Freud: not such a moody bastard
The Radio 4 tribute to Clement Freud showed that the BBC at least still does good radio.
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It’s very fashionable to slag off BBC television these days.
Apart from the odd documentary on sharks on a May Bank Holiday, some BBC 4 documentary in the middle of the night about Nazis, Michael Palin going round the world in some ever-increasingly tortuous theme, or the brilliant repeats of Diagnosis: Murder with the similarly affable Dick Van Dyke, the BBC is, by consensus, regarded as a waste of space.
But detractors and adherents of the BBC agree on one thing. While BBC television is a mess, pointlessly trying to compete with the commercial channels with shows such as ‘I’m Skating On Ice And A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here And I’m A Chef’, it’s easy to forget just how good the BBC is at radio. Radio 4 is a literally outstanding example.
Consider Paul Merton’s homage to Clement Freud on Tuesday’s Radio 4 show Clement Freud on Just a Minute: A Celebration (1). For those not in the know, Just A Minute has been a gameshow on Radio 4 since 1967, in which panellists are asked to talk about a certain subject ‘without repetition, hesitation or deviation’. And Clement Freud, who died in April, was always the star of the show.
Freud (yes, relation: he’s a grandson of that man) was known chiefly to be a lugubrious, dour kind of person, who drank champagne for breakfast, advertised dog food, became a Liberal MP, argued with his artist brother Lucian, liked betting on horses, and is now generally remembered as a bit of an miserable old bugger with mournful polymath eyes.
But Paul Merton reminded us of a different side to Freud. We were reminded of just how eager he was for success, and beneath the carefully constructed dour demeanour there lay a sensitive soul who used humour as a means of dealing with the world. Hearing re-runs of Freud on Just a Minute makes one realise just how much his worldview owed to his grand-pa-pa, Siggy.
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