He puts them in the ring without their habitual protective armoury to see how their different

He puts them in the ring without their habitual protective armoury, to see how their different versions of events measure up Second, he refines a potentially confusing mix of voices. The book forsakes the casual chaos of a turning radio dial for the well-choreographed order of an imaginary round-table discussion.What emerges is a strange and intriguing parallel universe, a place where tabloid showbiz editors talk intelligently and in sentences, and the wisdom of the ages comes from the mouth of Simon Bates. But the most gripping moments in The Nation’s Favourite come when its miasma of conflicting egos is suddenly shot through with the real stink of fear. A compelling momentum begins to build up as different streams of language – the calculated outrageousness of self-aggrandising broadcasters, the anodyne cruelty of the official memo, the fatal innocence of focus-group judgements – come together in a single river.In the journalist’s phrase book, the words “I think it would work really well as a question-and-answer” are usually shorthand for “I can’t be bothered to write it properly”, but Garfield’s seemingly random method encodes considerable amounts of work.

The format – all direct speech, like a screenplay without stage directions – takes a bit of getting used to. The sudden cuts between edited interviews, radio transcripts and overheard meetings are hard to keep pace with, but gradually the reader learns to stop trying. The challenge for Garfield was that, whereas there was great novelty value in encouraging his wrestlers to speak for themselves, most leading characters in this serpentine saga of BBC bloodletting rarely do anything but.
His book’s real achievement is to make an asset out of what should have been its biggest problem: the fact that its highlights have already undergone endless public rehearsal. The value and pertinence of their testimony was not diminished by its occasionally rather tangential relationship to the truth. That sense of lumbering behemoths awakened is felt again in The Nation’s Favourite.

SIMON GARFIELD’S previous book, The Wrestling, corralled the surviving representatives of a dying breed in a well-appointed paddock and allowed them to have their say about what they did. This time the ancien regime of Radio 1 emerges from the bin- liner of history – former heavyweights such as Dave Lee Travis and Simon Bates, so callously swept aside by new broom Matthew Bannister in the brutal mid-Nineties purge which is the book’s starting point. Those who once trod the boards of gladiatorial endeavour on ITV’s Saturday grappling showcase emerged from the shadows of history with a brawny and endearing swagger. Your grave is in Argyllamong the daffodils beside a treefeathery and green. A stream runs by,varying and oral, and your willbecomes a part of it, as the azure skytrembles within it, not Canadian butthe brilliant sparklings of pure Highland light.From Selected Poems (Carcanet, 1985). Theydiedin Canada and Africa with God,their mouths tasting of exile and of spray.But you remained.

His own music is heard throughout his big bulk of verse, and now that he’s gone so suddely (just weeks from diagnosis of the cancer to his death), I think we will all hear its distinctiveness more clearly One last wry thought – the Bible got him at last. Exactly three score years and ten.Angus CalderIain Crichton Smith (Iain Mac A’Ghobhainn), poet: born Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides 1 January 1928; FRSL 1971; OBE 1980; married 1977 Donalda Gillies Logan (two stepsons); died Taynuilt, Argyll 15 October 1998.All Our AncestorsAll our ancestors have gone abroad.Their boots have other suns on them. Taking both languages together, some dozen volumes of short stories More than a dozen books of verse in English alone He wrote compulsively, habitually. He did not like revising, and said that he had barely touched even “Deer on the High Hills”. In fact, it is the frankness and freshness of all his work which guarantees its durability. A vestigial Free-Church-like discipline reined back his surge of language, along with the technical rigous of the Gaelic verse tradition.

Perhaps In the Middle of the Wood (1987) will come to seem his most remarkable achievement in prose. Like Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, it derives directly from a phase of paranoia, which in Crichton Smith’s case actually led to a spell in a mental hospital.Iain Crichton Smith, I think, really didn’t set very great store by his English prose fiction, though now that Alan Warner has made Oban world- famous in fiction, it is worth noting that The Tenement (1985) uses that unpropitious locality very effectively years before Morvern Callar was dreamt of. It was simply and directly written, usually out of what he knew at first hand – though An Honourable Death (1992) is very successful in recreating the life of General Sir Hector Macdonald, the crofter’s son who became a great imperial war hero and killed himself on his way to face army proceedings connected with his alleged interference with young boys. One remembers from Crichton Smith’s novels not plot, but an atmosphere of friendly attention to fellow-humanity, expressed in the title of one of his best, A Field Full of Folk (1982). (In my last conversation with him, on the phone three weeks ago, I asked him if it was true that he had once reviewed 50 detective stories in a single weekend Pause Hint of a chuckle. “I think it was only 26.”) His own fiction, however, did not involve fancy plotting. / Forgive the distance, let the transient journey / on delicate ice not tragical appear / for stars are starry and the rain is rainy, / the stone is stony and the sun is sunny, / the deer step out in isolated air.”His first novel, Consider the Lilies, published in 1968, about an old lady in the Highland Clearances, is now reprinted as a classic and has been much used in schools He wrote novels, he said, to fill in the gaps between poems He was addicted to detective fiction.