The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
This year’s Free Thinking festival at the Sage in Gateshead has been asking the question, Who’s in Control?. Oddly, or perhaps presciently, as soon as I typed that last word ‘control’, the power went off in the midst of Monday’s storm. No word processor, no internet connection, no phone line, almost no radio (since the
You’ve probably already read or heard somewhere that the inspiration for Grayson Perry’s current series of Reith Lectures on Radio 4 was none other than Lynda Snell. (I wonder if she knows.) What a coup for the establishment network, the home service, the epitome of right thinking and professional excellence. Here’s a cross-dressing potter from
Boy, we’ve had to wait a long time for this. But last Thursday morning something unusual happened on Radio 4; something so unexpected, so rich with potential. It happened at peak time in the morning. Eight o’clock. The Today programme. And it began with the news, read by a woman — Corrie Corfield. Of course,
‘I was mad with jealousy,’ said Gwyneth Williams, the controller of BBC Radio 4. ‘I am mad with jealousy,’ she corrected herself, and I believed her. We were discussing Tom Stoppard’s Darkside, a radio play written to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s album Dark Side of the Moon. The play, which was perhaps
Why are we still listening to the radio in 2013, to an outdated technology that has hardly changed in manufacture or output since it first appeared in the 1920s? How come TV did not wipe it out, as CDs wiped out the cassette and DVDs put paid to video? My guess is that it’s because
This time round in the autumn shake-up of the schedules it’s Radios 2 and 3 who are on the frontline of change. They have had to face ‘tough decisions’ and to address ‘the financial challenges due to the licence-fee freeze’. Radio 3 has lost most of its ‘live’ Saturday-night transmissions from the Metropolitan Opera in
Five women, five very different stories of arriving in the UK, often unwillingly and always alone. How did they cope with the loneliness, the poverty, the loss of everything they once knew? What do they now think of the country that has become their adopted home? Jeremy Vine talks to them next week in a
‘He was a natural broadcaster,’ said Nick Higham, after the death last week of the rugby player and sports broadcaster Cliff Morgan. I wondered what he meant. ‘Natural’ as in born to the task? Or ‘natural’ as in his ability to communicate as if chatting directly to you, and only you, with no pretension or
How many listeners, I wonder, actually tuned in to Darkside as it went out on air on Radio 2, after dark, curtains closed against the pale moon waning? One listener for sure at 10 o’clock on Monday night was David Gilmour, Pink Floyd’s guitar man and co-creator of the band’s mega-successful ‘concept album’ The Dark
Just in time for the Paralympics the veteran broadcaster and campaigner for disability rights, Peter White, has launched a special Paralympian series of his No Triumph, No Tragedy programme (Radio 4), the title of which should probably be reversed. On Sunday he talked to Margaret Maughan, the first Briton to win a gold medal at
It must have sounded like such a great idea. To gather a group of thinkers, agitators, experts, intellectuals and media people round a large table, mike them up, ply them with drink, choose a presenter from the radio hall of fame to act as monitor and shut the studio door. Then switch on the red
Of course there’s a future for digital radio, it’s just that we’ll probably be listening to it online, or on the phone. The wireless set, tucked on the kitchen shelf, beside the bed, among the vases in the lounge, permanently tuned in to Aggers or Humphrys, Livesey or Lamacq, will become a museum piece, an
Will digital radio ever really take off? We were supposed to be switching over to digital-only reception in 2015 (three years after the TV switchover) but with only 36.8 per cent of listeners as yet tuning in to a digital station the future of DAB is beginning to look very uncertain (and most of those
Every so often a programme comes along that completely alters the way you think about something you thought you understood. It’s 60 years since the end of the Korean war on 27 July 1953 and last Friday the World Service marked the occasion by rebroadcasting an interview from the Witness series. These short programmes, often
The licence fee is both a blessing and a curse for the BBC. The clue is in that nickname — Aunty — both affectionate and slightly patronising. Aunty implies that the corporation is a friendly family affair, middle-of-the-road and just a teeny bit desperate to stay in favour, like grown-ups attempting the dance moves of
It had begun to look as if Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime had been taken over by the zealous publicity-hungry PRs of publishing. For the past few months we’ve had nothing but the latest John le Carré, Neil Gaiman, Mohsin Hamid and Jami Attenberg. Books that would sit better in the morning Radio 4 slot
Out and about in Surrey on Sunday I happened upon a scene that could have been played out 77 years ago. It was mid-afternoon on that glorious sunshiny day. Lunch just about over. The pub had a large garden with tables neatly shaded by leafy pergolas. A family group had finished their meal but were
One morning in 1995 Tara Bariana walked out of his house in Walsall and didn’t stop walking until he had reached the village in the Punjab where he was born and grew up. Ten thousand miles in 19 months is a lot of footwork. What made him do it? ‘I came here in 1960 with
We’ve heard it all before — the misery that war wreaks on everyday lives — but Lina Sinjab’s audio diary of her experiences in Syria took us right into the heart of what it feels like to be hounded out of your home, your memories, your sense of who you are and where you belong.
At 17.05 on the afternoon of 18 September 2010, Sebastiane Hegarty made what was to be the last recording of his mother’s voice (she died in April 2011). As he says, the digital tape ‘invented our last moment’; a moment of no great significance, nothing meaningful was said, except that it now marks an ending.
He’s gone. Not that anyone apart from Lilian will miss him. But Paul’s been despatched (at long last) to the Land of Discarded Soap Actors, despised, rejected and scorned by most of those who knew him in Borsetshire — and also, I hope, by any self-respecting Archers Addict. I felt nothing, absolutely nothing, at the
Coronation Day 1953 could have marked the end of radio as we know it. No one wanted to listen to the commentary from Westminster Abbey. Everyone wanted to see what was going on. Hearing could not, it was thought, be as effective an act of witness as viewing the glittering diamonds, the gleaming satin, the
‘Grief is work,’ said one of the parents of the teenagers killed by Anders Breivik on the island of Utoya in Norway. ‘To deal with grief — that’s work from the moment you wake up till the moment you fall asleep. And even then many people struggle with their grief when they sleep.’ His frank,
‘I don’t understand him and never will,’ says Pearl, the pivotal character in Anne Tyler’s 1982 novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. She’s talking about her husband, but could be saying something much bigger, larger, more meaningful. That’s the charm (and effortless skill) of Tyler’s writing. She appears to be drawing very mundane portraits of
What was shocking about Damien Hirst’s appearance on Desert Island Discs on Sunday was not his admission on air that he lost his £20,000 Turner Prize cheque, and then discovered he had spent it all in the Groucho Club bar. Or his account of his early teens drinking cider beneath the pylons, shoplifting, burgling, always
What will you miss most if your hearing begins to diminish? Those secretly overheard snippets of conversation on the bus? The throwaway comments of partner or child? A great Shakespearean in full flow on the stage of the National? High on my list would be the Dawn Chorus. Once it starts up again in full
Forty years ago, the idea of having an hour of BBC Radio devoted to men talking about themselves would have been so cutting-edge. Back in that dark age, you could still see City gents striding to work in pin-striped suits and bowler hats, whose buttoned-up appearance reflected (or so we have always been led to
Front Row is one of those Radio 4 programmes that it’s too easy to take for granted. It’s on every weekday, all year round, at the same peak listening time (after The Archers), with a team of presenters, John Wilson, Mark Lawson and Kirsty Lang, who have become such a reliable fixture they’re almost like
You could say that Sue MacGregor has done as much for women on radio as Margaret Thatcher did for women at Westminster. You might, though, want to add that MacGregor survived for 18 years as the only woman presenter on Today, Radio 4’s chief news and current affairs programme, without finding it necessary to deepen
