D-Day: A Family Affair; Simon Evans Goes to Market – review
|
Version 0 of 1. D-Day: A Family Affair R4 | iPlayer Simon Evans Goes to Market R4 | iPlayer The BBC has made a fuss this week about the D-day landings, and quite right too, given that the Beeb can't help but get excited about an anniversary with a zero on the end and most of the D-dayers won't be alive in a decade. Thus, on Friday, Radio 2 had Chris Evans broadcasting from Arromanche, Jeremy Vine (who has a longstanding connection with the armed forces) doing his show from HMS Belfast, and a D-day special version of Friday Night Is Music Night. And on Radio 4, Paddy O'Connell presented a charming programme, D-Day: A Family Affair, about 47 Royal Marine Commando, who, on 6 June 1944, were dumped into the sea under a hail of bullets and sent round the back of Port-en-Bessin to capture the town from the rear. One of the 47 Royal Commando was O'Connell's dad, though there wasn't much mention of him, as he died when O'Connell was 11. Instead, we heard from the sprightly 47-ers who were very much alive, singing loudly in a pub called the Harbour Bar, taking the mick out of each other. "It's very important to come over here. We can have a bit of banter... with that fat one there." O'Connell has been travelling with the remaining troops back to Normandy for several years, recording them all the time; some of the liveliest veterans in this programme are no longer with us. I very much liked Arthur, who took pictures with a camera he had found in an enemy bunker. He talked to O'Connell in the week that one of his comrades-in-arms was buried. Arthur wasn't too downcast. "I was sad at the funeral," he said. "But you can't do nowt about it. And if you can't do nowt about it, don't go worrying about it." O'Connell's excellent interviewing technique brought out some lovely answers. (He asked people to describe stuff – the sea, the noise, what they see now – and was never anything other than sympathetic and attentive.) But he was searching for something more than memories. He was wondering, really, what this regular remembering was for, how much it helps people when they return to a place where one of their life's greatest tragedies took place. "We have a bit of a laugh, a bit of a drink... There you are, that's life," said Arthur, an unsentimental romantic, a pragmatic poet. It is possible to take life extremely seriously while laughing about it, of course. Another man who does that very thing is comedian Simon Evans. I met Evans many years ago, when I was writing a column for Time Out. The column was about all the myriad ways you could spend your time in London, and I ended up in several odd situations. One of these was an erotic writers' convention, where I came across a very funny man, who seemed out of place among the earnestly kinky ladies wrapped in black PVC. That man was Evans and after that, I kept bumping into him – once at an acting improv class, I recall – until I bumped into him at a comedy club and thought, "Of course!" It took Evans a long time to find his vocation, and one of the things I like about his humour is the way it doesn't quite fit the comedy norm. He's not particularly leftwing, he has no time for cool posturing and he likes to know about stuff. So he has made a comedy series about money. "If nothing else, you'll start to understand why you're broke," he pointed out in this week's episode, which was about oil. We learned many interesting things – actually I learned more about oil in this half-hour than in two decades of diligent Newsnight watching – and Evans laced proceedings with his clever jokes, some scripted, some off the cuff. He illuminates a subject as he riffs about it, takes it seriously and gets the laughs. He made me think about plastic dinosaurs in a way I never have before. The audience loved it. Me too. |