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Wealth of ideas

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 9th April 2008

The relentless downgrading of the News to a series of shocking revelations about child abuse, bearded terrorists and the ghastly incompetence of our Olympic pretensions sent me straight to the World Service where even the shortest of hourly bulletins contains enough information to remind us that life goes on beyond our own limited horizons. On Sundays, too, there’s a new evening series presented by the illustrious Bridget Kendall. In The Forum she brings together an unusual selection of guests from around the world to ‘navigate’, as she explained, ‘the cross-current of ideas’.

I suppose it’s a kind of In Our Time, World Service-style, assembling experts on world events and encouraging them to talk on issues that have different resonances across the globe. Kendall takes on the Melvyn Bragg role, shepherding her guests through the discussion. On Sunday we heard from our own Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees; the Norwegian author of bestselling novels about life in Kabul and Grozny, Asne Seierstad; and from a diplomat in Singapore, Kishore Mahbubani, who’s just written a book asserting that the Asian renaissance presents the West with the challenge of accepting that its 200-year domination of world events is at an end. Not much common ground between them, you might think. But under Kendall’s intuitive guidance the discussion segued effortlessly and insightfully (without the banal dogma-slinging of programmes like The Moral Maze) from Martin Rees’s understanding of ‘multiverses’, the galaxies as yet unseen, to the children of Grozny who have nothing better to do after curfew in the war-torn Chechnyan capital than to watch the night sky looking for luck in the form of a falling star.

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