Re: Ransome on TV and Radio- Great Lives 18 April


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Posted by Peter H on April 21, 2003 at 18:53:27 from 213.122.212.145 user Peter_H.

In Reply to: Re: Ransome on TV and Radio posted by Mike Dennis on April 21, 2003 at 14:50:35:

In the BBC Radio 4 ‘Great Lives’ programme broadcast on 18th April the political journalist and TV broadcaster John Sergeant described the deep influence that AR’s books have had on him. Also heard were AR’s biographer Hugh Brogan, and Barbara Altounyan (who I think is the daughter of Roger Altounyan).

It is impossible to summarise the whole half hour, and for AR devotees much of it went over well-trodden ground. For the full recording see Ian's posting above, but for anyone who cannot access the 'Listen Again' facility, here are some parts of the programme which I found striking (I am not pretending that this is a comprehensive survey of the programme): -

John Sergeant admitted that AR does not really fit in the ‘Great People’ category, but what AR did do is answer the key question which we’re all interested in – how can you be happy? ‘AR provided a brilliant example of showing how you can be happy and the things which make you happy’.

Sergeant naturally emphasised the ‘journalist’ side of AR – knowing that each word has to count, expressing the character of the children in their dialogue, and what all great storytellers do – make sure you know something about each character that you don’t tell your readers about.

An extract from an archive recording of AR reading a passage from a Russian folk tale was played. AR’s voice sounded light and precise, with what we would call an ‘upper middle class’ accent, e.g. he pronounced ‘off’ as ‘orf’, and ‘back’ as ‘beck’.(This, I think, was RP in the 1930s.)

The question of AR’s political views was raised. Brogan thought that AR was, at heart, deeply conservative with a small ‘c’ – he liked traditional England and traditional Russia, and resisted change. But when he got to Russia he was a Liberal, and thought that only the Bolsheviks were capable of forming a government. Brogan thought that AR was fooled to some extent by Lenin and Trotsky, but a lot of what he said about the Bolsheviks was right. Sergeant said that AR was against the British intervention in Russia, and he particularly admired AR’s retort when he was interviewed by Scotland Yard on his return to England and asked what his politics were - AR replied ‘fishing’.

At the close of the programme, Sergeant was confronted by a statement by the critic John Rowe Townsend, ie that in AR’s works there are rather few insights, few of those moments when the reader is suddenly aware that life is richer or stranger than he’d realised. Sergeant gave a memorable answer – Ok yes, in AR, there’s no magic, no crazy Harry Potters, no Lord of the Rings, but you can get a situation even now where a mother and a father can, amazingly, get children to learn things and then to be excited by it, and then not be put in extreme danger. These are difficult ingredients to mix successfully, but Arthur Ransome did. All the other horrors of life will come soon enough, but for now – can we have an adventure? Can we have a difficult time, then at the end of the day just fall asleep, and be happy - now that’s quite something. . .



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