The brilliant first episode of a new series of Living World (31 January, 6.35am) considered the mysteries of the pike. "Good conditions for catching pike?" asked the presenter, Lionel Kelleway, standing on the banks of the Frome in late November. "Bad . . . bad," gloomed a fisherman called Mike, "there's always something wrong."
Sitting down, the pair chucked out a line with a dead dace attached. "Can you remember the first pike you caught?" asked Lionel. "It's graphic in my mind," nodded Mike. "I was 12. Used to pick up eels by putting my thumb in its mouth and letting it get a grip and then one day I did it with a baby pike . . . the amount of blood had to be seen to be believed." This man was radio gold. Pike are lazy fish, he said. They lurk in the weeds. "It'll be tucked under the bank, just there," he said, splashing with his foot, "just like you tuck inside the doorway of a house hiding from the rent man coming down the street."
Now that's poetry. That and when he compared the pike's lower teeth to rose thorns. "I never get tired of pike," he shrugged. "My favourite's called Isaac. He spends winters up by the railway line and summer by the ditch." Just then Mike actually fell in. "The line is going out!" yelled Lionel. "We've got a pike on!" (I'm thinking right now of that scene in Jaws when the two fat guys stick the Sunday roast on a hook and go night fishing off a fatally weak pontoon.) "There it goes! Lead the fish! Lead the fish! Oh! Look at that!" They land the creature. What a mouth. Do all pike have green tongues? ("I think so. Yeah.") "Put your finger in." "No way."
Over on Radio 3, the excellent Chekhov season worried over the stage direction in the second act of The Cherry Orchard, which insists on "the sound of a breaking string, dying away slowly and sadly" (30 January, 11pm). Heads were roundly shaken. Someone even had a go at making the appropriate noise ("Hello, I'm David Coulter and I'm playing the musical saw"). But no one quite articulated that this very stage direction, written so late in the play and so late in Chekhov's life, is the very thing that shows you the movement from The Cherry Orchard to Beckett.
Meanwhile, your reviewer must confess to a bit of a freak-out. Midway through an episode of The Archers I was suddenly convinced that the actor playing Eddie Grundy had changed. I dunno, it's like his voice had reverse broken or something - as though he was suddenly rubbing his hands across adolescent pimples on his forehead and sweating under the eyes.
Cigarette plopping from mouth into my woolly mammoth burger mix, I hurried to the computer for confirmation. Is it true, I challenged a press officer - as though my soul were in tears for a bold iconoclast, as opposed to a guy who occasionally ferrets - that the real Eddie Grundy has, in effect, gone upstairs to change his snow boots only to come down as someone with an experimental goatee, tossing a softball back and forth? What is this? Home and Afuckingway? Swift came the email denial: "Trevor Harrison still plays Eddie Grundy." Mucho egg on face. (I still think he sounds really different. Don't you? Let's pool knowledge, people.)
