Radio

The Dumb Waiter is a one-act play from 1957 that retains an extraordinary hold over the minds of theatre-goers. It’s set in the basement of a Birmingham restaurant where two Cockney hitmen are preparing to execute an unknown victim. A dumb waiter, or shelf on pulleys, descends from above containing requests for two-course meals. Liver and onions are on the menu. Demands for cups of tea and sago pudding are sent down. The nervous thugs start to panic as they struggle to fulfil the instructions arriving from on high. It’s an absurd situation underpinned by an authentic sense of menace and violence. These are not just clownish villains but real

It was odd listening to Jim Al-Khalili being interviewed on Radio 4 on Tuesday morning rather than the other way round. In his series The Life Scientific, Al-Khalili has developed his own brand of interviewing, encouraging his guests to talk about their work in science by leading them from personal biography —how they came to study science, what they were like at school, who influenced them — to the intricacies of their research and why we should know about it. He makes this sound so easy and natural, setting his interviewees at ease, and his listeners, too, with stories from school and university before delving into the complex ideas behind

It’s becoming clear that the travails afflicting all the major players in The Archers, Radio 4’s flagship drama, are intended by the soap’s writers (and new editor Jeremy Howe) to reflect what’s going on in the country at large, Ambridge as a microcosm of our imploding nation. As Home Farm is sold to absentee landlords with no interest in farming the land, reducing Brian and Jennifer to a terraced cottage on the green, and Ambridge’s stately home Lower Loxley Hall veers into chaos with the son and heir in jail and the business on the brink of disaster, even Brookfield, the Archers’ homestead, is standing on the edge of a

One masterpiece, one dud, and one interesting rediscovery. That’s Pinter Five. Victoria Station is a hilarious sketch which might have been turned into TV gold by the Pythons or the Two Ronnies. A radio controller needs a cabbie to collect a fare from Victoria Station, but the only driver available is a charming lunatic whose car is idling near a ‘dark park’. The cabbie already has a passenger on board, who may be a murder victim, and although he claims not to know Victoria Station he insists that he’s the best man for the job. This dotty piece of verbal slapstick feels a bit dated because cab firms no longer

Take yourself back to (or try to imagine) Christmas 1968; a year full of disturbances, dashed hopes and extreme violence at home and abroad. On 21 December, a huge explosion occurred; not, for once, a herald of catastrophe but at Cape Kennedy, where the engines of the Saturn V rocket, ‘the most powerful machine ever made’, were ignited, launching the Apollo 8 mission. Three astronauts in a tiny metal box were thrown up into space. Three days later, on Christmas Eve, they would broadcast back to the world images that would change for ever the way we see our planet. As they orbited the moon, the first astronauts to do

‘Without death,’ says Salena Godden, ‘life would be a never-ending conveyor belt of sensation.’ For her death is what gives meaning to life and to be able to imagine your own death should make you try harder to be a better person. Mrs Death Misses Death on Radio 4 (produced by Cecile Wright) is not a programme for the faint-hearted. Godden, a poet, novelist and musician, faces with robust clarity what many of us would prefer to distract ourselves from thinking about. She argues that Death is much more likely to be a woman; not the usual caricature of a hooded male figure carrying a sickle. She’s that invisible woman

You don’t need headphones to appreciate, and catch on to, the unique selling point of radio: its immediacy, its directness, that sense that someone is talking to you, and you alone. In fact, if anything, headphones take away from radio’s ability to reach out to the isolated and the lonely, to create that connection between you, the listener, and that someone else, the person behind the mic. With headphones the voice gets inside your head, but it’s not like having a conversation. That USP also explains why listening in the car works so well, creating a companionship while driving alone along a road empty of human contact, surrounded by fast-moving

I wonder what Michelle Obama, the former First Lady who remade that role in her own image, would make of Hannah’s attempts on The Archers to embody the 2018 version of an empowered, liberated woman? Does Obama secretly listen in to Ambridge each night? Has she been impressed by the soap’s attempt, via Hannah, to address the #MeToo movement? Does that explain why she blessed Radio 4 (rather than an online audio provider) with the great coup of reading herself from her new autobiography, Becoming? But first (for those unfamiliar with Hannah’s antics) let’s go back to Ambridge. She arrived on the scene as the new pig woman; Jazzer’s antithesis

Amid all the remembrance, Radio 3 came up with a simple yet effective way of reflecting on war’s impact. Threaded throughout the day on Sunday were ‘sonic’ memorials, three minutes of silence, or rather opportunities to stop and reflect. Not the music of a requiem mass, or a lonesome bugle, but the sounds of those places where the worst battles in recent history — from Antietam in America (during the Civil War) to Huaihai (between the Kuomintang and communists in China) via the Somme, Stalingrad and Afghanistan — were played out. Allan Little introduced each pause in the day’s schedule, explaining in the barest outline what happened, how many were

You may have noticed that BBC iPlayer (for radio programmes) has been replaced this week with the new BBC Sounds platform. Instead of simply finding your favourite programmes on playback, BBC Sounds will offer you the chance to personalise your listening, discover programmes recommended ‘just for you’, catch up with the latest podcasts. On Monday, James Purnell, director of radio and education at the BBC, talked up the new venture with Martha Kearney on the Today programme. ‘All of BBC audio will be at your fingertips,’ he promised. ‘We will do the hard work of getting the right programmes to you at the right time.’ ‘Won’t this involve taking money

Flies buzzing, strange rustling, crunching sounds, and then the most chilling screech you’ll have heard all week. Vultures were feeding off the carcass of a zebra in Kenya, recorded by Chris Watson. He had been up before dawn, on the look-out for a suitable carcass to attract the scavenging vultures. He was lucky to find one and clipped two microphones to the ribcage, running the cable to his recording vehicle 50 yards away. By break of day the vultures had appeared and were taking their breakfast. Watson believes that recording sound at such close quarters ‘really fires our imaginations in a unique way’. He was not the only contributor to

How very odd of Radio 4 not only to release The Ratline as a podcast before broadcasting it on the schedule in the conventional manner, but also to give its network listeners an edited-down version. It’s as if the podcast of Philippe Sands’s programme, which investigates war crimes by the Nazis, fuelled by his own family history and what he discovered while writing his book East West Street, has been given priority, and anyone who listens in the old-fashioned, switch-of-a-button way is somehow second-best and doesn’t deserve the full monty. The first episode of the ten-part series was six minutes longer online than on-air. What’s in those missing minutes, I

The most inspiring voice on radio this week belongs to Hetty Werkendam, or rather to her 15-year-old self as she talked to the BBC correspondent Patrick Gordon Walker in April 1945. He was with the British soldiers who entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and witnessed the horrors of that scene: dead bodies in piles with no one to bury them, living people lying beneath them too weak to move, or using them as pillows. Hetty was one of several children interviewed by Gordon Walker, her voice so strong and resolute and light in spirit, in spite of all that she had seen and experienced. Talking now, aged 88, to Mike

To have been a black lawyer in the deep south of America in the early 1960s would have taken a level of courage well beyond the ordinary. Chevene Bowers King was just such a man. He could have worked in the desegregated north, but instead chose to risk his life in Georgia, defending black people imprisoned on trumped-up charges and organising non-violent demonstrations to end segregation. David Morley’s two-part play on Radio 4, The Trials of CB King, took us through the blatant racism, the everyday brutality and dangerous reality for the black citizens of Albany, Georgia, where the sheriff encouraged the police to beat up the innocent purely because

Here’s a thought. Matthew Bannister, former Radio 1 controller turned presenter of programmes such as Outlook on the World Service and Radio 4’s The Last Word, has just announced that he’s leaving Outlook, which goes out several times a week, to ‘join the world of podcasting’. In fact, he’s already launched his own podcast, Folk on Foot. It’s as if he now believes that podcasting is where the exciting new challenges in audio (note, not broadcasting) can be found. We wireless-lovers should pay attention. Bannister is a radio man through and through. Does he really believe that podcasting is the future? We’re still waiting for the podcast that truly challenges

‘What can you tell me just now,’ asks Audrey Gillan. She’s talking to Tara, who’s been sleeping rough on Fournier Street in Spitalfields, close to Gillan’s home. Tara, aged 47, sounds like a man, so deep and growly is her voice, ruined by drink, cigarettes and the hardness of her life. Gillan wants to know how and why she ended up living on the street. But beyond explaining that she was slung out by her mum when she was 14 there’s little that Tara can or is prepared to tell Gillan. In Tara and George on Radio 4 (produced by Gillan and Johnny Miller) we are taken on to the

If proof were needed that radio will survive the onslaught of the new (or rather now not-so-new) digital technologies, albeit somewhat battered and slimmed down, then series like Radio 4’s Unforgettable (produced by Adam Fowler) should clinch it. Each episode is self-contained, and only 15 minutes long (the perfect length for podcasting). It’s cheap to make, requiring just a single guest, and inspired by a really simple idea — to create a conversation between a guest in the studio and someone they once knew who has died. You could make it at home, except that you probably couldn’t because an advanced editing machine is required, and an incredibly skilled operator.

There’s been a lot of fuss and many column inches written about levels of pay at the BBC, as revealed in its latest Annual Report. Who gets too much? Why are women presenters still paid less than their male counterparts? What can be done to create more equality at the BBC? But all this controversy about money and gender is a red herring, diverting attention away from what we should be far more concerned about. Quietly, without fanfare, the BBC has been changing the way it makes and delivers its programmes. As the report also reveals, BBC Worldwide, set up in the 1990s as the ‘commercial’ wing of the BBC,