In my first year at teacher training college, in a piece of cutting-edge technology, one of our literature lecturers arranged the filming of a panel discussion of a poem, the panel consisting of three students. When we viewed and analysed the discussion afterwards, several of my fellow-students told me that I was a natural in front of the camera and should consider a career in television. I knew then that I lacked the particular kind of fluency, of quickness of response, that the camera loves, and so I begged to differ.

When, several years later, the GPO (General Post Office) was searching for a new voice for its speaking clock, the headmistress of the school where Bernice worked was convinced that I would be perfect for the job. While this certainly avoided the problem of constant spontaneity, I found the thought of spending twenty-four hours a day standing in front of a microphone, saying: ‘At the third stroke, it will be eight, forty-two, and thirty seconds’, and so on, less than appealing. (Yes, I know that’s not how they really do it!) So, in the end, it was Brian Cobby who took over in 1985. Incidentally, for those of you from Britain, and of a certain age (ten years younger than me), Brian Cobby had, in a previous life, been the voice that announced: ‘5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1… Thunderbirds are go!’

Incidentally, if you have spent the last minute or two wondering why the Post Office, of all institutions, should want a speaking clock, let me enlighten you. Before the beginning of the railway age in Britain, many towns still operated on local time. A village would set its clocks and watches by, usually, the church clock. Because of the limited accuracy of most mechanical clocks, over the years all of these local times started drifting apart. When it was midday in London it might have been only 11:49 a.m. in Bristol.

The introduction of rail travel, and of timetables, made it essential for everywhere to be operated on a standardised Greenwich Mean Time. To ensure this standardisation, when the mail train arrived and the villagers gathered around the postman to get the news from London, he would announce what the time was according to his timepiece, which had been set in London. This custom is thought to be where the phrase ‘passing the time of day’ originated.

(If you want to have a look at the various generations of technology used for the speaking clock in Britain (‘Just dial T-I-M!’), check it out here.)

Probably because I lack the inventive spontaneity needed for the job, I have great admiration for those who can carry off the job of TV presenter successfully…and even more, I think, the job of radio presenter, where no body language or facial expressions can fill the gaps; radio presenters have only their voices to rely on. I often listen to interview and discussion programmes on Israel’s Reshet Bet, and have found myself, in recent months, reflecting on the contrasting styles and talents of the various presenters.

For me, one of the pleasures of the best of these programmes is that they demonstrate that, even in an Israel that is very conflicted and divided internally, it is still possible for two people to argue and disagree in a civilised way, and to remain respectful of each other. I first heard this in action on a weekly program of the early 2000s, called ‘על ימין ועל שמאל‘, ‘On the Right and the Left’, in which two national figures sat down to discuss current affairs. The figures were: on my right (on almost everyone’s right) Geula Cohen and on my left (on many people’s left) Eli Amir.

Geula Cohen had been a member of Etzel (a mainly revisionist breakaway from the mainstream pre-State underground defence force Hagana, Etzel followed a stronger line of response to Arab terror) and Lechi (which acted principally against the British Mandate forces). Cohen was Lechi’s underground radio broadcaster. After the establishment of the State, she became a politician, eventually cofounding the right-wing political party Techiya in 1979, in opposition to Camp David. She supported Jewish settlement of all parts of Eretz Yisrael, and herself briefly moved to Kiryat Arba, which is about as deep in cowboy country as you can get. She was in later life a recipient of the Israel Prize.

Eli Amir is an author and social activist. Having served as Advisor on Arab Affairs to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, he was later appointed Director General of the Youth and Aliya Department of the Jewish Agency. He repeatedly met with literary and other figures in the Arab world and advocated for co-existence, campaigning for more Israeli books to be published in the Arab world, and asking: ‘How can there be peace without us knowing each other?’

Each week, these two, whose world views and the arcs of whose lives were so different, sat in a radio studio and discussed the events of the preceding week. They never, to the best of my memory, found any significant island of agreement between them, but they always listened to each other respectfully, responded to each other’s points seriously, and parted, every week, as adversaries who recognized the right of each to disagree with the other, and who also each recognised that the other cared deeply about the country they both loved.

Something of the same spirit lives on, with, it must be said, a little less gravitas (but then we live in a very different age from the early 2000s, and certainly from the 1930s and 40s, Geula Cohen’s formative years, and even the 1950s and 60s, Eli Amir’s formative years). Currently on Reshet Bet, on Friday mornings, Emily Amrousi and Professor Yuval Elbashan jointly present a programme (‘Emily and the Professor’), in which they both discuss the week’s events and interview people in the news.

‘Emily’, a children’s author, journalist, and ex-spokesperson of the Yehuda and Shomron Council, lived for many years in Talmon, a yishuv close to Ramallah, and now lives in Jerusalem. In her childhood, her family became religious, and she grew up in a modern-orthodox, Bnei Akiva atmosphere. ‘The Professor’ is indeed a professor, of Law, and has been closely involved for 25 years with a non-profit organization advocating community and social rights for the weaker sectors in Israeli society.

Again, as with Geula Cohen and Eli Amir, Amrousi and Elbashan are (almost always) respectful of each other’s arguments, although it has to be said that the events of this year so far have put that tolerance to the test on more than one occasion. They are clearly friends, not only in the studio, and they welcome the opportunity to debate real issues in a civilized manner.

When I listen to programmes such as these, I find myself able to sustain some hope that Israeli society may be able to heal the fractures that threaten us.

This hope is nurtured in other ways as well. On Friday mornings, Omer Ben-Rubi presents a programme looking at the cultural news of the week. Ben-Rubi is not only a presenter; he is also an experienced administrator. He served as the founding manager of Reshet Bet, having previously run Galei Tzahal, the army radio station.

His culture programme is, I suspect, a uniquely Israeli phenomenon. In his introduction every week, he always gives the Hebrew calendar date, and mentions the Bible portion of the week. Last week, an unusual item could be found nestling between the segment where he invites three other observers of culture to give their recommendations for events of the forthcoming week (among them Barbie) and his playing of a recent pop release. On the day before the Shabbat when we begin reading the Book of Devarim (Deutoronomy), with Moses’ farewell speech to the nation, Ben-Rubi interviewed Micah Goodman, Israeli philosopher and a leading voice on Judaism, Zionism, the Bible, and the challenges and opportunities facing Israel and world Jewry. The subject of the interview was the message of that speech for our time, and what it teaches us about Moses as a political leader.

What is remarkable is not only that Ben-Rubi chose to include this item, but also that he gave no indication that he regarded it as anything other than a perfectly normal choice for a popular culture programme on a general public radio station in Israel.

Unfortunately, not every presenter on Reshet Bet has the same sensitivity, understanding, or knowledge. There is one particular presenter whose programme I am going to have to stop listening to, because she always makes my blood boil, and I end up shouting at the radio.

Rina Matzliach is, so I understand, a serious Israeli journalist, and presented ‘Meet the Press’ for 10 years. She has lived in Israel for over 65 years, since she was a year old. She has a BA in Israeli Literature and a Masters in Communications. She has been a broadcast journalist for 40 years. And yet…and yet.

In the last century, John Cleese made a series of management training videos which worked by demonstrating how not to do it. They are still very funny to watch, not least because they star John Cleese as the incompetent manager (in the days before he started taking himself too seriously). Every time I listen to Rina Matzliach, I find myself hoping that schools of radio journalism are recording her, so that lecturers can demonstrate to their students how not to do it.

Let me give a brief list of some of her most flagrant errors. When interviewing a guest, she constantly interrupts the guest’s answer to her last question, and frequently interrupts her co-presenter’s question with another question of her own. When interviewing a guest she knows personally, she always makes more than one personal reference, always of no relevance to the topic on which the interviewee has been invited to be interviewed. She appears never to filter her thoughts before expressing them out loud.

A couple of weeks ago, for example, she interviewed an Israeli who, with his wife, had been trapped by floods in a remote part of Nepal. They had walked a considerable distance to an area from where they were able to arrange transport back to civilization. This was so that they could return to their young children in Israel. They had, however, been forced to leave all but their essential possessions behind. He was on air to assure the listening public that the dozens of (mostly post-army) Israelis who were also trapped in the same area were well, had food and drink, and were in no danger. This must have been a tremendous comfort for parents who had lost contact with their children trapped in an area without mobile reception. Matzliach wasted a minute or two of this important interview ‘joking’ that, in their place, she would have stayed out of contact and enjoyed a longer holiday away from her children.

Matzliach frequently appears to forget that there is a radio audience of at least tens of thousands listening, and behaves as if she is at home alone. So, for example, she always sings along with the record chosen to break up the programme, despite her having, at best, a mediocre singing voice. To give another example, in a recent interview with someone she knew personally, she urged her co-presenter, on air, to ask the interviewee to send him a complimentary copy of the interviewee’s recent book (a book on a topic irrelevant to the interview).

However, what amazed me two weeks ago, was that, when her co-presenter, who is religious, mentioned that he would not be in the studio last Thursday because it was Tisha b’Av, she said: ‘Oh! Isn’t Tisha b’Av always in August?’ Maybe it is me that is being unreasonable, but it seems to me that an educated woman, with a BA in Israeli Literature, who has lived in Israel for over 60 years, should know that the Jewish religious calendar is not the same as the Gregorian solar calendar, that it includes leap-years in which an entire month is added, and that, in consequence, the timing of festivals and fast-days can vary from year to year by as much as 30 days, according to the Gregorian calendar. How can she not have noticed that Rosh Hashana is sometimes in early September and other times in early October?

It is difficult for me to escape the feeling that it is not that she does not know so much as that she has gone out of her way not to know, because she has convinced herself that there is nothing in the entirety of the Jewish religion that is worthy of her attention. She certainly makes a point of displaying her contempt for religion at every opportunity.

On the other hand, I find it very moving that this year a number of people who have never observed Tisha b’Av, and who, indeed, do not identify as religious, feel the threat of the country splitting apart is so strong that they decided to fast last Thursday.

Well, thank you for letting me get that off my chest.

All the kids and grandkids are back from their hols, but I can squeeze another week’s worth of pictures out of it. For Raphael, Storm the octopus seems to have overtaken Tiger as his constant companion, Ollie clearly loves his dad, and Tao has just been not-very-white-water rafting, taking all due precautions.