Terry Venables: A tribute to the former England manager

At the risk of joining the “It was better when I was young” tribe (urrgh) – and media researchers feel free to correct me – it does sometimes seem like the British media have become more and more Anglophone over the last 30 years. Yes, yes, yes, Scandi noir and all that, but I remember a time when you could watch French movies on BBC2 of an afternoon.

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Equally, the question might be asked as to whether the Between the Ears series is proof that radio’s appetite for adventurous, challenging programming is still in place or whether this is a last, defiant roar of a dying form?

The news that Radio 4 has cancelled its Lights Out strand is evidence for the latter, I’m afraid. It’s only a few weeks since I was raving in this space about Talia Augustidis’s documentary about her late mother which opened the most recent and, it appears now, last series.

Produced by Falling Tree – the production house also behind Between the Ears – Lights Out was a radio show that was playful and ambitious, not just in terms of subject but also in presentation.

Between the Ears – which took the five senses as its theme this week – offers the same. I’m not sure everyone would have loved Glasgow-based composer and artist Max Syedtollan’s busy, noisy, frankly relentless essay How to be Cool on Tuesday night (taste, you see), but it had a sly humour and faintly reminded me of Chris Morris’s late-1990s Radio 1 comedy show,Blue Jam. Only louder.

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Monday’s essay, the self-explanatory Smell, was a quieter, more melancholy pleasure. It saw Neena Pathak do a series of smell experiments with her dad. Old Spice and sewage figured prominently.

But Hidden Touch was the one that most caught my attention. The programme spoke to a Finnish undertaker and a forensic dentist about touching the body after life had left it. It was a lyrical exploration of death and grief that even offered the odd moment of release: “The undertaker asks, is there even such a thing as death? Maybe it’s just a change of being. The energy doesn’t go away, does it?”

It’s a lovely thought. Series like Between the Ears will always be on the margins of radio. That’s no surprise. But it would be a terrible loss if this kind of textured, experimental radio was to disappear altogether. Who wants to eat the same meal every day, after all?

Paul Gascoigne celebrates (Image: PA)

Last Sunday teatime I was driving home from Linlithgow. Turning on the radio for company I tuned into 5 Live for the familiar comfort of football. It was half-time at Goodison Park and filling the time between the commentary, presenter Steve Wilson was speaking to Darren Anderton about the death of former Barcelona and England manager Terry Venables.

Anderton, a fine footballer when he wasn’t injured, owed much to “El Tel”. When he was 20 Venables signed him for Tottenham. And it was Venables who capped him for England during Euro 96. Anderton paid him back, passing the ball to Paul Gascoigne who then chipped it over Colin Hendry’s head and volleyed past Andy Goram in the game against Scotland. (Feel free to mutter, curse or boo at this point.) Venables, Anderton told Wilson, was a father figure to him and it was notable that the two stories he told of their relationship were not so much about Venables the manager, but Venables the man. The stories were moving enough, but what really came across was the feeling in Anderton’s voice. You could hear it in the space around his words. Would that we could all be remembered so fondly.

Clive Myrie

Listen out for Clive Myrie’s Christmas, Radio 3, tomorrow, 1pm The festive season has started and on the first Sunday of Advent Clive Myrie starts a new series playing classical favourites germane to the season, from Bach to Vince Guardi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack.