That damn' Derham attitude!

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

11 February

It's not exactly an oral swagger, but an over-hasty, confidential familiarity - no, an overfamiliarity - from one who is making quite clear who's boss in the presenter / listener relationship, IF you let her (which she wants you to do, and almost assumes that you will).

Yesterday, she said as if it were an expletive, or, rather, admiration of someone's bum, Gorgeous piece!, then whiffled off into some - perhaps more scripted (and, to be honest, I do not know whether these presenters write their own material) - string of information. As ever, briskly, with almost unnecessarily precise diction, which reinforces the message I know what I'm talking about, you should listen to me.

Unfortunately, it's so forced, almost so desperate to be liked and to make ad libs full of her own opinions and 'personality', that, for me, it is an unsubtle stamp of would-be trustworthiness, not remotely the sort of underlying reassurance that is just inherent in, say, the style of Fiona Talkington.


Yet this Derham attitude is not her unique phenomenon, for Radio 3 seems 'to have bought into' this feminine style of clipped authority: to my mind, Suzy Klein is almost indistinguishable, save that she is the only person that I have heard using the word 'please' in such a barked way* that it is quite out of place in asking a performer being interviewed to answer whatever he or she is there to talk about:

It had echoes of a child begging for something that he or she knows is forbidden (or, at least, it's time has not yet come), but delivered not in quite such a wheedling way, but as if to ingratiate on some other level, but, not on her own behalf, but as the servant of the listening audience: it's as if she is a Jesus, pleading with the Father for forgiveness for the sinners on their knees before the cross - give them, I beseech thee, but the answer to this question in your almighty mercy...


End-notes

* And unnecessarily using it, to impart some sense of God knows what! - counterfactual humility?


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