Equivalence and Arundel

There is a marvellous programme on Radio 4 at present called Adventures in Poetry. This could be awful (especially with a title like that), but it isn't. Each week just one poem is discussed in some depth for half an hour. There is a certain amount of biography and historiography - setting the piece in context - but mostly these programmes work as extended analyses of the poem in question. For example, a few weeks back they joyfully spent some time considering the various effects resulting from Adlestrop beginning with the word 'Yes'.

The result is people with a deep knowledge and understanding speaking about something they care about, and refusing to talk down to their audience. On the contrary - being wholly unafraid of using their expertise and eridition.

It is broadcast on Sunday afternoons, but I prefer the late night Saturday repeats, as I can concentrate much more on the people and what they are saying about the poem when I'm lying cosily tucked up in bed. Last night we had Larkin:

An Arundel Tomb
Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet,
stillClasped empty in the other;
andOne sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly, they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Next week (or 16:30 this afternoon if you like) the poem is Browning's My Last Duchess - so I have to recommend it.

Amazingly, this wasn't the only example yesterday of surprising amounts of real knowledge being displayed in a broadcast programme. I caught an old edition of QI on Dave, flipping over to find, (as I thought initially), the usual clutch of five white, middle-aged comics sitting chortling to each other. Chief chortler was Stephen Fry of course, but the other villains were Alan Davies, Sean Lock, Rob Brydon and Ben Miller (from Armstrong & Miller). I was, I would soon realise, being somewhat unfair on the last of those.

The theme was science fiction (and science too, I guess, I missed the beginning), so they were all wearing silvery Klingon-style regalia over their shoulders. Of course they were.

At one point Fry asked a question about alien life - Rob Brydon said he didn't believe in aliens, and then - wonderfully - Ben Miller spent some minutes properly discussing he Principle of Equivalence and the Fermi Paradox. Brydon looked a bit shocked. A few minutes later Fry stated that science 'knew of no reason why time travel shouldn't be possible' and started to give an explanation of the grandfather paradox. Miller then challenged this view with a very sensible discussion of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, ending with questioning whether humans could exist in a universe where time's arrow didn't only point in one direction. If the other three panellists were gobsmacked, it was also true that the dilletante-ist Stephen Fry seemed very much out of his depth.

The jokes about not understanding this stuff came quickly, of course, to cover up their embarrassment. Then a minute or so later Locke said something about not understanding how even simple machines like telephones worked. Brydon responded - slightly sneeringly, I thought - with "And now my colleague Mr Miller will explain it properly to you."

So he did.

He spoke about transduction and piezo-electric crystals, was clear and straightforward - and kept it to the basics - and explained in essence how landline phones work. The others were again clearly flummoxed to find someone who knew what they were talking about on the show.

It was marvellous, of course, but almost unwatchable given the smug, sheep-faced responses of the rest of the panel, so I had to switch it off. Sigh.

Still, two peices of something sensible being broadcast on the same day? Who'd have thought it?

There's hope yet.

Postscript : According to IMDB, Ben Miller's (uncompleted) Cambridge PhD Physics thesis was on 'novel quantum effects in quasi-zero dimensional mesoscopic electrical systems'.