Miranda Sawyer 

Rewind Radio: Amanda Vickery On… Men; Wheel and Come Again: 50 Years of Jamaican Music; Darwin’s Tunes – review

Historian Amanda Vickery gave a witty take on male stereotypes, and Colin Grant impressed with a look at Jamaica's outstanding musicians, says Miranda Sawyer
  
  

Amanda Vickery on Men
‘Always on target’: historian Amanda Vickery. Photograph: Andrew Hayes-Watkins/ BBC Photograph: Andrew Hayes-Watkins/Loftus Audio/BBC/Andrew Hayes-Wa

Amanda Vickery On… Men (R4) | iPlayer

Wheel and Come Again: 50 Years of Jamaican Music (6 Music) | iPlayer

Darwin's Tunes (R4) | iPlayer

Now that the Olympics are almost over, perhaps we can admit that in the last week things got a leetle OTT on occasion… Rachel Burden, on 5 Live Breakfast, trying to force gymnast Beth Tweddle's boyfriend of one and half years to propose on air ("That's long enough, isn't it?… There's an opportunity, I think, possibly?"); Nicky Campbell getting the crowds to cheer everything, including Jeremy Hunt; Peter Allen – Peter Allen! – calling this Olympics the Happy Games and asking Seb Coe what was next for him. "King Coe?"

In the interests of the non-sportif, and to quieten my constant adrenaline rush, I tried a few non-Olympic programmes. Radio 4's Amanda Vickery On… Men had the personable, perceptive historian Vickery taking us through some historical masculine stereotypes. She began with the knight, whose qualities – aggression, loyality, sappiness towards women, extreme acquisitiveness – reminded me of US rappers. There were plenty of 14th-century knightly songs to accompany the action too, helpfully translated by Vickery and her compadres. One, where a knight returned home after four years away, had him being rude about his lady's fading looks. She responded by wondering why he spent just so much time with other men. You could imagine Jay-Z and Nicky Minaj spitting the rhymes.

Vickery is incapable of making a dull programme, her knowledge and asides always witty and on target. But I worry, a little, that she's being pushed into the "cute as" role. She's the expert, yet in this programme she was left to interview other experts, rather than claiming the knowledge herself. And the title is a bit BBC3. Actually, maybe not: the BBC3 version would be "Gangster or Geek? You Judge the Studs". But still… Vickery's clever, as well as pert. Let's hear that.

On BBC 6 Music, Colin Grant's Wheel and Come Again provided a scholarly look at Jamaica's musical contribution to the world on the occasion of its 50th anniversary of independence. If you've been getting excited about how such a small island as Great Britain can produce such amazing sportspeople and musicians, then how about Jamaica? It outclasses the world when it comes to sprinters and sweet beats and it's only got a population of 2.8 million.

I really enjoyed Grant's programme, packed as it was with carefully considered theory and lovely interviews. He had an interesting idea about the Wailers representing the three classic ways of being a black man: Bob Marley, the light-skinned accommodator, able to work with the moneyed whites; Peter Tosh, very black and very scary (he was murdered in the end); Bunny Wailer, who wouldn't go on tour, preferring to stay home with his crops and his chickens, "the man in retreat".

Oh, and the music! You forget just how good it is, how underestimated bands such as Toots and the Maytals were (still are). This was an intellectual, almost Radio 4-type programme that sneaked on to 6 Music, and was given joy by its sounds.

But then Radio 4 has always been a bit flummoxed by how to treat tunes. Other than the fabulous Desert Island Discs, its programmes either intellectualise music or put it into historical context. Wednesday's Darwin's Tunes was of the former type. It had a fantastic premise: that Darwin's theory of natural selection works when applied to culture. So: only the fittest survive, and every time humans make a cultural selection (by deciding which play, film, song, book is the one they want to enjoy) they are contributing to that process.

Unfortunately for presenter Professor Armand Leroi, an evolutionary biologist, Darwin's Tunes was sold as something more than it was. It was implied that we would find out the reasons behind our changing tastes in music, that some sounds were "fitter" than others and we would be told why. Instead, we listened to a computer programme making terrible tinny noises and found that after 6,000 consumer choices between these awful sounds, we got a track that a six-year-old with an interest in GarageBand would reject as unlistenable.

I thought I might find out why classical music is declining in popularity and – even – a plausible explanation as to why David Guetta has a musical career. But all we heard were (bad) bleeps and boops. Very disappointing.

 

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