Faulks on Fiction

It's a shame Radcliffe & Maconie are leaving Radio 2 and going to the recently saved 6. Just when you start taking something for granted, they take it away. But that is how the world seems to work in its ongoing striving for change without improvement.

I can manage without Radio 6 but would go there for the continuing Northern droll of these two superannuated teenagers. They play a nice mix of listenable new pop music and happily find old soul and reggae classics, are frighteningly knowledgeable and welcome such stars as Nod (Holder) and Simon Armitage to their cosy club but if they are doing the weekday afternoon shift on 6, they'll be no use to me there.

At least Radio 2 is benefitting from an improved Pick of the Pops on Saturday afternoons with Tony Blackburn, at 68 years old, adding some of his anecdotes about the records from years gone by and it's always a cracker if the first hour is taken from the sixties or anytime up to the mid-70's. You can often just concentrate on the horse racing after 2 o'clock if the second hour is well beyond one's period. We will forgive his reported dismissal of early reggae records as 'rubbish' in the light of his devotion to nominating every Tamla Motown single as one of his favourites.

But the BBC have brought in Sebastian Faulks, fine writer and busy, busy man, on Saturday evenings to outline some themes in the English novel. It provides a good excuse to recycle excerpts from the costume dramas of the last several decades but has so far left the more serious reader wondering whether this is what Faulks really thinks or if he's capable of some greater insight but looked at the figure on the contract he was offered and just said, well, okay then.

By all means, he traces a changing fashion in heroes and lovers, thus far, over the generations and despite the possible and inevitable complaints from the feminist point of view, one can't really fault Faulks on his focus on definitely significant titles and authors, which have thus far been predominantly men.

But apart from the erroneous conclusion that we have reached the end of the hero in fiction, he doesn't seem to have presented a thesis. It has always seemed to commentators that they are significant enough to live at the end of a tradition. Dear old Fukuyama announced the End of History when the Berlin Wall was demolished and yet, look, twenty years on, things have kept on happening.

One lecture we were blessed with at University in about 1979 involved the lecturer comparing the history of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama to Pop Music. After Shakespeare, the fashion changed to Ben Jonson's more classical and perhaps cynical style, then Ford and suchlike produced titles like Tis Pity She's a Whore, the whole enterprise was said to have become depraved and eventually the Puritans closed the theatres down. This was supposedly a bit like the revolution that was punk rock, which removed once and for all, for most of us, the pompous ramblings of big, progressive artists. It must have seemed like the end of the world to those steeped in sixties culture but it wasn't. And now, thirty years on, we have Tinie Tempah (born, it says here, 1988 ! ) and pop music isn't over yet. In fact, last night I was hearing talk on the radio of a 'folk revival'. Not exactly 'folk', I'd say, but quaint songs played on acoustic guitars and why not.

So Sebastian isn't living at the end of history, or the end of the hero or central character, and you never know what younger people are going to come up with. But they will find something. Every other generation did. He even gave us his own Engleby that terrified me enough a few years ago, so perhaps his conclusion was a bit lazy.

But we will see what other clips he's got lined up for us. I'm sure they will include Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and that the ladies need not feel left out. I'll always prefer Katherine Mansfield to Martin Amis even though I'm always impressed by the size of the hangover he seems to be carrying. As ever, I don't see it as a gender issue but I suppose if they had asked Hilary Mantel or Sarah Waters to do it then it wouldn't have been a problem.

Well done, Seb. Thanks for trying.