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Tanning Tales and Arthur in the Underworld on BBC Radio 4

You know when you've been Tango'd.

By Antonia Quirke

Tanning Tales; Arthur in the Underworld

BBC Radio 4

“I’m rubbing extraordinary butter into my kneecaps,” preens the presenter Kit Hesketh- Harvey, preparing his body for a spray tan. “I’m exfoliating. Yes, listeners, I am trimming.” Tanning Tales, a documentary about the immense UK tanning industry (1 July, 11am), burlesqued the subject enough for even the conveyor belt of the usual gender studies professors to laugh it up. One confessed that a daughter had chosen a university purely on the basis of how tanned the other students had looked on open day. I think she ended up in Nottingham. A landlord despaired over the state of his mattresses: “We thought it was from bodily fluids . . . but then we realised the orangey colour followed more or less a body shape.”

Any bounce that the programme had was slaughtered by Hesketh-Harvey – formerly of Kit and the Widow – who suffers from the same compulsion as Nicholas Parsons to peddle that unctuously camp tone that Radio 4 doggedly believes is humorous and stylish but comes over as the default setting of a peppery tyrant hauling a freight of indescribable mocking and violence. The “charming” this, the “wonderful” that. “How gorgeous!” “How terribly glamorous!” “Oh, you are splendid, you adorable redhead.”

Other standard male tones celebrated on the station include the “rapturous murmur” to which even David Attenborough has been known to resort. But it can be compelling. The writer Horatio Clare, in Arthur in the Underworld (4 July, 11.30am), a spooky and meaningful documentary about the great author of the supernatural Arthur Machen, travelled to Wales to see if he could spy an elf or a sprite in a forest. “Unfocus your eyes,” recommended Machen grimly, when committing to search for such surely malign but alluring creatures. (“You do just want the ground to open up and something to come out from underneath.”)

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Squatting in the unnatural conifer gloom, Clare confessed to having fallen into a mass grave for sheep when he was a child lost in a forest like this. Speaking in the dreamy rat-tat-tat of someone perpetually tottering on the edge of a properly crazed monologue, he was suddenly distracted by the call of a nightjar hunting for beetles and off Clare went again, his chatter unstoppable, low and melodious, like a sports car purling madly into the unknown.

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