Born in Dundee, Eddie Mair turned down a place at university to work at Radio Tay, a local station where he started presenting aged 17. In 1987 Mair joined the BBC, working on Good Morning Scotland, travel programme Breakaway, and BBC 5 Live, where he presented the news programme Midday with Mair. His combative interviews with Boris Johnson have twice made headlines: in March 2013 when he stood in on The Andrew Marr Show, and in June this year on Radio 4. Mair currently hosts R4’s daily news and current affairs programme PM and occasionally presents Newsnight. His memoir A Good Face for Radio: Confessions of a Radio Head (Little, Brown, £18.99) is published on 2 November.
1 | Film
Il permesso (Dir: Claudio Amendola, 2017)
The Regent Street cinema is a sashay away from Broadcasting House and has a history so long it makes the BBC seem like a startup. It’s the place in the UK that showed the first motion picture, and it’s a handy retreat for me, now beautifully refurbished (the cinema, not me). I greatly enjoyed an Italian film Il permesso there. Four prisoners get a 48-hour pass in Rome with hilarious and tragic consequences. It’s a simple premise executed with style. There was a selfish git texting during the film. I shushed him in bad Italian.
2 | Audiobook
How Not to Be a Boy by Robert Webb
The chance to “read” when I otherwise couldn’t is a bracing use of technology. Robert Webb’s How Not to Be a Boy rightly won plaudits for its insights into how society tries to groom men and boys to be “alphas”. But it’s also frequently very funny: I almost drove off the road as he relayed a tale of playing chess against an opponent with scant regard for the rules. Hillary Clinton’s audiobook is also more enjoyable than I’d expected. And the audio version means you get to hear her saying “pantsuit”.
3 | Art
Dan Colen: Sweet Liberty, Newport Street Gallery, London SE11
This exhibition made me laugh. It has eye-popping installations around each corner, and some of them can be previewed thanks to cartoon-shaped cutout holes in the walls. The one piece which requires the exhibition to carry an adults-only warning is so lifelike I couldn’t be sure for a while it wasn’t a real person. The gallery has something even brighter than Pharmacy2, the Damien Hirst/Mark Hix restaurant next door, and the price tag is lower.
4 | Podcast
Here’s the Thing, WNYC
Podcasts, for all their hipness, still worry me. All that content yet many people still struggle to understand how to receive them. Once they’re in, they’re hooked, but I know that many PM listeners find podcasts to be a walled garden. Alec Baldwin’s Here’s the Thing is, on the face of it, just the star talking to people who interest him. His interests cover a wide range so the cast list is never predictable. No doubt he has a stellar contacts book but what he does with it is the impressive thing. The Billy Joel edition has them riffing at the piano (Alec likes to sing), and with Elaine Stritch there’s respect and melancholy and a surprise appearance from her patient assistant. Plus she tells the funniest story I’ve heard in a podcast, about a memorable moment in any woman’s life, which took place for her on stage.
5 | Documentary
The Reagan Show (Dir: Pacho Velez, Sierra Pettengill, 2017)
The inability to watch a film in any cinema without encountering people who behave as if they’re in their own living rooms – or bathrooms – means I generally avoid the big screen. Curzon do a home-cinema option offering current releases streamed into your own home via tablet or laptop. I caught this all-archive documentary there, which was a chance to wallow in the 80s, like the Fergie character in Channel 4’s excellent The Windsors. A little short on insight, perhaps, and it seems to reach unnecessarily for Trumpian comparisons (there’s a clip of Reagan promising to “make America great again”). Best are the oodles of off-camera asides the president indulges in, and an opportunity to wonder again about Nancy.
6 | Radio
Steve Allen, LBC
Not everyone’s cup of builder’s, Allen continues to defy all norms of the medium with his early breakfast show. I first discovered him about 10 years ago, though his pedigree goes back almost to the station’s origins. Alone at the mic, without recourse to callers, Steve weaves his life and sometimes trenchant views on the lives of others into a frequently hilarious audio tapestry. In a medium which mourns the passing of its handful of true originals, here remains Steve, doing it his way. A trip to the supermarket can provide 20 minutes of material, and his recent hospitalisation has sustained his audience for weeks. The lesson for us all is don’t put a hot halogen oven on the floor. With Steve, followed by Nick Ferrari, the station has two radio geniuses to start the day.
7 | TV
This won me over despite being a fantasy: a genre I can never normally get into. Game of Thrones is a closed book despite giving several episodes a try. The Good Place is a comedy created by Michael Schur (the US version of The Office and Parks and Recreation). It’s an afterlife comedy that twists and turns, especially in the final episode of season one. Somehow they’ve sustained and improved it as season two continues. It also includes a chance to enjoy Ted Danson outside Curb Your Enthusiasm.
