Where’s the main verb ?

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18 October

The Verb, on a Friday night on @BBCRadio3, has changed. It needed to change, but it has not changed for the better.

I do not recall when I last heard it, but 9.45 used to be a convenient time to listen, and manage most of it before closing-time drinks at the local called, and I had been a regular for several years.

It needed to change, because, incessantly calling it the cabaret of the word, Professor Ian McMillan had become little better than Hughie Green, by which I mean the flowery introductions, larded with compliments for him for being there, us for joining him, and for guests who were never less than monstrously excellent, talented, and guaranteed to be worth our time…

Not to mention the same old people from whom the guests seemed to come, for example Toby Litt – he was back again, because we liked him, and we liked him, because he was back again, or some such self-reinforcing logic – and what ‘we’ had commissioned him to write. But there were, of course, gems, such as learning about Italian ice-cream in Oban from Janice Galloway, or Paul Griffiths (better known as a writer about (twentieth-century) music), with his short novel Let Me Tell You, where he had amazingly limited himself to a vocabulary identical to that of Shakespeare’s Ophelia :

I read that book, because of The Verb, and was stunned by its invention through limitation, telling a story of around a dozen chapters that had to circumvent having no word ‘mother’, or by using a noun as a verb, or an adjective as a noun.
That was its high point, before the guests became routine, the enthusiasm forced, the praise after everything read excessive - I loved the way that you xyz, and the surprise of the abc really caught me unawares. So what made you think of that moment when you say def ?


But what’s wrong now ? Well, on to-night’s showing, the floor-to-ceiling congratulation has gone, but it’s too much the questions / things that McMillan thinks that we might like to ask / comment :

Why did you write that as a fairy-tale ?

Is it very different, after working on a novel, to write a short story ?

When I get to the end of a short story, I’m turning the page, wanting it to continue. [Do people read a short story without looking to see how long it will take, and isn’t it a bad story (or your mistake), if you can’t tell that it’s ended ?]

That piece [an extract from awork in progress] sounded very self contained [which turned out to be because it had been made to be].


None of these sounded as though the words coming out of the authors’ mouths on these meagre cues had not merely been prepared, but rehearsed to death. The best of the programme, that the questions insulted no one, but just were too self congratulatory (I can only ask these questions, because I am a Professor of English Literature), and too much buttering up the writer, has gone, and the questions are banal – I can too easily credit that I did not need to be a Professor to conceive them, so why have one present the show.


So not :

Why have two of you written about wolves ?

What do you think about Orwell’s four stated reasons for writing, and does any of them weigh with you? [Pretty pointless to tell us these four things without doing something with them ?]

You have given ways in which novels are different from short stories – even accepting those, are the similarities greater than the differences?

You say that a writer of short stories has to be multi-disciplinary, dealing with, amongst other things, history and politics, but why are they not the concerns of a novelist?


Plus ça change, plus ç’est la même chose…



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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)