Good Morning, Vietnam Revisited: the real sound of the war

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/apr/11/david-hepworth-radio-preview

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Adrian Cronauer was the name of Robin Williams’s character in the 1987 film Good Morning, Vietnam. Adrian was and remains a real person. Good Morning, Vietnam Revisited (Monday, 10pm, Radio 2) is his story: how a disc jockey and radio announcer from Pittsburgh was drafted into the US army in 1965 and sent to Vietnam at the time when the forces were supposed to be there purely in an advisory capacity. No recordings remain of the shows he broadcast “from the Delta to the DMZ”. Few at the time could have guessed that anyone would ever want to remember how it felt to the soldiers stationed there.

The programme is comprised of his reminiscences (which are not quite as racy as Williams’s portrait may have suggested), contemporary newsreel illustrating America’s dawning sense of what a quagmire they had got themselves into, and lots of the kind of music you can imagine the Playmates frugging to in that memorable scene in Apocalypse Now, where they descend by helicopter to entertain the troops. In other words, cage dancing favourites such as Sam The Sham’s Wooly Bully and Roy Head’s Treat Her Right. What Cronauer remembers is that the troops’ real favourite songs were soft-centred tunes to do with leaving this hell-hole, such as Scott McKenzie’s San Francisco and Peter, Paul And Mary’s Leaving On A Jet Plane.

In The Buchan Tradition (Thursday, 11.30am, Radio 4), author Nicholas Rankin celebrates the great thriller writer John Buchan, the man who gave us The Thirty-Nine Steps, Prester John and many other leading titles of what has been called the “snobbery with violence” school of adventure writing. Some of his slang may sound somewhat archaic and his female characters like boys, but you can’t argue that the ideas of his books don’t still resound. Ask the BBC management, who were planning a dramatisation of his 1916 novel Greenmantle, which is about a German-sponsored plan to wage jihad against the British, and then quietly shelved it in the wake of the 7/7 bombings.

The best sound of the week comes from Jane Dolby and her fellow choristers in The Fishwives’ Tale (Monday, 11am, Radio 4). Every member of her group, The Fishwives Choir, has lost a husband, father, brother or son to the sea. The programme tells their stories, each of which is unique and contemporary while also carrying an echo of the agony felt by numberless generations of women who’ve waited on the shore for mariners who were never going to come back. Jane put the band together to give herself something to do in the years of grieving. They make, as you might have guessed, a truly joyful noise.

In the world of radio, the people who talk between the records are called “talent”. This implies a status that today’s industry is more likely to honour in the breach than the observance. Flicking between the MOR pop on Mid Mornings With Gary Vincent (Weekdays, 10am, Magic FM) and the MOR pop on Toby Anstis (Weekdays, 9am, Heart FM) recently, it was 20 minutes before I heard either presenter actually speak. I always thought that the thing people looked to radio for was “company”. Bette Davis is in formidable 1963 form in Frankly Speaking (Tuesday, 6.30pm, R4 Extra). A voice suggests that some of her best performances have been in poor films. “I really don’t know what you mean,” she says. There is a silence during which icicles form on the microphone.