PARAGRAPH: FOUR

"A duck to water"
Tenuous, I know, but "fabulous hair!"

Problems, problems…

I was driving around on a recent Saturday morning and, for whatever reasons, I happened to tune in to Radio 2 and the Graham Norton show. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, the twinkly telly chatmeister has successfully made his transition to radio and has become an extremely entertaining broadcaster in another medium, so “Well done you!” as he might very well have put it himself. The ghost of the rather terrifying and hilarious Father Noel Furlong has long been laid to rest and in his place has appeared an “All-round entertainer” (and by that, I don’t mean that he’s put on a lot of weight), and part-time “National Treasure” which is a role that he has taken to like a duck to water. Anyway, on that particular Saturday morning, the banter was witty, the tunes were above averagely bearable, and the journey rattled along amiably enough as we headed home after an early start of cutting out the middlemen so that we could pay the over-inflated prices direct at the Farmer’s Market. Then, however, the programme moved on to a feature where listeners had written in and were asking for advice and this chap whose wife had died started asking for advice about how to deal with his eleven-year-old son with whom he had recently been having a few difficulties. Our beloved presenters did, to be honest, seem more than a tiny bit perplexed by this, but did what most of us would have done, I expect, in similar circumstances if somebody had asked us the same thing. They fumbled their way rather awkwardly through a few fairly sensible seeming thoughts, told the man what they might do if they were ever in a similar situation, talked about getting “professional” help where and if appropriate, and suggested that most things are improved if you only take the time to sit down and talk about them, all good, honest and straightforward stuff, and at least they were embarrassed enough to admit that they probably weren’t really the best people to be asking. Now, I don’t know whether any of that helped the gentleman in question, but I hope it did. Perhaps his problems at home were so acute that he really didn’t feel that he had anyone else left to turn to, or perhaps, by having his story read out on the radio his son, or some of this fellow’s friends, might have realised the extent of the problem and stepped in to help. Maybe such a thing would make the young lad see his dad as being a bit more “cool” or, given his age, a complete embarrassment, but I don’t suppose that I’ll ever know. We reached home, carefully unpacked our precious cargo, and got on with our lives. Now, I know that I probably don’t really understand the situation, and I’m sure that in those circumstances people are desperate enough to seek out any help that they can, but one thing that has remained with me ever since is that I really can’t imagine any circumstances in which I might have a deep personal problem and decide that the first and very best course of action was to email Radio 2 to get some advice about it, but then I suppose that I’m not that kind of person, but other people are so there you go. It still seems strange to me, though.