) author of such eco-prophesies as The Death of Grassand The World in Winter and, accord- ing to the websites, still alive at the ripe age of 88. D.J. Taylor


Evocative, funny and touching: Domhnall Gleeson as Bob Geldof in When Harvey Met Bob


he was working the phones in the office of his record company, trying to boost sales of his latest album. But after seeing the first reports of the famine on the news that night, he turned his consid- erable powers of persuasion towards a better cause. First he rallied the stars to make the Band Aid Christmas record, which raised £6 million. Then a trip to


Ethiopia convinced him he had to do more, which is where Goldsmith, the pre-eminent promoter of rock concerts, came in. Even allowing for exaggeration, Geldof must have been infuriating to work with. From the outset, he assured Goldsmith that he had secured the services of “everyone who’s on the record plus all the big players in America”. But no one had signed anything, and most hadn’t even told their managers. He promised that the whole thing would be televised by Channel 4, but no deal had been (Continued on page 30.)


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