Live, in my view, ought to mean live. In cultural radio, it is more often euphemistic, a cover for institutional cowardice. Even colorific remarks about the red-hatted lady in row four have to be vetted in advance. Arts producers are terrified of uttering anything that might offend artists and their agents, or sound remotely spontaneous. In my studio, by way of novelty, there will not be a scrap of paper.
Improvisation is the highest form of art.
Phone and e-mail interjections from listeners at home and abroad will feed live into the proceedings, taking the agenda out of any putative control that the presenter might seek to exert, while the producer watches, mute and disarmed, from behind a glass panel. The show will go out live on the internet in webcam vision, drawing in an international public to a forum without frontiers. While others argue about elitism in the arts, my concern is that a mighty swell of populist feeling is perpetually ignored by the state or self-appointed custodians of public enlightenment. One purpose of this programme is to enfranchise audiences and encourage them to spit back the stuff they are spoon-fed. Another is to give the genteel norms of cultural discourse a jolly good shaking.