A friend once surprised me by announcing that she was making a documentary about Henri Cartier-Bresson. I was surprised because she was a radio producer. She laughed and said discussing photography on the radio was easy. I am not so sure. British radio often labours to cover visual subjects that would quite simply be better handled by television. This is not to say radio is the inferior medium. Television, conversely, is not a natural medium for serious talk or, indeed, live music.
The Castle: a Portrait in Sound (7 December, 11am) brought to my mind's eye a very clear image of the castle in Northumberland. Dunstanburgh was like a set of jagged teeth. It stood above an outcrop of huge black stones that looked like "dinosaur droppings". As you looked north from the village of Craster, it resembled a theatrical backdrop. The producer Sarah Blunt's contributors worked hard to conjure the picture, but I wonder how effective even their descriptions would have been to anyone who does not have, as I do, a father who lives in Craster.
Blunt is entitled to say I have missed the point of her nice little programme. If the idea was to open not our eyes but our ears, it succeeded. We heard the shrill cries of the castle's kittiwakes; its yellowhammers demanding "a-little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese". The winds howled, the sea moaned, and we caught an echo of the well that descended through a hundred feet of rock to the sea. The programme, although most interested in the wildlife, also answered the question of why Thomas, Earl of Lancaster had built it a mile from Embleton, the settlement it was meant to be defending, well off the road likely to be travelled by rebellious Scots. The answer, according to the historian Katrina Porteous, was that Thomas was demonstrating his ability to offer law and order in a way the weak monarch of the day, Edward II, could not. It was a visual symbol of his power. Which made me think: we need to see the castle.
I had similar feelings about Russia's Lone Rangers (4 December, 11.30am), which, interestingly, discussed a genre I had not heard of - the "red western". Lucy Ash's programme was a more than decent explanation of how Moscow had transplanted the values of the Wild West to Siberia and the Caspian. Under Brezhnev - such a fan of Chuck Connors that he allowed The Rifleman to be shown in Russia - Soviet cinema turned the Urals into Monument Valley and the River Volga into the Rio Grande. But, again, there was something missing: this time clips from the seminal 1969 "eastern" everyone kept referring to, White Sun of the Desert. You can't do film clips on the radio, not if everyone is talking Russian.
Radio here is filling in the gaps left by television's increasingly narrow agenda. Not even BBC4 would contemplate making documentaries about such specialist subjects. Hurrah for radio then, and shame on TV. But, listening to Martin Bashir's portrait of the American shock jock Howard Stern, The Best DJ You've Never Heard in Your Life (1 December, 10.30am), I could not help but think that American broadcasters understand speech radio's real purpose today: to be live, topical, argumentative and throwaway.
Stern earns $100m (£48m) a year. He proves there is money to be made in chat. In this field, a ballsy commercial radio station in Britain would not need to fear the BBC as a competitor, as the BBC would never allow a Stern on air. In fact, neither did American radio. Having over the years been fined $7m by the Federal Communications Commission, he has sold his very loud voice to satellite radio, which is ungoverned by the FCC (and taste). Stern broadcasts the sounds of defecation, talks sex incessantly and wishes cancer upon callers. He told Bashir that saying the unsayable makes society healthier because only expressed thoughts can be analysed and challenged.
It was an illuminating half-hour. Rather than judge him by British standards of what radio is, Bashir saluted "the comprehensive nature of Howard Stern's genius".
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
