Kate Chisholm

Four couples but only three available bedrooms is the brilliant stratagem devised by Alan Ayckbourn for his 1975 relationship comedy Bedroom Farce. Four couples but only three available bedrooms is the brilliant stratagem devised by Alan Ayckbourn for his 1975 relationship comedy Bedroom Farce. It’s being revived at the Rose Theatre in Kingston in repertory with a rather different take on coupled life, Strindberg’s Miss Julie, for an aptly named season, ‘Behind Closed Doors’. The three separate bedrooms fill up the unusually wide lozenge-shaped stage of the new Rose (modelled on the Elizabethan original) as our four couples writhe and wrangle under the spotlight of Ayckbourn’s all-seeing, all-knowing wit.

‘I want people to feel quite shocked,’ said Professor Tanya Byron in her opening lecture for Radio Three’s annual Free Thinking festival. ‘I want people to feel quite shocked,’ said Professor Tanya Byron in her opening lecture for Radio Three’s annual Free Thinking festival. This year’s theme is the 21st-century family and Byron, the clinical psychologist and presenter of the television series The House of Tiny Tearaways, was addressing an audience in Gateshead where this year’s festival is based. The purpose of ‘free thinking’ is to focus on a subject and take it to its extremes, in the hope that some creative ideas might emerge.

Schmooze, schlep, schlock — all words that have such an evocative, onomatopoeic meaning and all from Yiddish, a language without a country, an army or a navy, which refuses to die even after one-third of its native speakers were annihilated by the Nazis. Schmooze, schlep, schlock — all words that have such an evocative, onomatopoeic meaning and all from Yiddish, a language without a country, an army or a navy, which refuses to die even after one-third of its native speakers were annihilated by the Nazis.

I wonder how many people still listen to plays on radio now that there is so much competition for our attention from Twitter, YouTube and the hours taken up with Strictly Come Dancing. It’s not just that we’re being taken over by techie gadgetry so that there is less and less time to do anything else. (How many photos have you got trapped on your computer with no time to sort through their nameless numbers and download on to a memory stick, let alone buy the right paper to print them, etc., etc.?) It’s also very difficult to follow the action in a radio play and get involved in the drama if you’re tempted to text, flick on to Google or download those dratted photos midway through.

‘Life consists not of a series of illustrious actions, or elegant enjoyments,’ wrote Dr Johnson (of whom you may think you have heard too much in the last few weeks, but he is often so pertinent). ‘Life consists not of a series of illustrious actions, or elegant enjoyments,’ wrote Dr Johnson (of whom you may think you have heard too much in the last few weeks, but he is often so pertinent). He was commenting upon the barbarity of Scottish houses in which it was impossible to open a window and get some ‘fresher air’. The greater part of our time, he reminds us, ‘passes in compliance with necessities in the performance of daily duties, in the removal of small inconveniences...

Back in 1924 when radio was still a young upstart technology, full of daring invention and brazen self-confidence, a nature-loving cellist, Beatrice Harrison, sat in her Surrey garden and played duets with a nightingale, which were broadcast ‘live’ on the BBC’s Home Service. Back in 1924 when radio was still a young upstart technology, full of daring invention and brazen self-confidence, a nature-loving cellist, Beatrice Harrison, sat in her Surrey garden and played duets with a nightingale, which were broadcast ‘live’ on the BBC’s Home Service. We heard a clip from one of them on Richard Mabey’s inspiring quintet of meditations for this week’s The Essay (Radio Three).

If Dr Johnson, who was born 300 years ago on Friday (at least according to the post-1752 Gregorian calendar, which overnight lost 11 days from British life), had been around today he would most probably have been a radio star, and been paid a fortune for it, unlike the pittance he earned as a writer. Conversation was for him the breath of life, not just as the antidote to the depression that never really left him but as the surest way to discover the truth. In talk (not chitchat), Johnson could flex his intellectual muscle, wrestle with ideas, and satisfy his hugely competitive desire for victory. But he was also full of fun, delighting in wordplay, making up rhymes, flashing his wit. He would have outdone Paul Merton on Just a Minute and yet also excelled on Round Britain Quiz.

One minute we were in Brent Town Hall witnessing a Citizenship Ceremony, as a group of Somalis, Sri Lankans and Iraqis were welcomed as fully paid-up (to the tune of £2,500-plus) British citizens, the next in a beekeeper’s garden in Acton, west London. One minute we were in Brent Town Hall witnessing a Citizenship Ceremony, as a group of Somalis, Sri Lankans and Iraqis were welcomed as fully paid-up (to the tune of £2,500-plus) British citizens, the next in a beekeeper’s garden in Acton, west London. On the way we called in at a Blood Donor centre, the Bushey Tea Dance club and the Peace Hospice in Watford. What did they all have in common? A love of Tea and Biscuits.

Was it a shock, Joan Bakewell was asked, when Harold Pinter showed you the script of his latest play? Bakewell was hardly going to reveal live on air to ten million listeners what she really felt about Pinter’s use of their affair as a plot device in Betrayal. She’s far too smart for that. All she would say on Desert Island Discs this week is that their long friendship of 40-plus years was far more important than their seven-year affair. Her inquisitor, Kirsty Young, still would not give up. But surely it was a curious situation for someone like you to be in? ‘We had a damned good time,’ Bakewell replied.

‘Aggressive camping’ is how one of the characters in Andy McNab’s first play for radio describes his activities in Helmand province in Aghanistan. ‘Aggressive camping’ is how one of the characters in Andy McNab’s first play for radio describes his activities in Helmand province in Aghanistan. Last Night, Another Soldier... (Radio Four, Saturday) received a lot of advance publicity because of McNab’s reputation as a former SAS soldier whose books about his experiences at war have zoomed off the shelves faster than he can write them.

We’re still living with the fallout of the Iranian Revolution back in 1979 — and we still don’t really understand how the West got its reaction to events so wrong, or what could have been done differently. We’re still living with the fallout of the Iranian Revolution back in 1979 — and we still don’t really understand how the West got its reaction to events so wrong, or what could have been done differently. The fall of the Shah and rise of the Ayatollah is an object lesson in the powerlessness of Western might against cool-headed strategic thinking, and the negative impact of non-intervention.

Looking back it was a nuts idea, to attempt to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade and bring him back safely, as JFK declared on 25 May 1961. And even more incredible that the Americans actually achieved it, on schedule in July 1969 while engaged in a costly war in Vietnam and Cambodia. But when the Soviet Union laid down the challenge by launching Yuri Gagarin into space on the jolly ship Sputnik, the Americans had to think of something they could achieve first. Nasa’s rocket programme was nowhere near ready to launch manned flights into space, and so it was out of desperation rather than from calculation that President Kennedy’s advisers came up with the idea of sending a man to the moon and bringing him back again.

What was the very first sound you heard this morning? Have you noticed how many planes have rumbled overhead since the beeping of the alarm penetrated your consciousness? Can you hear birdsong above the din of traffic? The new Save our Sounds campaign launched by the BBC’s World Service is trying to make us more aware of the sonic soundscapes in which we live. We’re all very clued up on visual interference, blots on the landscape, the way buildings look and affect our aesthetic sensibility, but we tend to overlook the sonic soundscape which surrounds us.

A curious programme on the World Service on Friday reminded us that although we’re now embarking on a new kind of technological revolution, dominated by twittering, downloading, waking up to John Humphrys not in BH but Karachi, we’ve not quite lost our connection with the mindset of the Middle Ages. On Blood and Lava Malcolm Billings joined the Procession of San Gennaro in Naples. It’s an annual festivity, when the ornate silver bust of the saint and his Holy Blood, in two sealed glass bottles, is carried from the cathedral to the monastery of Santa Chiara.