Bbc radio 4

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

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

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

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

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

‘Can you fly down this evening?’ she was asked by her boss in the Delhi office of the BBC. ‘Yes, of course. I have to,’ replied Ayeshea Perera, a Sri Lankan journalist. She was talking from Colombo to David Amanor of the World Service’s The Fifth Floor, which looks at current news stories from the perspective of those intimately involved with them and is always worth catching for its alternative, less formal approach and Amanor’s gentle probing to find the real story. Perera described the chaos on arriving at the airport in the Sri Lankan capital on the evening of Easter Day and the weirdness of going to see the

It was never given the choicest slot in the schedule, airing first thing on Sunday morning with a repeat at the end of the day. But in its 24 years Something Understood, guided and often presented by the esteemed foreign correspondent Mark Tully, has gathered an impressive audience. Its blend of poetry, prose and music from a huge variety of thinkers, theologians, scientists, poets and composers, carefully (but not artificially) edited around a theme, is for many listeners the best of Radio 4, challenging yet always accessible, highly selective but broad in content. I didn’t always manage to hear it but was glad to know it was there. Yet on

As if in defiance of the BBC’s current obsession with programming designed to entice in that elusive young and modish audience, Radio 4 has set us an Easter challenge. Each afternoon over the weekend Jeremy Irons is reading a chunk from The Psalms for half an hour, without illustration (except a bit of music), explication or deviation. It’s a discomfiting listen, at times harsh, unrelenting. The supple but rigorous language of the King James Version of the Bible is both daunting and uplifting. ‘Keep me as the apple of the eye’ is one of my favourite images, and ‘hide me under the shadow of thy wings’ has helped me through

He is said to ‘have changed the sound of speech radio’, not just by giving voice to those who until then (the 1960s) had not been given air time, the richness of their county accents too far removed from Broadcasting House’s Received Pronunciation. He won awards for his pioneering use of the new midget tape recorders, taking his microphone out of the studio and down the mines, to the fishing harbours, into the boxing rings and talking to teenagers. He was also a genius at editing, able to cut away an errant ‘s’ or insert a single note into the soundscape with the rudimentary tools then available, a sharp razor

At its best audio can be a much more visual medium than the screen. Making Art with Frances Morris (produced by Kate Bland), which I caught by chance on Radio 4 last week, gave us insights into the work of the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle that were so vivid it was almost as if we had been to an exhibition of her work. Calle, now 65, is known for her unconventional approach to what art can be. In 1980 she was invited to show one of her first works, The Sleepers, a collection of photographs, in New York. ‘I asked people to give me a few hours of their

As the ravens circle around Broadcasting House in London’s West End, presaging difficult times ahead for BBC Radio, with less money to play with at a time of increased competition from its commercial rivals, a very different kind of listening experience was on offer last week in an upstairs room above a café in Canterbury. The UK International Radio Drama Festival is in its fifth year, gathering dramas from across Europe and beyond for a week of intense and unusual audio, transmitted in 18 different languages. Thirty or so of us sat around as the plays were broadcast through a number of old-fashioned radio sets, listening to monologues, musicals, character

‘You’re thinking these girls all wrong,’ Miss Mai tells Enid in Winsome Pinnock’s play Leave Taking, adapted from the recent Bush Theatre revival for Radio 3 (and produced by Pauline Harris). ‘They don’t know where they come from.’ Miss Mai continues: ‘These girls got Caribbean souls,’ but they’re living in south London. Viv and Del have been taken to see Miss Mai, known locally as an obeah woman, by their mother Enid for a palm reading, a prediction, or perhaps a casting out of demons. Del has got into bad company, has lost her job at the burger bar for being cheeky, and fears she must be pregnant. Viv was

It’s not surprising given the way that electronic communication has taken over so much of our daily business, minimising human contact wherever possible, that podcasting (or what might be called aural blogging) has taken off in such a big way, anything from Griefcast to Love + Radio via The Breakup Monologues and To the Woman. We crave the sound of a human voice talking to us and no one else, and even better when it comes in disembodied form, stripped of all physical expression. This intense aural connection has been radio’s chief selling point since the 1920s, technology enhancing human interaction, the need to tell and listen to stories. Don

It sounds like something out of Dickens or a novel by Thackeray, a classic case of high-minded Victorian philanthropy, but the Glasgow Humane Society was actually set up much earlier, in 1790 (just after the revolutionary fervour in France demanded liberty, fraternity, equality), to protect human life in the city and especially on the river Clyde. It still exists and Glasgow claims to be the only city in the world to have a full-time officer dedicated to rescuing people from drowning. Back when it began the river and its banks were hectic with shipbuilding, trade and manufacturing. Now the city is almost ashamed of its river; no big ships, hardly

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