Open Book
Radio 4
On a particularly stilted episode of Bookclub, James Naughtie - in conversation with Douglas Coupland - kept repeating the phrase "Generation X" as though it were a strange, new locution requiring a tiny pause on either side while one arranged one's mouth for the pronunciation. But at least Bookclub - a monthly event - equals a respite from Open Book and Mariella, who just might be personally responsible for an awful lot of literary evil.
After all, the reward for writing a book is that you get a chance to go to bed, metaphorically, with Mariella. She is frequently to be heard on the air, propped up against a writer's shoulder, hand clutched to bosom, although possibly never more so than the other week in conversation with the pulchritudinous Joshua Ferris (28 February, 4pm).
Phrases such as "what was it about that particular dichotomy that compelled you?" have always been favourites with Frostrup (to be compelled by a dichotomy is Mariella's definition of an intellectual), but for Ferris her vocabulary became particularly intense - words such as committed and emotions scattering the battlefield, and her accent, already as studiedly posh as an Edwardian schoolgirl's, clambering up a few notches in the presence of Serious Totty. (Was there ever a voice more made-up than Mariella's? More selected and constructed, as one might a nose from a surgeon's book of photographs on Harley Street? And was there ever a voice more able to freeze a room? For when Mariella has no interest in her interlocutor they are left to huddle into their collars, as a netherworld chill descends on the studio.)
“Being a very thorough person," Mariella reassured Josh, "I went through a lot of your previous interviews." Her keenness to get to the nub of Josh's being was then made all the more urgent by his incredible come-on phrase: "I am writing for that reader to whom reading is a matter of life and death." Frostrup's eyes narrowed to Nancy Drew slits. Ferris's peripatetic childhood, his "wrenching from home and hearth" - surely this had affected his writing? "You'd need to be an expert in psychology to answer that," challenged Josh. Red rag to a bull! Mariella is the agony aunt in the Observer.
Really, the tension was impossible to bear. As was the subsequent interview with a man who'd taken 50 years or something to write a book but in whom Mariella clearly had no interest - "Yeah yeah, what's it about then?" was the general gist of things, the temperature dropping rapidly away as Mariella extended a traffic policewoman's hand, insisting he come no closer.
All of which was almost as gripping as Michael Ball's interview with Dolly Parton on Radio 2 (9 March, 10.30pm). "That phrase, 'I will always love you'. It's very simple, and yet very . . . profound," claimed Ball, but Dolly admitted that she couldn't really remember the moment she'd first thought of it. "Really?" cried Michael, completely stunned, as though certain that Dolly, like Sylvia Plath at the high window of her lonely flat in Primrose Hill, watching the city freeze into another unbearable Hughes-less night, had written it in blood. (Or at the very least, like McCartney with "Yesterday", she'd dreamed it.) But Dolly merely laughed, and tactfully asked for Whitney Houston's version of the song.
