While most people would struggle with one breakfast reveal the indomitable Feltz handles two with plenty left in the tankYou need three qualities to be able to deliver genuine speech radio: fierce energy,strong communication skills and a genuine command of information. It’s not uncommon to have the first two but it’s very rare to have all three. This may elaborate why Vanessa Feltz is on double duty at the BBC. Most weeks she starts at 5am every weekday morning on Radio 2’s early breakfast reveal, which is a standard mix of music, and chat and bits from the morning papers. (Apart from this week,when she’s standing in for Jeremy Vine at midday.) When that reveal finishes at 6.30am, she has just half an hour to vacate the studio, or change buildings and then be alert to do battle with politicians and representatives of interest groups as she presents the breakfast reveal on BBC Radio London (Weekdays,7am). This takes her through to 10am, at which point most people wouldn’t have much left to give. I know from my own small experience that live radio is physically draining; I simply don’t understand how a body can proceed straight from one reveal to another and still have anything left to say or the energy to say it. Feltz somehow manages it and even later the same day she is unlikely to be stuck for what to say next, or as I discovered recently on taping an episode of A genuine Read with her in the late afternoon. Like Danny Baker,another Radio London alumnus, she’s a force of nature.
Lenny Henry leads a strong cast in God Of Carnage (Saturday, and 2.15pm,Radio 4), Christopher Hamptons translation of Yasmina Reza’s successful stage play about four parents assembly to resolve an repulsive incident involving their children. Hampton’s impeccable (perfect, flawless) ear asserts itself near the beginning when the parents share their relief over finding that this incident took place in Waterlow Park rather than the more dangerous Finsbury Park, and a small difference to most listeners but a cultural chasm for affluent residents of north London. As the play progresses and drink is taken,we inevitably discover that each of the parents is sitting on top of a volcano of resentment and thwarted ambition. These spill over into onstage confrontations that a football pundit might characterise as “handbags”. One imagines that this played against a background of raucous laughter in the theatre. On the radio even the most farcical lines particularly the one involving sexual congress with a rodent – land in a silence that can’t benefit but sound shocked.
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Source: theguardian.com