Radio 4's new version of Milton’s epic Paradise Lost proves devilishly good and a real education
One of the best things about listening to the radio is that you can’t help but learn stuff. At least, I can’t. My fractured education, much of it at the hands of progressive teachers who didn’t believe in knowledge, means that my intellectual landscape is strewn with potholes. But almost every week – thank you, licence fee – I listen with jubilation to something that fills in a hole.
My ignorance of Paradise Lost was, I now realise, more of a chasm. Regarded by some as the greatest poem in the English language, it has inspired everyone from William Blake to Pink Floyd. Yet hardly anyone reads Milton’s epic anymore, for reasons that became clear to me right at the start of Paradise Lost, Radio 4’s new dramatisation on Saturday. “Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe,” intoned Ian McKellen, playing the poet Milton in the quivering stage voice that actors always deploy when faced with olde wordes.
So far so good, thought I; this must have something to do with Adam and Eve. But then McKellen started bandying about words like Oreb and Siloa’s Brook; and then up popped Simon Russell Beale, playing Satan but seeming to address someone else entirely called Beelzebub. You mean they’re not actually the same thing?
Less than four minutes into the programme, I found myself Googling the demonic hierarchy of Hell. And because that was so interesting, I then looked up the poem itself, read it all the way through (accompanied by explanatory notes), and followed up with some light critical analysis.
These modest researches complete, I returned to the Radio 4 version – and loved it. This adaptation, by the poet Michael Symmons Roberts, has several narrative layers. Milton – old, blind and grieving, after the deaths of two wives, four children and his political hero, Oliver Cromwell – dictates his version of the Genesis story to his latest wife, Elizabeth (played by Frances Barber).
The action shifts constantly from Milton’s study to the lurid, and sometimes deliciously banal, scenes he describes: Satan presiding over a council of demons to decide how best to annoy God, or Adam and Eve discussing gardening chores. To help us understand what’s going on, there are lots of sound effects – crackling flames, the groans of the damned, the chinking tools of the demons building Satan’s palace, Pandemonium – as well as a running commentary from Satan himself.
Readers of Milton have always (I now know) found his Satan surprisingly sympathetic – more of a freedom fighter, really, standing up for the rights of fallen angels against a despotic and bad-tempered God. Beale goes further still, making the Prince of Darkness so mild and reasonable that one visualises him as a sort of downtrodden celestial clerk. This can be hard to square with his more diabolical moments – one can’t quite see him beating his fiery wings and rising from the burning lake of hell – but it does make him a wonderfully engaging narrator. The drama is available on the iPlayer; I urge you to give it a listen.
"Is Music a Civilising Force?" asks Radio 3 this week, in its contemplative series The Essay. The first episode belonged to the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton. He began by quoting Plato’s warning that, while “sedate” music imparts “discipline and virtue to the soul”, the “barbarous” rhythms of dance music could produce in young people “traits of character which no civilised republic should allow”.
These days, no one could be stuffy enough to – oh, hang on. Plato and Scruton, it turns out, are of one mind. Scruton described, rather movingly, how “serious” music (by which he means classical) civilised his own teenage soul, its complex harmonies reflecting and describing the very best of human nature. On the subject of pop music, however, he sounded absurdly dyspeptic. “Beware of those rabble-rousing disc-jockeys, and music in which there is nothing but a beat,” he admonished. “It really matters what the young are listening to.”
The best comedy and drama podcasts
How useful, then, to have Chris Hawkins, usually of 6 Music, reveal what that might be. In Band Politics (part of Radio 4’s series The Art of Now), Hawkins argued that rock music is going through its most political phase for decades. The angry young musicians he interviewed were torn between Corbynist invective (sample lyric: “A loved one perished at the hands of the barren-hearted Right”), and an uneasy awareness that, as the Brexit vote showed, the Left no longer seems to represent the working classes. A thoughtful, intellectually supple presenter, Hawkins roused no rabble – instead providing a fascinating window onto our current, and future, politics.
