Karaoke nation

Some months ago my car radio, intermittent for some time, stopped working altogether. I could get a static laden AM signal but no FM. I don't drive a lot and didn't especially miss it but a couple of weeks ago I discovered the aerial was missing. Replacing it was simple and now I can listen to clear a clear AM signal and a slightly crackly FM.

Music in the car is frustrating unless I know it well. I drive a Peugeot, not a Rolls Royce, and the lower frequencies are lost in engine noise and tyre rumble so I have to fill in the bass lines myself. For this reason I listen to talk radio in preference and if I'm driving to a 9 o'clock start this means the news. I oscillate between Radio Brain - serious items about the economy, a dying eco-system and politicians on the make - and Radio Bloke - sport and stories about celebrities I've barely heard of.

I have long felt that our obsession, in the UK at least, with 'celebrities' does nothing for our economic plight. Reality TV ( Big Brother being a prime example) and karaoke programmes, like the recent 'search' for a Dorothy to be the star of a West End staging of The Wizard of Oz, give hope to a whole generation of people whose sole game plan is to become famous and then rich off the back of that fame. Why bother working hard at school when, with a little make-up and the talent you know you have in spades, you can sing your way to success. And if you can't sing, well, just being witty and pretty ought to be enough. Let sociologists worry about the devaluation of celebrity status that comes with there being so many celebs.

Wednesday saw the end of a project in a seaside primary school that has gone on for some months. The sun shone and the outdoor play was, somewhat against the odds it must be admitted, a great success withessed by many smiling parents whose behaviour was a credit to their offspring. Afterwards there was to be a steel band from a local high school. Instead we were treated to a small group of girls taking it in turns to sing along to a backing track.

Now there is nothing wrong in that. They had lovely voices and it was very good of them to come and enhance the event. But this isn't an extra-curricular activity. They do this as part of a course of study.

I used to think it was just the high school where I teach woodwind that took performing arts just a little too seriously but it seems to be endemic. You can't really blame the TV companies. Programmes about plumbing and engineering that appeal to the young? The X-Factory? Charisma transplants for nerdy inventors? My glove is on the floor if anyone would like to pick it up.

But perhaps I'm just failing to adapt to changing times and a day will come when we are all celebrated, as Andy Warhol predicted. Still, I can't help wondering who will be left to build, manufacture, repair or even grow anything. Will anyone still know how?

The Soundtrack to Your Life

8.45 am, the local health centre. I am still in shock at having got an appointment for the same morning I made the call and don't feel fully awake. I prefer a gentle start to the day, however early I have to set my alarm to get it, along with a second cup of tea. Some time after 9 o'clock I realise the waiting room has pop music playing. It's been a while since I've seen a doctor and this surprises me. I am used to noise in libraries nowadays, although they haven't started playing music yet, but a disco beat in a medical facility is a new one on me.

The DJ tells me I am listening to Heart FM. I've heard of this station - it isn't just for hospitals - but am not a regular listener. She (or he? are there two of them?) is playing some kind of 'guess the year' game with the audience of which I am now a member. "The soundtrack to your life," she tells me in that happy pop-radio voice. I wonder why they still do this when the answer is only a click of the mouse away. I look around at the others waiting to be seen by the doctor. The receptionist apart, there doesn't appear to be anyone here under fifty and no one is visibly enjoying the disco beat, even if it comes from some time in the early 1980s. I like the music of Sting well enough but 'Every Breath You Take' sounds singularly inappropriate in the present circumstances. If I didn't know better I would think the DJ was taking the micky. I can't have been the only one in the room who just wanted some head space.

Now it's the Eurhythmics and Annie Lennox singing 'Sweet dreams are made of this'. The thick synth bass is almost too much. I usually hate listening to inane presenters waffle endlessly between tracks but the speculation of her listeners as to whether the year is 1982 or 1983 comes as a relief. Spandau Ballet arrive a little later with 'True' (have you guessed the year yet?). It's an anodyne song but at least it's only a dance number if you're feeling smoochy.

Finally, at 9.40am (God bless the NHS) I get to see a doctor. I must have missed the part where the year is revealed. That must have been while I was trying to drown out the din by playing arpeggios in my head. As I leave the building five minutes later the couple in their 80s, who have been waiting almost as long as me, still appear baffled by the benefits of technology as implemented by well meaning managers busily paving the road to Hell with their good intentions. Perhaps the manager who came up with this particular idea should come and attempt an early morning sing-song going. 'Roll Out the Barrel' or 'Bohemian Rhapsody' perhaps? Maybe they could try a line-dancing session and gauge the response.

The Eurhythmics may have formed part of the soundtrack to my life but then so has silence. Even in my early twenties, when feeling the worse for wear in the morning I know which I preferred. Nothing in the intervening years has made me change my mind. I happen to know that, as well as Heart FM, there is an entire genre of 'healing sounds' available on CD but silence is so much cheaper and far less likely to irritate. Please let silence be, if not the soundtrack to my whole life, at least the soundtrack to my doctor's waiting room.

Of birds and Bach

What's your favourite sound? I have many and would have found that a very difficult question to answer until some years ago when something very pleasant, but completely unexpected, happened. At the time I was working in a number of schools in Norwich and Norfolk and spending far too long in my car driving between them. The car was not a great place to be and this was largely because it was filled with the sound of its driver cursing other road users for clogging up the roads. One day I was looking for something on the radio to take my mind off yet another stressful journey when I came across a station broadcasting birdsong. It turned out that the soon-to-be-launched Classic FM was using the sounds of birds for the purpose of testing its signal.

I was reminded of this when I woke this morning. Although I live close to the city centre my bedroom looks out over the well established gardens of large Victorian houses. The trees are many and various making for a habitat that supports a respectable population of birds. I've seen plenty of sparrows, robins, blackbirds and blue-tits as well as woodpeckers, magpies, pigeons and collared doves. A heron visits occasionally, to clear urban ponds of fish, along with a raptor of some kind that I'm told is after the pigeons.

As the dark and dreary winter drags on, one compensation is that one does not need to rise very early in order to hear the dawn chorus. But a city dawn chorus in February is no substitute for a forest in June, however leafy the streets and gardens. When I was studying for a diploma I was required to harmonise Bach chorals from which one or more parts had been removed. (It's a kind of Sudoku for musical theorists - puzzling, satisfying when completed and there's a vague hope that it's doing some good.) Like those incomplete chorals February's dawn chorus seems too thin, missing the parts played by birds holidaying elsewhere and lacking the majestic fullness of sound that a bigger population would provide. Roll on summer and holidays out of town.