As if on cue, Lemn Sissay’s new series for Radio 4 tackles all those questions we would rather ignore in this season of good cheer and overindulgence. He starts out with a programme about homelessness, reminding us that the Christmas story begins with a young unmarried couple, ostracised because she’s pregnant and her current partner
‘I like not knowing why I like it,’ declared Fiona Shaw, the actress, about Georgia O’Keeffe’s extraordinary blast of colour, ‘Lake George, Coat and Red’. O’Keeffe was inspired by the lake in upstate New York but there’s no discernible lake on the canvas and no coat, although there is plenty of red. When Shaw is
It was created in November 1957, a year before the BBC’s fabled Radiophonic Workshop, and was far more influential in shaping the development of electronic music, yet the Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES) is now virtually unknown even in Poland. Radio 3’s feature on Sunday night, Poles Apart (produced by Andrew Carter), made the case
There’s nothing like a nice bit of death on a Sunday evening. Radio 4 originally transmit their obituary programme Last Word on Friday afternoons, but I love listening to the repeat. Sunday at 8.30 p.m. is the perfect time — the ending of people’s lives at the ending of the week. The stresses of Monday
Some listeners will have had quite a shock first thing on Monday. Turning on at six to Classic FM they would have heard a familiar voice but not quite the one they expected. In yet another surprising turn of events, John Humphrys, the fox terrier of news broadcasting, has just completed a stint on Classic
It is 50 years since Ronald Blythe published Akenfield, his melancholy portrait of a Suffolk village on the cusp of dramatic change. Akenfield was actually a composite of two real villages, Charsfield and Debach, and Blythe’s oral history was a patchwork created from about 50 conversations — with figures including a pig-farming colonel, the over-stretched
There was something really creepy about listening to the ten-minute countryside podcast released last weekend by Radio 4 supposedly transporting us to Marneys Field in Ambridge. Two worlds colliding. The fake countryside of Borsetshire was transfigured — no longer pretending to exist but existing, as if to make us all pretend we believe in it
This Changeling Self, Radio 4’s lead drama this week, clearly ought to have gone out in August. It’s set — and was recorded — at the Edinburgh Festival and would have been a gift to marketing. ‘I love the festival!’ coos She. ‘All these millions of conversations, listen, listen, oh and stories, lots of stories,
Radio 4, how do I love thee? Rather as one loves the flocked wallpaper that came with the house. It isn’t what one would have chosen — but it is home. Yes, even when plangent piano music indicates a meaningful drama is about to begin. Yes, even when said drama is a woefully wooden effort
What else is there to write about in the week that John Humphrys, that titan of the BBC airwaves, retires from his duties on the Today programme? Love or hate his terrier-like style of interviewing — baiting and occasionally biting his victims metaphorically on air — there’s no denying his stature as a news broadcaster
There were so many ear-catching moments in Peter Hennessy’s series for Radio 4, Winds of Change, adapted from his new book by Libby Spurrier and produced by Simon Elmes. Harold Wilson answering a journalist’s question after a sleepless night while awaiting the results of the 1964 election, quizzical, cheeky and so quick off the mark.
It’s such a relief to turn on the radio and hear the voice of Neil MacGregor. That reasoned authority, his deep knowledge of history and how things have come to be as they are, his measured common sense and ability to see round an argument or story. He’s like the voice of how things used
I first heard Lemn Sissay talking about his childhood experiences on Radio 4 in 2009. At that time he was still fighting Wigan social services for sight of the official dossier on his years as a child in care, fostered at first and then dumped back in the system and institutionalised in care homes and
The madeleine upon which Proust’s seven-volume epic In Search of Lost Time pivots makes its significant appearance after just 18 minutes in the new Radio 4 adaptation — with which, if you’re not obsessed with the Ashes or holed up with the family in some dank seaside cottage, you can while away this bank holiday
Maybe the equality inspectors at the corporation didn’t get the chance to vet Richard Littlejohn’s series for Radio 2, The Years that Changed Britain Forever, before it was broadcast on Sunday. Maybe the first programme (produced by Jodie Keane) was an accurate reflection of the year it focused on, 1972. But the most striking thing
By the age of eight Vaira Vike-Freiberga had learnt that life was both ‘very strange and very unfair’. Her baby sister had died from pneumonia the previous year because of the harsh conditions of life in a refugee camp in Germany (this was late 1944 and her family had fled their native Latvia for fear
Every so often an idea for a show will come along that is perfect, and therefore should never be made. A sitcom based on Julian Assange’s time in the Ecuadorian embassy. Or a gender-flipped version of What Women Want. These are concepts to treasure, to return to, to discuss with friends. Once made flesh though,
Television has the pictures but the most spine-tingling moments in the recordings from the Apollo space missions are the bursts of crackling conversation between the spacecraft and mission control. Never a word wasted, absolute precision and the most surprising clarity even when there are only seconds to spare before total disaster is averted. The wonderful
One of the advantages that podcasts have over the scheduled array of programmes is the space that can be given to a subject, turning what would have been a one-off into a whole series sometimes three or four hours long. This can be offputting. Who has the time to give so much to one programme?
There’s been a Dimbleby on air since before I was born but last Friday saw the end of that era when Jonathan retired as chairman of Radio 4’s Any Questions after 32 years. It’s a bit like imagining life in Britain once the Queen dies. The Dimbleby family has been intertwined with the history of
