Joe Queenan excelled in his analysis of finger pointing and fault finding
Archive on 4: A Brief History of Blame (R4) | iPlayer
Blasphemy and the Governor of Punjab (R4) | iPlayer
Back from a holiday where the only available radio offered tinnitus house and jingles that literally shouted FUN at you, it was a blessed relief to spend a day pottering about on Radio 4. Woman's Hour with Jane Garvey getting sly digs into a woman who's written a book about husband-hunting. Soul Music, on how Beethoven's Violin Concerto changed people's lives. An audio portrait of Fred the Shred. All lovely, just lovely. Admittedly Radio 4 has turned into a rather joyless, picky-over-the-news-fest in the middle of the day, but never mind. If you zone in and out over the day, the effect is of being chuntered at by a selection of specialist shop assistants from Eccentrics Are Us. At one point I found myself listening to a 10-minute feature on the delights of glow-worm spotting. You don't get that on Radio Magaluf.
And programmes such as Archive on 4 make up for all the station's faults. Archive is always worth checking out – one of my all-time favourite Radio 4 programmes was an Archive: Toby Amies on sampling – and yesterday's featured satirist Joe Queenan, unpicking the immense subject that is blame. Queenan, big and witty, is a funny man – mostly because he's an angry man. He hides it, but his rage will bubble up, as when he talked about Israel Bradley, who sued Kentucky Fried Chicken for making him fat. Or the gambler who sued his bookies for letting him bet. Or how everyone wanted to blame the bankers, the parents, anyone other than the rioters last summer. "Wake up!" boomed Queenan. "Wake up!"
This programme was billed as an opera in six acts, though it wasn't really. It was more an attempt to make sense of just how thoroughly we all refuse to take responsibility for our mistakes. "All history is about blame," said Queenan, and he was right. Germaine Greer said that all immature people assign blame to others – look what you made me do! – and she was right too. Queenan's interview with Greer, about Eve and her apple, was short but powerful.
Later, the producer made a hilarious mash-up of Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time, used by Queenan to illustrate the fact that in the olden days there was something more than your unresolved issues with your parents to point the finger at. Massive scapegoats such as the Black Death. Vikings. Attila the Hun. Oh, this was a proper, silly, clever, absorbing, funny listen. Can't we have Queenan every week?
Also on yesterday, and also, weirdly, about blame, Blasphemy and the Governor of Punjab was a shocking programme, not least because it managed to use dramatic reconstruction without making me want to shove my knuckles into my mouth. Though nominally a play, this was actually a very thinly disguised documentary about contemporary Pakistan, presenter Owen Bennett-Jones using interviews with the governor's family and friends, as well as reconstructions, to build a modern murder story that was both astonishing and thoroughly depressing.
In late 2010, self-made millionaire and governor of Punjab, Salmaan Taseer, decided publicly to support a poor, illiterate, Christian mother of five who'd fallen foul of a crowd of Muslims. She was deemed to have committed blasphemy and, in a court where the only witnesses of said blasphemy hadn't actually been there, was sentenced to death. Taseer tried to help and was interviewed on a primetime TV show where the host appeared to inflame the situation by suggesting he was a west-loving liberal and had rightly been put under a fatwa. Not long later, Taseer was assassinated. Subsequently, his son was kidnapped. Meanwhile, his killer was feted across Pakistan and is still deemed a hero.
The play was compelling – not a moment was wasted – and revealing. And if this is what modern Pakistan is about, then God and Allah should join forces to help its reasonable citizens, shouted down – gunned down – by the mob. The blame game can lead to terrible things.