I have seen the future of Radio 4 - and nothing much changes

I BOUGHT my new Radio Times from the newsagent the other day and recoiled nervously as four threatening faces grimaced out at me from the cover. They belonged to four people who were not only apparently trying to hypnotise me but were also dressed in that anonymous white suiting worn by senior guards in science fiction series about brainwashing. The effect was startling. I must have groaned in fear.

"You all right, sir?" said the solicitous newsagent.

"Just a bit unsteady on the old pins," I said. "I wasn't ready for this ghastly vision on the front of the Radio Times. Some new horror series, is it? Adaptation of Kafka? Remake of The Prisoner? Or are they real villains wanted by Crimewatch?"

"Let me see," said the newsagent, who seldom gets a chance to discuss magazine production with his clients. "Yes, I see what you mean. But they're not actually snarling. They're smiling. The anthropologists always tell us that the muscles used for snarling and smiling are virtually the same."

"Very twisted sort of smile," I said. "Look at this man in the bottom left-hand corner. Is he or is he not a night club bouncer, wearing the sort of smile with which people duff you up?"

"Ah, no," he said. "I see your mistake, but this is actually the new face of Radio 4 which Radio Times is celebrating this week. So they've put some of the new faces on the front. That's Melvyn Bragg, and that night club bouncer is John Peel, and that's Michael Buerk, and that's Sue Lawley, no, I tell a lie, it's Kate Adie. They're looking a bit grim, I grant you that, a bit as if the photograph was taken just as they were all STOPPING say `Cheese'..."

"Hold on," I said. "These aren't new faces. These are old faces. Bragg and Buerk and Peel have been knocking around the airwaves for what seems like years but is probably for ever. Where's the NEW face of Radio 4?"

"Well, new is as new does," said the newsagent. "Maybe if you had been away in New Zealand or Canada for twenty years it would all seem very new. I was in Canada on holiday last year."

"Were you?" I said. I hoped I sounded interested.

"Out there in the old colonies and dominions they're still repeating old editions of My Word and My Music on the radio, and heaven knows what other programmes which we've forgotten about. There was one edition I listened to which was so old that three of the four panellists were, to my certain knowledge, dead. But it was all probably very new to a whole generation of Canadians."

"How does that link up with the cover of the new Radio Times?" I asked.

"My theory, for what it is worth," he said, "Is that James Boyle, the Controller of Radio 4, is announcing that he is going to introduce huge new changes in order to alarm people, and then actually only introducing very small changes so that people feel relieved and think that the changes weren't so bad after all."

"What would be the point of that?" I said. "If he is only introducing small changes, he could just have done them without announcing them. Nobody would kick up a fuss if he changed a few things."

"You have to be joking. Have you never heard Feedback? Make the slightest change and the whole of the Radio 4 Old Guard is on you. No, what he is doing is tinkering a bit and disguising it as an earthquake. Dust clears, turns out it wasn't a great disaster after all. Small Earthquake, Not Much Changed. General relief all round."

"So why did he make the front of Radio Times look so menacing?"

"I don't think he was trying to be threatening. He was trying to convey a subliminal message which said `It's new Radio 4 - and nothing's changed!' And to prove it here are four very familiar middle-class, middle-aged, white people one of whom is a token woman! Nothing threatening there, surely?"

"So the message is, `This is New Radio 4 And It's All More Of The Same!'?"

"Something like that, sir. I've made a little study of BBC slogans over the years. You know, things like, `It's All For You on Radio 2' and `The BBC - You Make It What It Is'. And they all have one thing in common."

"What's that?"

"They're totally meaningless."

I looked at the Radio Times cover again, and those four familiar faces. There was a slogan as well, which I hadn't noticed before. It said: "New Faces, New Places".

Hmmmm. Perhaps he had a point.