Faber & Faber

'Hoorah! A dazzling new novel has appeared featuring a subject hitherto unknown to quality fiction, radio soap opera', began the review in the Spectator before calling it a 'masterpiece'. For the Independent, 'this tale of a radio soap makes post-war Britain sparkle'.

Revolving around the makers of a daily radio soap, and the listeners who religiously tune in, Paul Binding's My Cousin the Writer evokes a 1950s Britain of afternoon tea, National Service and rock 'n' roll. It's an era the author remembers well and with great fondness, but how much was it a case of life imitating art, or art imitating life?

My Cousin the Writer began with my having a mental picture of three people in a modest sitting-room at tea-time listening to a favourite programme on a Bakelite radiogram. Two of them were mother and young son, the other a relation of theirs, a youth, in his own estimation superior to this household but, despite himself, every bit as held by the radio serial as the others. Perhaps - for this was clearly the Fifties - he had been, to his chagrin, rejected for National Service for health reasons, and the programme was a kind of restorative for him.

Concentrating a little more on the scene I realised that the programme so absorbing the trio could only be Mrs Dale’s Diary (later The Dales). It had had an enormous significance for myself at (roughly) this period since I had a familial connection with it. It is hard to over-estimate the role of this soap-opera, for many years unique of its kind, in British life. Though it was about as far away from traditional masculine domains as it could be, practically every boy at my school not only knew about it but was familiar with its ongoing characters and situations. For their mothers listened, and it coincided with afternoon tea, and its ‘repeats’ with morning coffee. It thus was as much a part of middle-class domestic life as, say, watering the potted plants (cyclamens mostly) in the window-sills or hoovering the bedrooms.

Obviously, my own association with it being what it was, I couldn’t call the programme in my novel Mrs Dale’s Diary, ‘an everyday story’ of life in a doctor’s family (though Dr Dale seemed to do remarkably little doctoring). Mine would be The Parkers, and deal with the family of another fixture in conventional society, the Vicar. One of the points of the real radio programme was its niceness (there simply is no better, more accurate word) - hard to think one’s way back into that now, in view of the issue-related, often emotional, and almost as often lurid goings-on that fill EastEnders or Hollyoaks.

In the later phase of the programme’s history - after a change of actors for Mrs Dale herself, and a change in setting from the Outer London suburb of Parkwood Hill to a New Town, Exton - attempts were made to be rather more inclusive of human experience, so we did meet those who had forsaken the strict path of respectability. After all British society itself was not just changing but was declaredly desirous of change.

Ironically a lot of the serial’s savour (and concomitant popularity) disappeared when it ceased to be so determinedly nice. In a sense the decision of the producers and script-writers to obey the demands of the BBC for modernity was a kind of betrayal of what had previously animated and underpinned Mrs Dale, but which also makes it - when one has the opportunity of listening to an episode again - now so claustrophobic and flat (even, or especially, when, as it felt regularly obliged to, it ventured into high comedy or even farce). We value niceness at times of crisis (or after the traumas of war and austerity), but it is quite insufficient as a desideratum; it leaves too much unaccounted for, excluded.

My Cousin the Writer is the book of mine I like the best, partly, I suppose, because the writing of it was so richly enjoyable. Early on I decided to make it essentially a compilation of documents purportedly from the times in which it was set but linked by a confession by the central figure, Bruno Armitage, the youth turned down for National Service. Therefore I wrote extracts from Parkers scripts, and from contemporaneous magazines, as well as more personal pieces employing where need-be the vocabulary of the period. Doing so enabled me to obtain a virtually continuous double-take on my subject matter, both from inside it as an inhabitant of the Fifties, and from outside, with the saddened or amused eyes and ears of the 21st century.

Also I felt - and still feel - peculiarly close to poor Bruno, a closeness only strengthened by those - very complimentary - reviewers who saw him as ‘odious’, and ‘stupid’ into the bargain. Well, I won’t deny that at times he is both. Yet ... but to say more here would be to venture into my own private life, and one of the objects of my quasi-documentary approach was to render doing this impossible. Using quotations from artefacts would surely make My Cousin the Writer a free-standing artefact itself. Which is what I hope it is.