The Other Guantanamo
BBC World Service
Sounds of Sixties
Radio 2
Mornings with Simon Bates
Classic FM
There are many irritating things about Americans, not least their general laziness in the use of full names of people and places. It is easier for them to call Jennifer Lopez “J-Lo” and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie “Brangelina”. What they do with all the energy they save with abbreviations beggars belief, but it probably includes couch potato inactivity and consumption of lots of fried food.
Even much more serious matters get the shorthand treatment. George W Bush was “Dubya”, an attempt perhaps to make this political gunslinger and arguably very dangerous man sound cuddly, while Guantanamo Bay became “Gitmo”, as if to spit the word out quickly rather than dwell on the considerable human rights issues, illegalities and moral inconsistencies involved in detaining without trial many people who either looked villainous or had sketchy evidence pinned to their orange overalls.
In our throwaway world of the twittering classes, places such as Guantanamo have become known for one thing only – in this case, the prison compound. But in The Other Guantanamo, travel writer Polly Evans gave us an unusual glimpse into the real place where Cuban citizens try to survive as people do in any other community. It is not an easy place to live but it is their place.
Inevitably, in trying to find normal life, the programme was drawn back to the influence of the United States on the area. The local desire seemed to be for the military presence to disappear forever, but there was also acknowledgement that, over the years, service men and women had brought in much-needed money to boost trade, and that a sudden decline in dollars spent would undoubtedly have disastrous effects on the local economy. For people living in the bay area, it is a devil’s dilemma without an obvious solution. In a world away from “Gitmo”, we find “Sots” (Sounds of the Sixties) and it was a great pleasure to hear that the recent Sony radio awards handed the bronze prize for best specialist music programme to Brian Matthew and his oldies show.
Every Saturday morning, for two hours, Matthew’s distinctive voice continues to celebrate the flowery, nutty, psychedelic, “make love not war” decade that gave us so much great music as well as lots and lots of terrible records that should be wrapped in a kaftan and hurled into the nearest abyss.
The show is a mixture of the obvious hits, but the real delight is to be found in obscure album tracks and B-sides, the archive clips of live performances and interviews, and the listeners’ stories of found love, lost love and nostalgic reminiscences about things that probably never really happened.
Brian Matthew and his Radio 2 colleague David Jacobs (still presenting on Sunday evenings), both now in their 80s, are the last of a breed of broadcasters that understood the role of the presenter as a supplement to the music. They are from a calmer generation of radio hosts and have much to teach the current crop of egotists and prattlers on popular music radio.
In another era, Simon Bates could prattle with the best of them but nowadays he runs a very listenable show on Classic FM on weekday mornings. The advantage is that because classical music tracks are considerably longer than rock or pop songs, there is less time for Bates to become annoying. He does have that curious kind of radio voice which sounds as if it has been practised and honed with deliberate tones and timbres, not quite British, not quite American, but manufactured to sound authoritative and cool. He is in control and exudes reassurance that all is well with the world. Surely, that’s all we need from a disc jockey. As Alan Freeman used to say: “Not ’alf.”
