Today

25 Aug 2022
Why we must defend Radio 3 from threatened cuts

Who doesn’t love Eurovision? All that razzmatazz. The ghastly frocks and gloopy pop songs, the false bonhomie and bare-faced bias when the voting comes around. It’s an irresistible annual event, guaranteed to put a smile on your face and provide the pretence that we are all one happy European family. But all that showbiz comes at a cost (€6.2 million, and rising), with the host country’s broadcaster expected to cough up about one-third of that. What might have to be lost by the cash-strapped Corporation in the next year, or curtailed, to ensure that we put on the biggest and best show ever next year? The BBC budget has become a hot topic in recent weeks. Cuts are in the air, with the forthcoming review into the licence fee still not announced because of the current parliamentary hiatus.

Why we must defend Radio 3 from threatened cuts

Thursday

3 Jun 2021
A mighty contest from trivial things — the quarrel between Alexander Pope and Edmund Curll

Rapid technological advance, a dark underworld of uncensored publishing, a threatened rupture with Scotland, even fears of a new outbreak of plague. Close scrutiny of the first few decades of the 18th century reveals some startling (and oddly reassuring) parallels with our own trying times. In his new book, Pat Rogers, an expert on the writings of Alexander Pope and much else, resurrects what you might think was an obscure battle over copyright between Pope and the Grub Street bookseller and printer Edmund Curll. Their quarrel, though, becomes a prism through which Rogers captures the upheavals, hubbub and stench but, above all, the wit of that period, when words could have the explosive impact of hand grenades.

A mighty contest from trivial things — the quarrel between Alexander Pope and Edmund Curll

Thursday

26 Nov 2020
Maggi Hambling’s Wollstonecraft statue is hideous but fitting

Frankly, it is rather hideous — but also quite wonderful, shimmering against the weak blue of a late November sky. The new statue ‘for’ Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97), the radical writer, journalist, teacher and novelist, had drawn quite a crowd to Newington Green in north London when I went to see it. They were gathered round it, puzzled and questioning, trying to work out what to think of the tiny figure on top, the garish silvery finish, the heaving bulbous mass below. The memorial, designed by the sculptor Maggi Hambling, has been vilified since its unveiling a few weeks ago by critics who have focused on the nude female figure, bothered by the beautifully styled tits and perhaps perturbed by the very obvious bush of pubic hair.

Maggi Hambling’s Wollstonecraft statue is hideous but fitting

Saturday

1 Feb 2020
The comfort of building your own coffin

H.G. Wells got it right in his comic novel The History of Mr Polly, where the wake is so much more fun than the wedding breakfast. How often have you come home from a wedding feeling slightly nauseous from an overdose of cheap champagne and fake bonhomie? Yet a funeral can be heartwarming and inspiring; a celebration, a gathering, without the flimflam and interminable jollity. But how many of us will make plans for that final reckoning? How many will decide on the venue, the music, the food and flowers? Most likely it will be your relatives who will choose the coffin in the funeral director’s brochure (£265 for cardboard, rising to £1,990 if you want one in oak with the Head of Christ carved on the side). My cousin designed her own bier, upon which on a windy day last autumn she was carefully lowered into her grave at a woodland burial site in the Yorkshire Dales.

The comfort of building your own coffin

Friday

31 Jan 2020
The Edition
The Edition podcast: has the great Brexit divide mended?
31 min listen

First, as the news agenda is dominated by things like Huawei, HS2, and public spending, could politics be – whisper it – returning to normal? In his cover piece this week, Rod Liddle writes how, for the most part, the election result has put a lid on the civil war between Remainers and Brexiteers. One such Remainer who has reconciled herself with the result is Stefanie Bolzen, the UK Correspondent for Die Welt. She writes in the issue this week about just why Germans are so heartbroken about Brexit. Stefanie and Rod chat Brexit emotions on the podcast.Next, is there anything to be gleaned from the Chinese response to the coronavirus? I write in this week’s issue that Beijing has responded in a distinctively authoritarian way – on the one hand locking down tens of millions of people in quarantine overnight; on the other shutting down bad news to avoid upsetting the bosses.

The Edition podcast: has the great Brexit divide mended?

Wednesday

18 Dec 2019
How podcasts have transformed radio

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 is not the father, who are desperately in need of a bed for the night. Cut to 2019 years later. ‘How do you decide how much to give?’ he asks a young woman in his audience who, it turns out, works with a charity for homeless people. ‘Do you ever feel you’ve not given enough?’ ‘All the time,’ she replies, to which Sissay responds, quick as a flash, ‘You actually give money and go away and still feel guilty? Why do you give money then?’ Sissay, who grew up in care, was thrown out at 18 and given an empty flat for a home but no furniture, no job and no support, has every right to prick our sensitivities.

Thursday

28 Nov 2019
The pleasures and perils of talking about art on the radio

‘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 asked to describe the painting for us, her listeners, by Alastair Sooke, the presenter of The Way I See It, she puts her head in her hands. It’s almost like an amateur painting, Shaw concludes, and yet ‘it absolutely isn’t’. It’s an early work from 1919 when O’Keeffe was 32. At the time she was  experimenting with abstraction, testing its limits, creating a study in pure colour that bears no relation to anything you can necessarily describe.

Thursday

14 Nov 2019
The Polish electronic music revolution of the 1950s

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 for its significance, taking us back to those early days of analogue bleeps, bongs, blurps and squelches. Robert Worby and the eerily electronic undercurrent to the programme gave us a completely new perspective on what else was going on in Poland in the 1960s besides the trouble at the Gdansk shipyards and the suppression of political thought. Housed in a drab, high-security building with armed guards at the door, the home of state-run Polish Radio seemed an unlikely place for extraordinary invention.

Thursday

31 Oct 2019
From Brexit to Beethoven: John Humphrys returns to radio

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 FM’s breakfast show, swapping Brexit for Beethoven and smooth radio for the ebullient hectoring of the Today programme. ‘No need to readjust your radio,’ laughed Humphrys just after seven, before introducing the next track, Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite. Humphrys actually sounded as if he was beginning to enjoy himself, reading out readers’ emails, introducing the School Run dedication slot (‘For Noah, off to primary school in Leicester’) and Noah’s Dad’s choice, Leroy Anderson’s ‘Plink, Plank, Plunk!’, before quoting from fulminating articles in the Daily Mail.

Thursday

17 Oct 2019
Without Joe Grundy The Archers feels lost

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 for real. We can hear David in the distance calling in the cows, just like an episode of The Archers. But those birds cheeping furiously; that tractor rushing past. The wind, the thunder, the sudden downpour. They could all have come from a nature documentary. It was all too weird, trying to make us believe there is a farm called Brookfield and that our daily visits to Ambridge are to a real place, not something conjured up in a studio in Birmingham filled with bicycle pumps, an ironing board and industrial quantities of yoghurt.

Thursday

19 Sep 2019
What’s the point of the Today programme?

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 or his influence on that staple of the Radio 4 schedule. He will surely be missed, much as Sue MacGregor, Brian Redhead, Jim Naughtie et al are missed, their presence in our lives determined by that early-morning slot, the first voice we might hear each day, the voice that brings news of never-to-be-forgotten events, the voice that infuriates and intrigues in equal measure. Humphrys’s combative style has come to represent the programme, much as Jeremy Paxman infamously shaped Newsnight on TV.

Thursday

12 Sep 2019
General de Gaulle’s advice to the young Queen Elizabeth

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. When asked if he felt like a prime minister, he replied: ‘Quite honestly, I feel like a drink.’ Later he was waylaid at Euston station having just got off the morning train from Liverpool and was still unsure of the result. (Labour won by just four seats after 13 years of Conservative rule.) At 3.50 that afternoon, Wilson, sitting by the phone in Transport House, at last received a message from the Palace.

Thursday

5 Sep 2019
Why 80 per cent of young people in this Macedonian town have turned to posting ‘fake news’

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 to be, when the world was not so topsy-turvy and the news reports made sense. His series, As Others See Us, returns to Radio 4 this week (produced by Tom Alban), taking him this time to Singapore, the USA, Australia, Poland and Spain to talk to people there about Britain’s past connections, present woes and future prospects. It’s fascinating, salutary, and more than a little disturbing. Take Singapore, for instance. MacGregor finds plenty of evidence for those colonial connections, laid down in 1819 when Stamford Raffles established British rule over the colony.

Thursday

29 Aug 2019
The joys of Radio 4’s Word of Mouth

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 then a remand home. Eighteen years of his life stored in an Iron Mountain data facility. He’d been asking for his files, the story of his life, since he came of age. It was not easy to forget that programme; the banal cruelties of the system and Sissay’s resolute dignity in talking about them. At 18 he was told that the name he had been given by his foster parents was not his birth name. But it was too late: at 14 Lemn had had his initials tattooed on his arm, using the first name given to him by his first social worker, whose name was Norman.

Thursday

22 Aug 2019
Will you last beyond the madeleine? Radio 4’s In Search of Lost Time reviewed

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 weekend. It’s always a surprise to realise that the most significant cake ever baked (after Alfred’s burnt tarts) makes its fictional appearance so soon, almost before Proust’s characters, Swann, Gilberte and the Guermantes, have taken shape in your mind. The narrator, now grown up, is offered a cup of tea and a fresh madeleine by his mother and taken back in time to those holidays as a child at his great-aunt Léonie’s house in the French countryside.

Thursday

15 Aug 2019
The joys of scavenging the Thames

‘It’s very hard for you to really live in the day,’ says Ruth, ‘because you don’t know by evening you may have a letter from an agency saying you’ve got to go tomorrow.’ She arrived in the UK in 1937, aged 15, sent here by her Jewish family to escape the Nazis. Now 98, she was talking to Nikki Tapper, a presenter for BBC West Midlands, at a community centre in Birmingham, which since 2015 has committed itself to be a city of sanctuary. In The Syrians and the Kindertransport on Radio 4 (produced by George Luke), Tapper brings together two generations of refugees, divided by 70 years, who have come to the UK from very different worlds, but who share the experience of losing everything and being forced by circumstances beyond their control to settle elsewhere.

The joys of scavenging the Thames

Thursday

8 Aug 2019
Two sides to every story

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 about it was not so much Littlejohn’s thesis, by which he declared that politically, culturally and musically it was a pivotal year in our national history, determining events that followed much later. No, it was his selection of music to accompany his thoughts about how the miners’ strike of 1972 led to the three day week, which led to the general election that destroyed Edward Heath and brought Arthur Scargill to national prominence.

Two sides to every story

Thursday

1 Aug 2019
Voices of import

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 of the communists). Her mother soon had another child but when Vaira went to see her new brother in hospital she observed the young woman in the next-door bed turning her face to the wall against her wailing baby, product of a gang-rape by Russian soldiers. The nurses had given this unwanted baby girl the same name as Vaira’s much-mourned sister. Vaira was struck by the paradox, she tells Lyse Doucet in the first of a new series of interviews with women who have achieved remarkable things, Her Story Made History, on Radio 4 (produced by Ben Carter).

Voices of import

Thursday

18 Jul 2019

Thursday

11 Jul 2019
A matter of life and death | 11 July 2019

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? Even more so now when there’s so much else on offer to distract and entertain. But in the case of the new podcast ‘dropped’ this week by the Beyond Today team those three hours (in six half-hour episodes) have been used to best effect, allowing the story to build, the voices to become clearer, the families and the horror of what they have experienced to become more real. Claire Read’s series, Deadliest Day (produced by Heidi Pett), takes us back to 2009 and the war in Afghanistan and to one day in particular on which five members of a single platoon of infantrymen were killed and several badly injured.

A matter of life and death | 11 July 2019

Thursday

4 Jul 2019
End of an era

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 the BBC, and major national events, since the second world war when Richard, the father, carved out his career as a war reporter, most famously from Belsen in 1945. Mere mention of the name conjures up those Reithian values — clear reportage, an intelligent and fair-minded assessment of what’s going on, and access to that information for everyone. At the end of his final programme Jonathan reiterated the motto by which the BBC has been governed since Reith was in charge — education, information and entertainment — almost, it felt, as a rallying cry to all those who still believe in its relevance.

End of an era

Thursday

27 Jun 2019
Tables turned | 27 June 2019

It can’t be easy to find yourself on the other end of the microphone when you’re a journalist of the calibre of Emily Maitlis. You know all the pitfalls, how easy it is to be teased out of your bunker, to say more than you ever intended under the scrutiny of an ambitious, driven interviewer with a keen nose for a story. In One to One on Radio 4, though, it was surprising to hear the ultra-cool Newsnight presenter almost in tears as she recalled covering the Manchester Arena bomb and the Grenfell fire. We could hear her voice catching, the tears welling up, her words stuttering as she tried to get her breath back. She was being interviewed by Emma Freud, who coaxed Maitlis into giving more of herself away than we might have expected, not least by confessing at the outset that she herself had always wanted to be a news journalist but she knew she didn’t have the intellect or the self-belief to make it in that highly charged, competitive world.

Tables turned | 27 June 2019

Thursday

20 Jun 2019
The sea, the sea

Walking into Fingal’s Cave, after scrambling across the rocks to reach it from the landing stage where the boat from Mull arrives, is a strangely emotional experience. It’s not just the extraordinary landscape, the precise, almost unnatural shaping of the hexagonal basalt columns that rise up high above you, the screeching of gulls and roaring of the sea as it enters and leaves the cave. That’s enough to provoke a sense of wonder. But there’s also so much history attached to the place since it was discovered by the Romantics and became the epitome of the sentimental landscape, awesome in scale, and also quite frightening. Mendelssohn, Walter Scott and Turner between them set off the fashion for visiting the cave; even Queen Victoria braved the rocking sea to experience her own moment of insignificance.

The sea, the sea

Thursday

6 Jun 2019
She hasn’t stopped dancing yet

It’s not often you hear the voice of a 104-year-old on the radio. You’re even less likely to hear one so clear in thought, so spirited and full of enthusiasm for life. Eileen Kramer’s voice crackles with age, with the years she has lived, but from what she says, and the energetic way she says it, she could be at least 30 years younger. ‘I don’t know how long I will go on living,’ she says, but she’s still excited by the present: ‘There’s so much going on. I’m living in that period when a lot is being discovered about everything.’ Kramer is a dancer, artist, performer, famed in Australia for her expressive, idiomatic style of movement, and she’s still choreographing new works, although difficulties with balance have meant she has only just given up joining the dancers on stage.

She hasn’t stopped dancing yet

Thursday

30 May 2019
Acts of settlement

‘Put yourself in their shoes,’ says Zahra Mackaoui, a British-Lebanese journalist who has been following the stories of refugees from Syria for five years, catching up with them as they move on restlessly, searching for a place to settle. ‘Ask yourself, what would I have done?’ That question echoed through her series of documentaries for the World Service as we heard from those who have been exiled by a war in which they have played no part except as victims. What would I have done? In Beyond Borders (produced by Craig Templeton Smith), the open, frank honesty of Hani, Ayesha, Doaa Al Zamel and Fewaz gave us an opportunity to see deeper into their experiences. All of them have lost everything: the future they had once envisaged; the past, too, best forgotten.

Acts of settlement

Thursday

23 May 2019

Thursday

16 May 2019
Women on top | 16 May 2019

On returning from a brief trip to Istanbul, where inside the mosques women are still very much kept to one side, only allowed to look on from an angle, unable to contemplate the full mystery of the space created within those extraordinary domes, I was intrigued on Sunday to happen upon Heart and Soul (produced by Lindsay Leonard) and to hear a Muslim woman leading the prayers to Allah. She sounded so natural, so intent, her voice modulated and firm, uplifting and authoritative. But how, I wondered, is this possible? Where is this female imam allowed to practise? It turned out that Samira Ahmed (from Radio 4’s Front Row) was reporting for the World Service from the Inclusive Mosque Initiative in north London, where men and women pray side by side and all the leadership positions have been given to women.

Women on top | 16 May 2019

Thursday

9 May 2019
Afghanistan’s got talent

The cheering fans, the dramatic Hollywood-style drum rolls, the excitable host all sound just like The X Factor or The Voice. It’s hard to believe that beyond the lights and cameras there’s a huge security operation keeping the singers, TV staff and audience safe. But the Afghan version of the talent show is still under attack from the Taleban. In The Art of Now: Afghan Stars on Radio 4 (produced by Roger Short) we heard from Massood Sanjar, who set up the TV company that produces the programme, and Zahra Elham, this year’s winner, voted to the top spot by the audience, the first woman to win the show in its 14-year history. Two generations have grown up in the 40 years that Afghanistan has been torn to shreds by war, fearing death while out buying bread or going to school.

Afghanistan’s got talent