Killing My Own Snakes by Ann Leslie

Author:Ann Leslie [Leslie, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780230738843
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

18

Stop the Rot

Robert Robinson, chairman of the long-running BBC Radio 4 chat show Stop the Week, was holding forth in the pub which its BBC regulars called the Gluepot, but whose actual name was the George.

His subject was the general uselessness of women as on-air conversationalists. ‘Women simply can’t do Stop the Rot!’ (his pet name for the programme).

‘Bob, in case you haven’t noticed,’ I pointed out, ‘I’m a woman and I’ve been doing Stop for years!’

He looked at me and remarked dismissively, ‘Oh, I never think of you as a woman!’ Which (as I also pointed out) was not quite the compliment he thought it was.

Stop the Week was a cult programme which ran for eighteen years on early Saturday evenings and, judging by our postbags, all our listeners heard it in the bath before going out for the evening. It was, as Miles Kington pointed out in The Times, not a chat show but a soap opera, with the regulars, Laurie Taylor, Professor of Sociology at York University, Milton Shulman the drama critic, and me, the token woman, playing the roles in what Kington christened ‘The Skittish Family Robinson’.

Every week we would gird our competitive loins, polish our anxious wits, sweat blood and cross swords for our listeners soaking in their Radox, while we discussed such weighty issues as ‘At what point do English seagulls crossing the Channel become French ones?’ and ‘Is it possible to name six famous people called Stan?’ or mused on the fact that, according to the Sun, 75 per cent of Belgian men preferred Mrs Thatcher to their own mothers.

Our somewhat eccentric producer, Michael Ember, would then edit the conversation or, as he put it, ‘boil off the fat’. Ember – whom Bob would always refer to on air as ‘our friend from East Molesey’ – had been a talented footballer in Hungary, and as such was known for his tremendous turns of speed. When the Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary in 1956 Ember put on one of his tremendous turns of speed and ran across the border to freedom and the BBC.

While it was true that most women guests found the Garrick Club atmosphere difficult to cope with – ‘You’re just a bunch of wankers!’ one famous critic pronounced after her own dismal showing – men often found it so too. We did behave like members of an exclusive club, faintly unfriendly to outsiders, each of us extremely possessive about our own particular favourite seat at the table in the cavernous sub-basement studio in Broadcasting House where the programme was recorded. When the distinguished philosopher and womanizer Professor A. J. Ayer came in and confidently placed his bottom on ‘my’ seat I had to shift him, thereby finding myself startled by the extent of both his irritation and his intense halitosis. One critic said the programme should be renamed ‘Meet the Chums’.

Perhaps the biggest postbag I got while on Stop was when I remarked en passant that my husband Michael (whom Bob

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