5 Live Sports Extra
Radio 5 Live
A minute-ten to go at the Super Bowl and 5 Live Sports Extra were still hoping the Indianapolis Colts might pull it back from the brink (7 February, 9pm). Or possibly it was more that they couldn't stop repeating the name of the Colts' most famous quarterback, Peyton Manning - the name just kept slipping out, so pleasingly preppy, so like the name of the daughter of a bunch of Wasps going way back, and out it kept coming, in a helpless incantation. "Can Peyton Manning do it? Peyton Manning taking a pass - has he footballed it? . . . Here's your only prayer, Peyton. I'd kick it deep and try to hold them."
Oh yeah, it was all pretty as per, even if the underdogs won with seconds to go. It was still the boring old Super Bowl - so boring that the commentators are explicitly on Facebook the whole time ("Vickie Kay Baker says wow") and never manage for a moment to sound Jonathan Pearce-ishly engaged, not even when announcing the New Orleans Saints' unexpected victory. "What an incredible game of American football. We say it every year, but what a fairy tale it's been. You've seen it all. So much human drama. And so he trudges off the field. Peyton Manning just couldn't get it done . . ."
On Radio 4, an atmosphere of panic overwhelmed a documentary about the low stocks of all sorts of important shit (Out of This World,
11 February, 9pm). Carbon is scarce. Silver is scarce. Aluminium, magnesium, phosphorus, radium, fibre optics, matches, MRI scanners, knives and forks, you name it. A Swede from Yale was worried about copper. Tin is a goner, too, and those other metals that just went along for the ride, like zinc, we must forget about immediately. Another scientist stood on a roundabout in Birmingham melancholically pointing out the platinum-containing road dust from catalytic converters and claimed that if you swept three kilometres of motorway every day for a year you might possibly gather enough to make one slim wedding band.
After a while, the all-round absence of spicy magazines and dog tracks began to get to your reviewer, the implied vision of a future in which each of us sits quietly on our own army cot, with our one regulation knapsack, table and folding chair. Certain words and phrases began to merge, certain rights and wrongs, certain boundaries that must be firmly peed round to get established, the sense of things getting away from us in general, ". . . friendly bacteria . . . hoover uranium out of mining debris . . . Beijing has all the plasma screens . . ." The big news is that we can always lean on other planets. But first, the sums need to be done. ("We intend to work on them in the next year or so.")
A Radio 1Xtra documentary about the toughie that is the long-distance relationship (Going the Distance, 10 February, 4pm) was well timed, as it's precisely now, after one term of protestations and railcards and a Christmas spent hanging up the phone in the family kitchen (university makes you argumentative, without the capacity yet to follow the argument), that all first-year students are dumping their school-era boyfriends and girlfriends. As usual, the show's psychotherapists were genius: "Long distance often involves a lot of effort . . . plenty of ways to keep in touch, like Skype." And the killer: "Yes, infidelity is tempting."
