Radio Review Bernice HarrisonThe most astonishing thing about the Dave Fanning Beatles Special (2FM, Monday) was the age profile of the texters and callers to the programme.
There were 15- and 17-year-olds who were huge fans, desperate to get their hands on a new version of a Beatles album that was recorded in 1969. Let It Be was the band's last album. They were on the verge of breaking up when they made it, so the record company brought in Phil "wall of sound" Spector to finish the production. The band had originally intended it to sound live and raw, with no over-dubbing or studio effects, and the new album, Let It Be: Naked, released this week, is a digital remastering of the original without the Spector embellishments.
You don't have to be a muso anorak to hear how different the pared-down, back-to-basics versions of Let It be, Get Back and The Long and Winding Road sound (though it would have been interesting if Fanning had played two versions of at least one of the songs back to back, for comparisons' sake). Interspersed with the songs were interviews with the surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, about how difficult it all was at the time, especially with Yoko around.
"We were used to an old-fashioned type of woman who stayed at home," said Starr, while McCartney asked, reasonably: "What was I meant to do, tell John 'don't have 'er sittin' on me amp'?" He added, somewhat unnecessarily: "At the time, it was really a big pressure."
After more than an hour of the album, Fanning talked to two hardcore fans. Pat Moore and Thomas Walsh wholeheartedly welcomed the new version of the album but pointed out that fans had been badly served over the years by Apple, The Beatles' record company, in terms of a remastered and reissued back catalogue.
"The bootleggers have served the fans better than Apple," said Moore, who even before this glossy release had 150 hours of Let It Be out-takes in his collection.
That was music from the end of the 1960s, while across the Atlantic at the start of that decade the shiny optimism engendered by the election of John F. Kennedy was captured in the upbeat sounds of The Beach Boys and Elvis, and songs such as What A Wonderful World, Hit the Road Jack and It's Now or Never. They were the musical backdrop to The JFK Generation (BBC Radio 2, Tuesday), featuring, among others, Joan Baez, Janet Leigh, Neil Simon and Harry Belafonte, who talked about the election and how modern it felt at the time to have a president who was born in the 20th century. The programme (the first in a two-part series) was introduced by another type of TV president, The West Wing's Martin Sheen.
Janet Leigh recalled throwing a party on election night, where the tension of the close count (Kennedy won by 300,000 votes) got so bad that at one point Frank Sinatra picked up the phone to the Nixon camp and shouted "concede, concede" over and over again.
Singer Kris Kristofferson, then a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, remembered the election-deciding televised debates in which, he said, "Nixon sweated like a liar" and Kennedy "was like the angel Gabriel up against the prince of darkness". Radio listeners, immune to the beauty contest nature of TV, were convinced that Nixon won the debates.
There was nothing artificial about the life that Lorelei Harris found in Newfoundland when she went there in April, where the natives have so many names for ice it makes the Inuit sound tongue-tied in their search for words for snow. No matter what you call it, ice doesn't sound like the most likely subject for a documentary, but Ice (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday) was an inventive 45 minutes of radio.
For the fishermen, the state of the ice (or slob, ballincatter, quarr, conkerball, ice-glim - the list goes on) dictates their entire lives. Harris went out in the boats with men whose accents sounded a curious mix of Connemara and Canada. All the voices stood out in this programme, from Harris's exclamations of wonder on seeing the great mountains of ice, to the voiceover spoken by an actress articulating Harris's personal thoughts on the hardships of the seafaring life when the enemy is as dangerous and as simple as ice. It was a powerful piece of work.
On Today with Pat Kenny (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday), the guest in studio was Katharine Hepburn's biographer, Scott Berg. Kenny brought the story bang up to date by asking Berg about Hepburn's meeting with Michael Jackson. The singer didn't have much to say during their lunch together, apparently, though he brightened up a bit when the subject turned to his menagerie.
"She thought he was like ET, like someone from out of this world," said Berg, adding to a list of names for the singer that grew and grew as long as the ice names as the week went on.