Radio
‘We will know one day why it happened,’ said the mother of Helga Mosey.
‘We will know one day why it happened,’ said the mother of Helga Mosey. Helga was just 19 when she was killed in the bomb that destroyed PanAm flight 103 as it flew over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on the night of 21 December 1988. Mrs Mosey was being interviewed the day after, doorstepped at her home in the Midlands by several news teams anxious for a story, a reaction, a headline.
This week’s Archive on 4 was the first in a series, ‘A Life Less Ordinary’, which is not so much reliving history as looking back at the...
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That interview with Kenneth Clarke, QC, was not so much a disaster for his political career as yet another knockout blow to the possibility of hearing honest answers from leading politicians.
That interview with Kenneth Clarke, QC, was not so much a disaster for his political career as yet another knockout blow to the possibility of hearing honest answers from leading politicians. Who now will be prepared to go ‘live’ on radio to talk about sensitive policies?
I didn’t catch the conversation in real time, when the Justice Minister’s comments on rape and how it should be punished might have sounded much more appallingly insensitive (most of the reports of what he actually said have been wildly inaccurate). Listening to it later, after the furore had erupted, the person who came...
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What are we supposed to make of those odd pictures of Osama bin Laden sitting crouched in a dingy, undecorated concrete room watching something blurred on a small TV screen? Is this really the face of jihadist evil? These were the questions behind this week’s provoking 15-minute drama in the From Fact to Fiction slot on Saturday (Radio 4).
What are we supposed to make of those odd pictures of Osama bin Laden sitting crouched in a dingy, undecorated concrete room watching something blurred on a small TV screen? Is this really the face of jihadist evil? These were the questions behind this week’s provoking 15-minute drama in the From Fact to Fiction slot on Saturday (Radio 4). Christopher William Hill’s task was to take an item of news from the past seven days and make a drama out of it. He couldn’t have been given a better week to cover. The dripfeed of pictures from the bin Laden...
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‘She hung up and ended the interview,’ said John Humphrys on Saturday morning’s Today programme (Radio 4), sounding rather bemused.
‘She hung up and ended the interview,’ said John Humphrys on Saturday morning’s Today programme (Radio 4), sounding rather bemused. Had he really been cut off mid-round? The battle not yet won. He’d just been talking to Reem Haddad, director of Syrian state television and also, or so the BBC’s website declares, a spokesperson for the Syrian administration (an odd combination of roles, one might think).
Haddad had questioned Humphrys’s use of the number ‘500-odd’ persons as having been killed by state troops during the current uprising in Homs and Deraa. ‘What lovely numbers you give me,’ she said. Humphrys...
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Trust a radio critic, she who is paid to listen, not to rely on the wireless set in her car for information when stuck on a highland road miles from anywhere in a jam that stretches far into the horizon in both directions.
Trust a radio critic, she who is paid to listen, not to rely on the wireless set in her car for information when stuck on a highland road miles from anywhere in a jam that stretches far into the horizon in both directions. But when a forest fire closed the road we were travelling on back across the mountains I realised I hadn’t a clue how to retune our southbound radio from the preset buttons and so couldn’t find the local station, Moray Firth Radio. After three hours, in the gloaming, we turned back along the road we had travelled....
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Five clever updates of Old Testament stories filled Radio 3’s late-night speech slot this week and revealed just how difficult it is to make these stories work in a contemporary setting.
Five clever updates of Old Testament stories filled Radio 3’s late-night speech slot this week and revealed just how difficult it is to make these stories work in a contemporary setting. Without the cadences of the Authorised Version, the rigour of the language, its powerful rhetoric but also its inflated poetic style, Noah and his ark, or Samson and Delilah, can appear quite ridiculous.
How do you make sense of miracles in our enlightened times? A young man who works in a B&Q DIY store follows a ‘vision’ and saves his family from a flood in Lewisham by building...
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