Sceptred Dial: on Laurie Taylor, Sara Collins, and Bill Dare

Voices ageless and wise

Listening to Laurie Taylor presenting the latest edition of Thinking Allowed this afternoon, I was struck by how little changed his voice is from the one I first heard in the 1980s — it might even have been the 1970s — when he was a regular panellist on Stop the Week.

I guess that’s the beauty of a radio career over a screen one. It’s hard not to look older as the years go by, but sounding older? At 88, it’s impressive to say the least the way Taylor has pulled off this trick — I’d say to an even greater extent than Melvyn Bragg, who is three years Taylor’s junior.

One of the really clever things about Thinking Allowed — just as an idea for a radio programme — is that longevity is built into it. The flow of academic reports that Taylor and his guests discuss is unceasing, their variety infinite. But it could never have lasted the way it has — it launched all the way back in 1999 — without Taylor’s mastery of the medium.

Dress culture was the subject of this week’s programme, following on from an edition that was about the role that crowds have played in national life — from events like the poll tax riot to M25 raves. Such is Thinking Allowed’s eclecticism.

Taylor introduced the crowds topic by recalling an experience he had as a teenager of standing on the Kop at Anfield. That was typical of the personal touches he brings to the programme. They engage the listener’s attention right from the outset. And he’s so good at putting his guests at their ease while maintaining a professional distance that Thinking Allowed comes with a kind of lifetime guarantee. It helps that the programme has had the same producer — Jayne Egerton — for a long time, its success very much the fruit of that relationship.

For many years I’ve written about radio in Radio Times, and one of my most stimulating assignments for the magazine was to interview Laurie Taylor. We met over lunch in 2018 and he was refreshingly unguarded, in spite — over the years — of having had a somewhat rocky relationship with the BBC, accusations of “closet Marxism” surfacing from time to time, much to his amusement.

When I heard his story about going to watch football at Liverpool, I thought back to what he’d told me about his younger self and the ambitions he had to become an actor.

He got as far as joining Joan Littlewood’s fabled Theatre Workshop in Stratford in east London — this was the late 1950s — but was given a rude awakening when a friend came to see him in a play. The show over, and with no opinion forthcoming, Taylor wondered what was going on. Eventually he had to ask the friend what he thought of him. “You were absolutely terrible!”

It was then that Taylor turned to academe and became a noted sociologist, displaying a lecturer’s gift for performance that in time had him picked up by the BBC. His broadcasting career was up and running.

I guess there’s an element of performance in the way Taylor presents Thinking Allowed. I don’t mean that he’s in any way flamboyant. But his pacing and timing are spot on, and the voice — to my way of thinking — remains one of the most attractive on the airwaves. Agelessness, thy name is Laurie Taylor.

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There was a brilliant moment right at the end of this week’s edition of A Good Read in which presenter Harriett Gilbert invited her guests — the writers Sara Collins and Oliver Burkeman — to comment on the issue of the “likeability” or otherwise of books with dislikeable characters. I loved Collins’s response — “Nothing gets my goat more than people saying, oh I just didn’t like any of these characters so I didn’t like the book” — which I think should be enshrined in the English curriculum.

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The latest Radio Times is out today (Stacey Dooley on the cover) and I have a short piece in it in which I spoke to Dead Ringers star Jan Ravens following the recent death of the show’s longtime producer Bill Dare. Radio comedy is mourning a huge loss, and Ravens was very interesting about Dare’s working methods and about the relationship he had with the show’s performers. Meantime I asked Radio 4 publicity what plans there might be to honour Dare’s memory, and was told, “I'm sure we will be paying tribute. Please stay tuned for further info”.