When stars die, it's sad. But at least you get to hear their work again in the tributes
When I was a kid, the only way to see films, outside of the cinema, was when they were shown on telly, so the best news you could receive was of the death of a major film star. We'd run about the house going "Cary Grant's gone! Yesssssss! Goodbye Six O'Clock news, hello North by Northwest!", as a commemorative season hit the schedules. Then we'd feel bad because he was dead. Now that I have a DVD player, I mainly get this experience from Last Word (Radio 4, Sunday), particularly when a folk singer dies. Mike Waterson's passing from pancreatic cancer is a great loss to English music, but gave rise to the best radio obituary in ages.
On a lighter note, ahem, Private Passions: Light Fantastic (Radio 3, Sunday) was a compendium of past guests whose passions haven't been pieces so much as ditties. It does happen, you know. You get the odd guest coming on saying: "I like Mahler and all that, but I prefer a fol-de-rol." Stephen Fry chose A Walk in the Black Forest, performed by Herb Alpert ("a walk," said Michael Berkeley, "which had Stephen Fry also rolling around on the floor with laughter." That seemed a bit rum. It wasn't that funny). Dame Edna Everage chose the Sabre Dance by the Andrews Sisters , which seemed curiously fitting. It would be pushing a point to say they looked like transvestites, but the Andrews Sisters did have a rufty-tufty, ready-for-anything, faintly martial air about them. Mark Ravenhill's passions were aroused by the jolly, and probably hilarious (once) You've Gone Too Far from Offenbach's Orpheus and the Underworld. It was fun, goshdarnit, the whole thing.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/jun/27/radio
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