Andrew Roberts seems to have cornered the Bonaparte market, what with his BBC Two series on Wednesdays (see preview, right) and Napoleon: the Man and the Myths all this week on Radio 4. What’s more, he is firmly rebranding the man we’ve been brought up to think of as the Little Emperor, the tiny tyrant. Roberts is definite on this. The great British cartoonists of the day, Gillray, Cruikshank and their ilk, misled us. Napoleon was no joke.
He was France’s greatest ruler, Roberts says, but misunderstood. He was an intellectual, a champion of science, admired by Goethe and Beethoven and, definitely, not small. Napoleon was of average height for the times, he said, at 5ft 6in a lot taller than Nelson. When I heard this I had a flashback to taking my younger sons to Apsley House, that living monument to Napoleon’s conqueror, the Duke of Wellington and, on inspecting the Duke’s uniform in a showcase, the pre-growth-spurt 12-year-old said “That would fit me” but as he also said it about Henry VIII’s armour in the Tower of London I put it down to how we try to step into history by trying on its clothes. I will omit their reflections on Henry’s codpiece.
Time changes our perspectives on history but a good historian like Roberts always takes us back to the documents. Extracts from Napoleon’s diaries are read and passages from letters by William Cobbett and Madame de Staël, his disapproving contemporaries, are given careful voice too, for this is an exactly measured series, produced by Susan Marling and Victoria Ferran for independents Just Radio. I wish it were in the Friday evening omnibus slot instead of the lumbering Home Front, an awkward coupling of fact and fiction chronicling the First World War day by day, year by year, as seen from Folkestone. That probably looked better on paper than it’s turned out on air. This, on the other hand, is grown-up radio.
I love Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, a romance that started when I did it for A-level and learned the great monologue about duelling for my party piece. I admired José Ferrer playing him in the 1950 Stanley Kramer film, I adored Gérard Depardieu in the glorious 1990 Jean-Paul Rappeneau movie. Which sturdy earnest schoolgirl would not carry a lifelong torch for the world’s greatest unknown lover? The radio version, going out all week in Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour drama slot, is bustling and colourful. Tom Burke as Cyrano, the wit, poet and philosopher cursed with a nose too big to make him handsome, has such a lovely voice that his nose doesn’t matter. The adaptation by Glyn Maxwell is clever, faithful. But that essential nose is somehow missing.
Michael Grade is one of life’s best storytellers. He can make an anecdote into a mini-play, do all the voices, deliver a punchline with the assurance of a Les Dawson or a Frank Muir (depending on which anecdote it is). One to One, his new Radio 4 Tuesday morning series, reveals his shortcomings as an interviewer. His theme is risk, the first interviewee was Kolbassia Haoussou who came to this country from Chad, a political prisoner who escaped, swam to Cameroon, walked miles, begged on the streets. He gambled his last coin on a bet, won enough money to get him on a boat and smuggled into Britain. He fetched up in Croydon, started a new life. Then, 10 years later, he went back to Chad, to see what remained of his family. Risk, as you may deduce, attended his every step. He’s 40 now. But what did he do to be imprisoned, how long was the journey from prison to Croydon, what does he do now? Maybe all those details had to be kept vague, but the conversation wasn’t helped by Grade asking so many questions that contained their own answers.
Dame Esther Rantzen was Eddie Mair’s guest on Monday’s The Robert Peston Interview Show (with Eddie Mair). This is Radio 4’s summer cabaret, each of the named presenters picking a guest whose name is kept secret from the other until the moment the show is recorded. Mair made a big thing of his surprise, with a long, hint-filled introduction, saying his guest would be Marmite, i.e. some would love her, others not. Peston greeted her with delight, saying her show That’s Life had been big in his childhood. Dame Esther responded with grace, as she did throughout, even as Mair kept offering her both flattery and therapy while Peston stayed beadily pertinent. Esther won, of course. She always does.