This has happened entirely by chance, and I am sure that it the circumstances behind this phenomenon will never repeat themselves, but I find that I have two major features going out on the BBC within a week of each other.
The first was ‘A New Red World’ a literary exploration of
Martian Utopias that was commissioned as part of Radio 4’s Martian Week. It
went out on Tuesday March 7 at 11.00, which meant that I never got to hear the
broadcast for myself. In amongst a number of interesting programmes, ‘Another
Red World’ examined how Mars became the subject of intense speculation: was the
Red Planet a cypher for humanity’s past or its future? Was it a dead or dying
world – or did it offer the hope of new social and cultural orders? I found
myself enjoying the Martian worldviews of Victorian curates, French psychics,
American feminists and Russian revolutionaries. The programme ends with
meditations from James Lovelock on the uselessness of terraforming Mars and
from Kim Stanley Robinson on the colonising of Mars as a thought experiment. I
may have started the programme with the confession that I want to be buried on
Mars when I die; but it was a privilege to breathe the same planetary air as
these people. The amazing sound design for the show was by Mark Burman who also
produced my show about Forbidden Planet for Radio 3, which is still online.
To hear ‘A New Red World’, click here.
To download ‘A New Red World’ as a podcast, click
here.
The second programme is my long-anticipated Sunday Feature
on Marshall McLuhan for BBC Radio 3. ‘Watcha Doin’, Marshall McLuhan’ is
personal reflection on the life, career and theories of this important media
theorist. It was recorded and scripted over the summer and early autumn of 2016
and includes some fascinating interviews with contemporary writers and academics,
such as my old friends Tom McCarthy and Rathna Ramanathan, as well as number of
McLuhan acolytes from the 1960s. There are still some surviving members of the
‘priesthood’ of students that seemed to have followed McLuhan the Catholic
scholar around from the late 60s into the 70s and up to his death in 1980. This
seemed like a vital time to record their impressions of, and reflections on,
this remarkable mind. Most generous of all with their time and enthusiasm was
the writer Tom Wolfe – while not a member of the inner circle, he probably
brought more insight to his relationship with McLuhan than anyone else. Wolfe’s
agent had told us firmly that the celebrated author was ‘only doing one
interview in the UK and that was with Peter York for the Sunday Times.’
Fortunately my brilliant producer Dan Shepherd managed to track down Wolfe down
to his summer home in Long Island. Wolfe was gracious in the extreme – answered
all of our questions with his usual urbanity and even gave us the recipe for a
perfect Tom Collins ‘although’, he added, ‘there’s only a few barmen old enough
to know how to make is properly.’ I came to the end of the programme still
loving McLuhan for all of his flaws and prejudices: his media fame was based
upon a dense and interlocking series of misunderstandings – but then whose isn’t?
‘Watcha Doin’, Marshall McLuhan’ goes out on March 19 on
Radio 3 at 18.45. You can find the details here.
Pictured above:
KH posing with the Curiosity Mars Rover at Imperial College
London, April 2016; Mars circa 1875 by French illustrator Étienne Trouvelot; Marshall McLuhan and
Professor Frank Kermode on BBC TV’s Monitor in January 24 1965; Tom Wolfe going
all-out Global Village August 11 2016
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