Start Radio 4 listeners’ clubs

credit: martin McCready/blairhillmedia

I love my Mum. And my Mum loves Radio Four. My Mum is an 82-year-old ex-district midwife, still living in Coatbridge, the Lanarkshire post-iron-works town of her birth. Domestically, she can still get from room to room, but she’s immobile in public. So she mostly sits at her dining room table, in the hours when visitors or relatives aren’t there, and she listens to Radio Four all day – from the mid-morning features as she wakes, to the poetry as she falls asleep.

Whenever I come to see my Mum, she has a scribbled list of names and topics that she’s garnered from the previous days’ listening – anything from Putin’s long-term strategy in the Arctic, to moving obituaries of scientists she’s never heard of before, to writers or poets whose words have moved her, to politicians whose mendacity and evasiveness infuriates her.

It’s an amazing hour or two with her. There is only one problem: she can find no-one in her own community to talk to about all this – all the teeming, challenging world that comes to her dining table through Radio Four. The pain from her osteoporosis often leaves her beside herself, broken and silent. But one way to bring her back to herself (and us) is informed conversation.

I would go as far to say that Radio 4 is contributing a significant element to my mother’s staying alive. But we can’t be there to hear her all the time. In the light of a story like this, and I can’t imagine that it’s so rare, could the BBC think about creating “listeners clubs” for avid, passionate listeners like my Mum – and not just in leafy Surbiton suburbs, but in towns like Coatbridge too. Those clubs should particularly target that soon-to-be-a-majority of those who are elderly, bear some debilitating infirmities, but have minds still ready for a challenge.

There should obviously be some integration with social services and elderly care provision around this, after all it’s those services who will be able to gauge the level of need out there. In light of the Tories recently dumping the payment for pensioners’ license fees on the BBC, this may seem like a perverse demand.

But let’s bracket out the political context and think about my proposal on its own merits: in my experience the BBC at its best – and for all its faults we can identify Radio Four as that – “informs, enlightens and entertains” those for whom listening and watching is their primary connection to a bustling world they used to physically and socially know.

Can the intellectual, emotional even spiritual capital that this generates also be turned into social capital? Public pretexts for those in the 3rd and 4th Age to meet with each other; to meet programme makers; explore their enthusiasms; generate health-giving wellbeing?

So, what would “Radio 4 Listeners’ Clubs” be like?

Pat Kane (@theplayethic) is a one half of the band Hue and Cry, an author and activist