The Stage

Radio review - Light programme

Published Tuesday 2 March 2010 at 11:00 by Derek Smith

You wouldn’t call Todd Rundgren a household name, but he’s certainly been around long enough for his moniker to ring a bell with a fair few generations of serious music lovers. The kind of performer who tended to be described as a ‘musician’s musician’, the Philadelphia-born artist has always had more than one string to his creative bow.

In this detailed hour, another in Radio 2’s The Producers series, it was his undoubted talents in the sound studio which came in for scrutiny, Rundgren having worked with everyone from Japanese techno-pop outfits to Californian punk bands over a career spanning 40 years.

A self-confessed Anglophile when it came to early musical tastes, he has always been interested in the technical intricacies of producing records, balancing his work around the mixing desk with a successful career as a musician in his own right. He’s also acted as a pretty shrewd kind of talent scout, helping to mould embryonic, rough-edged bands into successful acts. Like the always fabulously bizarre Sparks, for example, whose path he first crossed when they were known as Half Nelson. Tom Robinson, of TRB fame, also pays thanks to him for saving “his wreckage of a band” and producing a very credible second album in difficult circumstances. Andy Partridge, lead singer of post-punk outfit XTC, is a little less kind. “He has the people skills of a Dalek,” he says. But, as a producer, he admits the man was right on the buttons.

With Rundgren, early influences continue to resonate, as they clearly still do with many of today’s Bollywood music stars. Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire may have opened the commercial floodgates to the potential of Bollywood, but it was in essence an amalgam of creative components that have been around for decades. In the first of this four-part series on Bollywood Britain, it was the so-called golden age - from the forties to the sixties - which presenter Nikki Bedi delved into.

What was evident here was the very personal passion each contributor holds for the Asian art form, films such as Mother India, made in colour in 1957, still having a special place for many older British Asians. Over the 30 minutes there’s thankfully no pretence that Bollywood output, past and present, is high art. What they are now and have always been, state composers, directors and ‘playback singers’, are cinematic vehicles of unapologetic escapism, not least for expat Asians in various parts of the UK. If you were an Asian living in Wolverhampton in the fifties, says one contributor, you needed all the escapism you could get. “Can the vision of the golden age be matched in the years to come,” asks Bedi. The next few episodes may hold the answer. What Bollywood won’t lose is its British fan base, as passionate and enthusiastic as they come.

As have been the dedicated audiences which ballet has attracted down the decades. Proving that radio programmes on the subject can translate that passion was Radio 4’s The Ballet Russes in England, an undemanding and wry look at the famous Diaghilev company which made Britain its favoured, adopted country. Given that Jane Pritchard, curator of dance at the Victoria and Albert Museum, tells the unlikely story of a Russian troupe decamping to the Coliseum around the end of the First World War, the whole exercise is in safe, knowledgeable hands.

During the 30 minutes, gritty facts are thrown in, along with the chronological detail of Diaghilev’s rise to notoriety - such as the time when the ensemble was stranded wartime in neutral Spain, when it was forced to sell off its costumes to pay for food. Cue a very welcome benefactor in the form of Oswald Stoll (co-founder of the Stoll Moss Group) who offered a residency at the London Coliseum, then being used as a music hall. That his dancers had to perform on the same bills as clowns and performing pooches appalled Diaghilev, who was clearly a bit of a cultural snob and prone to giving British artists Russian names to maintain the highbrow foreign image that London audiences demanded. Including one Hilda from Essex apparently. A nice story, told with humour and little pretension.

Comedians seem rarely willing to share the limelight, much less any good gags. Not so Sarah Millican, who appears quite happy to front, but not dominate proceedings in her Thursday night Support Group series on Radio 4. Playing Sarah, a life counsellor and modern-day agony aunt, she tackles such thorny personal issues as, ‘My mother is behaving like a teenager - she’s 50 not 15!’. As good as she is in episode two, it’s Simon Daye who steals the show, perfect as Terry, a character who makes white van men sound like a highly erudite species. It’s not laugh out loud, but plenty of titters were indeed had - and a note made about tuning in for next week’s no doubt doleful dollop of personal woes.

PROGRAMMES

The Record Producers: Todd Rundgren - Radio 2, Saturday, February 27

Bollywood Britain: Those Golden Years - Radio 2, Tuesday, February 23

The Ballet Russes in England: What did Britain do for Diaghilev? - Radio 4, Tuesday February 23

Sarah Millican’s Support Group - Radio 4, Thursday, February 25