AS we all know, Kirsty Young isn’t doing Desert Island Discs any more. But you couldn’t say Young Again, her newish gig on Radio 4, is really all that different.
It’s a little less musical, yes, but it’s just as revealing.
On Tuesday it returned for a second series with Scottish actor Peter Capaldi as Young's guest. It was clear from the get-go that the two of them got along. There was a definite connection.
Ironic, really, given that one of the points both Young and Capaldi were keen to make was that as a young actor that’s exactly what Capaldi was missing. Connections.
After appearing in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero he moved to London only to find that he wasn’t what was being looked for.
“Who I was was not sellable,” Capaldi recalled. “Or that was the impression I was given. He was told he’d need to change his voice, even the way he stood.
At the time he accepted the advice. “I thought I’d better listen to all these people.”
Now he knows better. “I shouldn’t have given them the power. I shouldn’t have allowed them to make me feel less secure about my own gifts.”
Capaldi relived his career with humour and insight. After winning an Oscar for a short film he would sit in meetings and be told by Hollywood types: “We want to be in the Peter Capaldi business.”
A year to the day after winning his Oscar he was up to his knees in mud filming a pet commercial for local TV.
After the success of The Thick of It and Doctor Who, Capaldi can look back now with the knowledge that he always did have something to offer. That was the advice, he said, he would give to younger acts and to his younger self.
“Value who you are. Value those things about you that are individual to you and that other people don’t have.
“The thing that prevents you from getting that job is the thing that will get you that job,” he added.
It was a pleasure to spend half an hour in his company. On iPlayer the interview runs to an hour. Dig in.
On Sunday afternoon on Radio 4 – slightly early for Valentine’s Day – Corin Throsby investigated the Hollywood romcom. The result was both a celebration and an interrogation of the form, a whistle-stop tour that began with Harold Lloyd’s silent comedy Girl Crazy, tipped a nod (but not much more) to the screwball comedy of the 1930s and rushed onto When Harry Met Sally and Richard Curtis movies (via Shakespeare and Jane Austen).
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Curtis even turned up in person. Looking back at old scripts he had written that were never made, he noted that what was interesting about rereading material from 25 years ago was how much of it would be unacceptable now.
In what way, Thosby asked? “It’s just a use of language, or the way you might describe a woman, or the way they get together, or the sexual morality of the moment. And the fact that it’s not as diverse as anything that you do now would be. The world’s moved on.”
But that’s not a death knell you’re hearing. “Every few years we hear that the romcom is dead,” Tom Melia, one of the creators of the excellent recent black British romcom Rye Lane, pointed out. “And as long as people are falling in love and as long as we’re making films there’s gonna be romcoms.”
On Monday afternoon the Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan was Nihal Arthanayake’s guest on 5 Live, which turned out to be unexpectedly electric listening. At some point when Tiernan was discussing – to comic ends – whether it was acceptable for him to dress up as Denzil Washington or even as a Nazi to fulfil his wife’s sexual fantasy, you could almost hear the entire studio take a deep breath.
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Arthanayake had to remind him that it was lunchtime and the schools were off before saying they had to break for the news.
“Am I going to be on the news?” Tiernan asked. Frankly, it wouldn’t have been a surprise.
Finally, the news that Steve Wright died this week was a shock. Wright has been such a familiar voice since the end of the 1970s (I remember him on Radio Luxembourg) it is difficult to imagine radio without him.
Listen Out For: Late Junction, Radio 3, Friday, 11pm
Jennifer Lucy Allan introduces this quirky, late-night perennial which seems a much less depressing way to see out the day than Americast over on Radio 4. This week’s show is a celebration of “the appearance of frogspawn in waters across the country”. Only on Radio 3 …
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