Growing Pains - Radio 4 Extra
GRACE Dent brings wry wit and tenderness to her stories of Growing Pains.
She's a genius choice to present what could be just a riffle through old archive footage of what it means to be a teenager down the years.
She has moved on from childhood memories peopled with the likes of Pippi Longstocking and shared a smile at her teenage self, locked up in her bedroom listening to the Smiths on repeat.
Teenager years in Carlisle were about being "a bit of a berk and going to war with your parents" - turning militant vegetarian and ruining everyone else's Sunday dinner every week.
Those were the days when she dyed her hair blue and turned her mother's hair silver and gave her wrinkles.
Cue more Morrissey and some crying.
But there was a smidgeon of Grace Dent and a wealth of evocative radio about what it was like to be a teenager growing up in the war years.
"We didn't know whether there would be a tomorrow for us," someone said.
A woman described how she had arranged to meet a soldier on a certain night. He did not show.
She met his friends and asked where he was. "He bought it over Germany," they said.
The atmosphere was straight out of old black and white films - the drone of German bombers, the shrill wail of the air raid siren.
A man looked back at his 16-year-old self caught up in a bomb at a cinema - as Bing Crosby sang.
He said he grabbed a shovel and ran to the shelter where people were trapped and screaming.
But it scared him so much that he threw down the shovel and got on his bicycle and fled.
"I should have stayed and helped, but I was 16, I had never met that before," he said.
There was a chance to hear a dramatisation of Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle and Roger McGough's poem about young love in the 1960s, Summer with Monika.
This was rich radio with tender moments.
