The week in radio: Listen to the voices, and spring will surely come

As if astonished and thrilled to see you; as if you were the one person in all the world he'd been daring to hope might stroll into his basement club, just before it closes; as if now, the elderly jazz-men will raise their tortoise eyes, smile a sleepy smile and play your Jazz Record Requests just one more time, Sam, like they used to in old Casablanca, Geoffrey Smith says "Hullo!" It gets me every time.

You can't twitch an eyebrow or snatch an embrace on radio: your pulling power is in the voice. Assessing tone, tempo and timbre, a fickle audience lingers - curious, flattered, soothed - or strays distractedly away, to flirt with other wavebands, other frequencies. The irreverence of generations of bar-room philosophers and the rhythms of Synge lurk behind the benign cynicism of Terry Wogan's Limerick brogue. And, when you catch Alistair Cooke's Friday "Good evening" or his Sunday "Good morning", the greeting of the venerable sage still carries echoes of the young Fulbright scholar, travelling by bus across the Rockies or down into Alabama 60 years ago and feeling like Columbus with a notebook.

There was a magazine, now defunct, called The Listener, wherein an anonymous writer once defined Rosemary Harthill's voice as "quintessentially Radio 4, like someone talking down a would-be suicide from a high window-ledge". So it is, and anyone alone with a radio during the coldest days and longest nights of winter welcomes the calm reassurance of the Radio 4 voice, that life will not die away with the year, that the world will stir itself awake and that spring will come.

It is often women's voices that have this comforting authority. Anna Massey's is like expensive, tailored linen. Reading the often florid script of This Sceptr'd Isle, she gave that didactic series a cool assurance: she did not rise to become head of history, you felt, by tolerating dissenters (a new series is coming soon, bringing the Isle up to date, although who knows what will have happened to all the sceptr's by then).

In Dear Jane Brown earlier this year, Jill Balcon lent muscle to the flaccid, flagging morning serial, with her uniquely beautiful, instantly recognisable inflections. While no one who heard Dame Judi Dench playing a limpet in Tales from the Sea-Shore could forget the plangent, slightly hoarse desire with which she infused that minuscule mollusc.

She was helped by Lynne Truss's inspired script. When reader matches writer in excellence ... well, it's rare and glorious. And it happened last week, when five women writers were commissioned to write seasonal stories. All were good, but one was very good indeed and another plain brilliant. Clare Boylan chose the office party as her grimly festive setting for a drunken fumble in the cupboard under the stairs. It Didn't Mean a Thing (R4), thought the narrator (Pat Laffan), but the story twisted like cough-candy, and by the end, it meant disaster.

The brilliant one was by Angela Huth. Two old friends, both widows, meet in a seaside department store for tea and a spot of their usual competitive family boasting. Little by little they realise that they will in fact be alone on Christmas Day, and resolve to spend it together. It becomes, they agree, a case of Angels Bending near The Earth (R4). The delicacy with which their situation was established was superb, especially as narrated by Prunella Scales, her soprano warmly clad in sensible tweeds.

John Sessions has many voices. He assumed a husky South American growl to become Lady Pilar Woffington, invited to describe her Private Passions (R3) yesterday (and this afternoon). Lady Pilar has been twice widowed, both husbands having fallen tragically down carefully oiled staircases. She has established a country-house opera festival, but her productions tend to include wintry weather, and the powdery white "snow" she uses has a distinctly Colombian origin.

Michael Berkeley quoted this newspaper's thinly disguised music critic, Michael Flight, whose acute ear recognised that a singer was miming to the recorded voice of Mirella Freni during one such show. The programme ended with Lady Pilar being arrested, and Berkeley solemnly advising listeners to avoid her very naughty, very private passion. It was extremely silly and very funny.

Finally, head-girl Sue Lawley had a most distinguished castaway this week in the person of Sir David Attenborough. His voice sounds about 17 years old and belongs to the nicest kind of unquenchably enthusiastic sixth-form prefect. He is incapable of being bored or boring.

Attenborough spoke about the thrill of being in at the start of television; about his introduction of snooker to the black-and-white screen, "the blue ball is next to the green one", (in our house it was called "Pot Grey"); of the serendipity of filming wildlife: "When a lady gorilla has her hand on your head, it's not the moment to go on about the opposable thumb"; of what tremendous fun he would have on his island, visited by birds, by whales, by dolphins.

If what passes for civilisation were to collapse, I found myself thinking, and only one man to be saved, it should be him. And if he were ever allowed company, well, I'd thoroughly enjoy his Desert Island Discs (R4):

"Soave sia il vento" from Cosi fan tutte, Mozart;

"And the Glory of the Lord" from Handel's Messiah;

Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D Minor, Bach;

"Malletoba Spank", Duke Ellington;

"Zefiro torne", Monteverdi;

Adagio from String Quartet in C-Major, Schubert;

"Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" from Ruckertlieder, Mahler;

Symphony No 1, Walton.

His luxury was a guitar, and his book, Shifts and Expedients of Camp Life by Lord and Baines.

Published in 1882, this will, he is confident, teach him to make a canoe from one bolt of canvas. But then, we might never want to escape. Well, we can all dream. Happy New Year.