Our Lady of Paris
Radio 3
“It’s a small kind of miracle, a building reaching into the clouds taking advantage of technological innovations to express the glory of God in new ways.” Simon Russell Beale is standing outside Notre Dame – 850 years old and in the midst of anniversary celebrations – and doing one of the many things he does so unusually well: making a script sound improvised without a hint of the faux casual (23 March, 12.15pm). Behind him a wintry Seine fiercely laps against stone and tourists chunter and hustle, but SRB maintains his usual quiet focus, a skill he transports directly into conversations with experts and historians that doesn’t dissolve even when he’s splurging out things like, “Oh, they’re singing in a boat! On the Seine! How sweet!” when looking at an 11th-century painting of musicians on the water.
Later, in this tender programme about the musical history of the cathedral, he quoted from bawdy medieval songs (“find here in Paris great joy/fine jewels/and honourable ladies/and others among them of the cheaper sort . . .”) without remotely changing the tone or emphasis of his voice and yet making it perfectly clear he was quoting. How does he do this? It’s as mysterious as the way he manages to appear on programmes on Radio 3 in which he is required to talk about himself personally (Summer Selection, Essential Classics, In Tune . . . Radio 3 would fall to bits without SRB, as would BBC4) and never, not once, sounding like an asshole. You try it. It’s impossible. Yet here comes SRB: not precious, not self-regarding, not nervous about his knowledge, just noticeably, always, great.
Actors moonlighting as presenters are usually required to be either twinkly and reassuring, or cynical and mysterious. With the lone exception of SRB they helplessly give off an air of (a) being barely able to wait to tell the next dirty limerick in the lunch truck, or (b) that they are only presenting this documentary because they want their life to come across as a sequence of unlikely but successful throws on a roulette wheel. And yet here is SRB talking about single-line plain chant and “exciting new worlds of sound” like the perfect presenter: a guy on whom absolutely nothing is wasted. Not just whole programmes but whole stations happily adjust around him.
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