The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
I know we’re all supposed to be taking advantage of the new technologies and listening to whatever we fancy on the radio whenever we like. But I reckon you have to be under 25 to really get the hang of listening by download, podcast and stream rather than at the switch of a button. When,
No wonder Clive James thought he was writing his own obituary when he was interviewed by John Wilson for the Radio 4 series, Meeting Myself Coming Back (Saturday night). Wilson played him a clip from a recent Mastermind programme on which one of the Specialist Subjects was…Clive James. ‘I was halfway between being amazed and
It’s as if James Joyce was writing for radio, as if he understood the potential of the new audio technology long before the BBC had begun to broadcast plays and poetry. All that freakish literary invention in his 1922 novel Ulysses suddenly begins to make sense when heard on air, spoken out loud, with sound
Will and Nic’s canoodling in the woods. Adam’s bashed-in head. Amy’s makeover from wholesome midwife to foul-mouthed stepdaughter. Ambridge, home to the Archers, the Grundys and of course Lynda Snell, has been transformed from a sleepy village in the heart of Middle England into a crime-ridden soap, fuelled not by the everyday happenings of ordinary
It was my first Jubilee moment — Judi Dench on Radio 4’s Today programme suddenly launching into Shakespeare mid-glam (incredibly glam) party. She was talking to Jim Naughtie at the Queen’s gala for the arts at the Royal Academy and bewailing the decline in the teaching of Shakespeare in schools. Mid-sentence, she breaks into Cleopatra’s
7 Up, the TV series first made in 1964, would never have worked on radio. Ten young boys and (only) four girls were interviewed as they set out on their lives, with the intention of checking up on them every seven years thereafter to see what might have happened to them. They’ve now reached 56
He was accused of listening too much to the ‘wrong people’, of being ‘too deferential’, not judgmental enough. Sometimes those he interviewed afterwards said that he was like ‘a ferret’, who pried too deeply into their lives, ‘looking for the facts that he wanted’. But Tony Parker, who died in 1996, gave a voice to
Listeners beware. Especially those of you who are unashamed Archers addicts. The antics of the denizens of Ambridge might seem like casual, everyday stuff, but they’ve probably been carefully designed to indoctrinate us with the ‘right’ kind of behaviour. That’s if a two-part documentary on the World Service, hosted by none other than Debbie Archer
It would never have worked on TV. Ann Widdecombe going out for a night on the town with a group of young professional women. No self-respecting binge-brunette would have allowed themselves to be seen on camera with a sexagenarian ex-MP who just happened to be off the booze for Lent. But there she was, in
It’s the weirdest thing. This obsession with the sinking of the Titanic. Go to the BBC iPlayer website and you’ll find eight programmes you can listen to now, if by chance you missed them first time round. Take Titanic: Minute by Minute on Radio 2, broadcast ‘live’ on the very same night (100 years later)
You might be thinking ‘Oh no’ as you listen to yet another trailer announcing the BBC’s latest Shakespeare season, designed to showcase England’s great playwright across radio and TV in this Olympics year. ‘Do we really need a 20-part series on Radio 4, scratching through the surprisingly few facts that are known for sure about
He’s got the perfect voice for radio, gruff and gravelly, slow and measured so you can catch every word. His new series is not, as you might expect, on 6 or 1, or even 2, but on 4. Jarvis Cocker’s Wireless Nights (late on Thursdays) is quite a coup for the former Home Service, the
Kate Chisholm looks forward to The People’s Passion on Radio 4 which explores the role of the cathedral in a modern, secular world ‘We began by wanting to do something about cathedrals and the life that goes on within them,’ recalls Christine Morgan, head of religion and ethics at BBC Radio. That was about 18
Imagine a small room, no windows, institutional cream on the walls. Bare of all decoration except for a circle of cheap chairs and the most basic of recording equipment. A gathering of people squeeze into the space — three young men, a strained-looking couple, an official-looking woman with clipboard and notes, a man in jeans
On the page a minute’s worth of words doesn’t look like much. A hundred and forty-four or thereabouts. But try spouting forth for 60 seconds on any given subject without hesitation, deviation or repetition and those 144 words become an awful lot to find, especially when they have to be summoned up at speed from
‘It’s like acting,’ says the illustrator Quentin Blake about his latest project. ‘You imagine yourself there, in that situation. You imagine you are that person.’ The first-ever children’s laureate has been taking his acute eye for gesture, for character, into hospitals, as part of the Nightingale Project. His funny, colourful, bursting-with-life paintings are now decorating
Life-changing moments are not always as dramatic as Saint Paul’s Damascene experience. Often they emerge from conversations that begin with mundane exchanges about last night’s Masterchef, the film you saw last week, the last time there was a drought. Then gradually the talk moves on to other, deeper matters. Something is said, some connection is
What took them so long? For weeks and weeks he’d been limping into the farmhouse whining about how cold he is, how tired, how he’s had enough of Tom gadding about Borsetshire selling his gruesome-sounding pork meatballs while he’s stuck on the farm trimming leeks and getting up at the crack of dawn to do
It’s a bit of a surprise to discover that my young nephews are huge fans of radio. Since Radio 4 abandoned programmes designed for children, and CBeebies disappeared from the airwaves, radio has become a kids-free zone. What on earth do they find to listen to? Why, of course, Radio 4 Extra, and especially the
Not much fuss has been made about it. We might not have realised it was happening if news of the leaving bash with its tales of uninvited guests (former staff members) had not been gossiped about in the press. But from March the BBC World Service will no longer be broadcasting from Bush House, that
He writes about the stuff you’d rather not know, prefer not to think about, pretend to ignore. But it lives on with you in the mind. It won’t let you go. By his words, the sharp, brittle, spot-on dialogue, he forces you to recognise the limitations of your experience, your understanding. Roy Williams’s new trilogy
Maybe he was asking for it. Maybe his article in the New Statesman was a subconscious attempt to undermine his brother’s authority. But what was the point of grilling David Miliband about his relationship with his brother Ed on the Today programme (Radio 4) on Monday morning? What we wanted to know was whether Miliband
No red carpet was rolled out on Sunday night when the first ever Audio Drama Awards were presented to best actor (David Tennant), best actress (Rosie Cavaliero), best drama (The Year My Mother Went Missing)…in a Hollywood-Lite ceremony at Broadcasting House. No tears were shed as the winners sought desperately to find the right words
It was uncanny, discomfiting, even a little bit alarming. He seemed to be reading my mind, as if my thoughts were being hurled back at me through the ether. Why are we so tired? Why does it feel as though time itself is speeding up, making midlife so much more nerve-wracking an experience than it
Where mostly do you listen to the radio? In the kitchen, on the M25 or M62, under the duvet, soaking in a bathtub? We’ve got used to moving around with the wireless, often listening with just half an ear, not really connecting at all, and with no opportunity to share the experience with anyone else.
The trouble with Dickens is that there’s just far too much plot. How do you make sense of his incredibly complex stories in just three hours as the BBC tried to do at Christmas with its TV version of Great Expectations? It looked fabulous but the storyline made no sense because there was no depth
‘Do you feel like crying?’ asked Shaun Keaveny on his 6 Music breakfast show this week, before replying, ‘Text us your tears.’ It was Tuesday, the first day back at work for many listeners. And Keaveny was trying to cheer us up. Then he played ‘Grey Day’ by Madness. Keaveny’s lucky. 6 Music reckons that
Since the Home Service was relaunched as Radio 4 in September 1967, the station has established itself almost as the ‘heartbeat’ of the BBC. The chance to direct, shape and enhance such a treasure-house of programmes — ranging from Farming Today to ElvenQuest via Something Understood, Classic Serial and The World Tonight — must be
It might cheer the spirits of our over-stressed EU leaders this weekend if they were allowed time out from their delicate financial machinations to listen to the Day of Christmas Music broadcast on Radio 3 on Sunday and in the other 55 countries of the European Broadcasting Union (set up in 1950 as a cultural