It was something - being on the wireless in the days when there was no television, no mobile phones. The Brownies or choir practice tried to keep the young entertained after school. Going to the bad didn't seem to be an option so the young stayed home like everyone else and listened to the radio. Fabulous radio. And, most of the time, it was enough.

I couldn't quite believe it when I found myself ON the radio, and for terror and elation few things have matched those childhood years working for the Welsh Home Service. Even at its most relaxed and un-live, radio is a "hot' medium. Live radio is like flying too close to the sun.

Waiting for my small turn, I watched, as real grown up actresses, all beautifully turned out (stocking seams straight, make-up and hair spruced up specially for transmission) began to weave their way in and out of their places at the microphone. They were concentrated, controlled, elegant even, but I knew that they were silently humming like dynamos, ready on the turn of a page to erupt like volcanoes.

It'll never be me I thought, despairing. My first star turn on Children's Hour, playing an obnoxious tom cat, had left me dishevelled, wild eyed and breathless... I watched and watched and nothing they did, good or bad, escaped my attention. I was equally transfixed by the nonchalant expertise of the engineers and studio managers.

While I was taught, yelled at, encouraged and generally licked into some sort of shape by the directors, I was indulged by the studio staff and allowed into their glory hole of an office as they figured out their spot effects and after a few years and after a lot of coaxing and practicing (and keeping well out of sight of the director's window onto the studio floor) I was allowed to take part in a spectacular, horse driven coach crash. My contribution, involving two coconut shells, a couple of nuts and bolts, a chain and a handful of tin tacks went out live on Saturday Night Theatre. I must have done a bit of acting but I only remember giving my all to the coconut shells. Whew.

What price Hedda Gabler?  

Celebrate the 90th birthday of Radio Drama with a re-recording of a scene from Julius Cesar performed by Harriet Walter and Jenny Jules from 16 February on BBC Radio 4Xtra

Take a trip down memory lane with the Radio Drama at 90 Audio Slideshow

Read birthday messages from Stephen Mangan, Celia Imrie and Toby Jones

Read Jeremy Mortimer's blog on Radio Drama at 90

James and the Giant Peach shown on BBC 1 in December 1976. From left to right: Bernard Cribbins as Centipede, Thorley Walters as Grasshopper, Kate Lock as Ladybird, Simon Bell as James, Pat Coombs as Spider and Hugh Lloyd as Earthworm.

Novelist, short story writer, fighter pilot and screen writer, Roald Dahl was born in Cardiff of Norwegian parents in 1916, and he died in Oxford in 1990. Such is the continuing popularity of his work that 13th September is celebrated as Roald Dahl Day in the UK, Africa and Latin America.

Radio 4 Extra's 4 O'Clock Show not only marks Roald Dahl Day, but has also dedicated the entire month of September to celebrating the life and work of this great writer. Roald Dahl Month on 4 Extra features a range of his stories, Dahl-related delights, and archive interviews with the man himself. Coming up on The 4 O'Clock Show is a brand new version of James and the Giant Peach, read by the doyenne of the spoken word, Miriam Margolyes (Ed's note: Starting on 19 September 2011. More info here.) The story has been abridged and recorded especially for The 4 O'Clock Show, and marks an extraordinary 50 years since the book was first published.

This week, listeners can also hear about a visit to Roald Dahl's house. Producer Rich Preston was delighted and privileged to be allowed to peek inside the writing hut at the bottom of the garden where all of Dahl's creations first came to life.

Here is Rich's fascinating account of his visit:

When I was young, Roald Dahl was my favourite writer - my mum tells me I knew Fantastic Mr Fox practically off by heart. So I was thrilled to be given the chance to visit his home and see the place where he wrote all of his books.

The Fantastic Mr. Dahl lived in Gipsy House, at the end of small country lane in the Buckinghamshire village of Great Missenden. And in the garden, with a bright yellow door, stands Roald Dahl's writing hut.

It was constructed for him by a local builder, Wally Saunders, who many believe was the inspiration behind The BFG. Roald had wanted a place to escape to, where he could be surrounded by his favourite things and simply sit and write. He called it 'my womb.'

You first enter a small ante room filled with large filing cabinets, which were home to his records and early drafts. Then you enter the main room itself, completely customised by Roald Dahl. His writing chair had belonged to his mother, and he'd cut a square out of the back pillow to accommodate an old wartime injury. A suitcase filled with logs is nailed to the floor a precise distance away from the chair. A heater hangs precariously from the ceiling - he used his walking stick to pull it backwards and forwards on wires for warmth. And a sleeping bag lay on the floor - he would pull it right up over his legs so he was totally cocooned. He would then place a roll of corrugated cardboard across his lap, and on top of that would sit his writing table. He would sharpen six Dixon Ticonderoga pencils and start to scribble on his yellow, American-ordered paper.

Roald hung on to things that mattered to him. The walls of the hut are covered in pictures of his family and things that his children had made. On a table next to his writing chair lay all sorts of things... including his own hip joint. Roald had had his hip replaced and the doctor at the time had commented on it being the biggest he'd ever seen - and so he gave it to Roald to keep, which he did. I was able to pick up and hold Roald Dahl's hip bone!

There is also a heavy, grey, metallic ball - every day after his lunch, Roald would have a Kit Kat. The foil wrapper was balled up and, day after day, he would add to the ball. He did this every day for the rest of his life, and the ball ended up about the size of a large, very heavy, ping-pong ball.

I also looked inside a small test tube which contained a Wade-Dahl-Till valve; a device Roald had co-invented following a disastrous accident involving his son Theo, to release fluid building up in a child's head. Although Theo recovered of his own accord, it became a commonly used piece of medical equipment. Another test tube contained shavings of Roald's back from that wartime accident - small grey flecks of bone and flesh. In life, as in his stories, he was as intrigued by the grotesque as much as any child.

Outside in the garden are paving slabs engraved with quotes from Dahl's books. "'Giants are never dying,' the BFG answered. 'Sometimes, and quite suddenly, a giant is disappearing, and nobody ever knows where he goes to.'"

My visit was unforgettable."

Mary Kalemkerian is Head of Programmes at BBC Radio 4 Extra

• Radio 4 Extra: The 4 O'Clock Show
• The official Roald Dahl website
• The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre
• BBC News: Roald Dahl hut campaign launched

It's a perfectly ordinary looking box file, with the perfectly innocuous title 'Letters'. But it's not stacked alongside the other box files in my study - the ones labelled 'Tax' and 'VAT', 'Personal Documents', and 'Miscellaneous'. Instead, it has been neatly fitted into the space between the top of the spare wardrobe and the ceiling, so that it can only be accessed with the help of a small step ladder. Over the last thirty years it's sat in many similarly inaccessible places: behind the cleaning things in the space below the stairs, underneath the spare bed, at the back of the airing cupboard, and for a short time only, on the top of the bathroom cistern.

When everyone else is out of the house, I periodically check its contents. Yes, everything is still secure and in proper chronological order. All the letters from Gillian, my very first girl friend, are bundled next to the postcards from her successor, Marjorie.

And Marjorie's loving thoughts are neatly succeeded by Helen's carefully written expressions of affection.

There's nothing obsessive about all this. Oh no. I don't sit and read through all these letters. They've now become so familiar that I only need to flip through them in order to discover the critical sentences: the ones in which the writers mention my enormous attractiveness, my overpowering intelligence, my superb wit, before going on to promise eternal love and devotion.

My life would have been a great deal less pleasant if I'd not owned and maintained my letters box file. While others need to resort to drink and drugs in order to ease doubts about their worth, all I need to do is climb on a chair, fish behind the top of the wardrobe, and I'm already only a second away from Janet's admission that she'll never find anyone to compare with me 'in the whole wide universal world.'

My box file is my only truly private possession. It is my only store of secrets. If others ever ask about its contents I say that it's 'strictly personal' and change the conversation.

But in my more honest moments, I know that I only want to keep it so secret because any public exposure of its contents would quickly reveal that many of the so-called love letters carried quite other messages: unfortunate references to duplicities and dishonesties, to my physical and sexual inadequacies (in one PS, Janet actually compares my performance with that of her tennis coach and finds me 'lacking').

I did once come home and find my Letters box file sitting in the middle of the coffee table.

'Oh sorry about that', said my partner Emma, 'It fell down when I was putting things in the wardrobe. Hey, don't look so worried. I checked. It's got nothing in it. Only boring old love letters.'

The nature of privacy and secrecy. That will be the topic for discussion when I talk to the author of a new book called 'Islands of Privacy'.

Also in the show - How Filippina migrant mothers fulfil their parenting duties - by mobile phone. Mirca Madianou talks about her study of mothers in Britain and their children back home.

Ed's note: Listen to or download this episode of Thinking Allowed (along with 46 other episodes) on the Thinking Allowed podcast page - PM.

Laurie Taylor is the presenter of Thinking Allowed

• The picture shows Mirca Madianou with Laurie Taylor in studio 70A in Broadcasting House.
• You can find out more about the programme's new partnership with The Open University and related features by going to their website.
• This, the latest episode of Thinking Allowed, is available to download or listen to online (along with 46 other episodes) on the Thinking Allowed podcast page.
• Find our more about this episode on the Thinking Allowed website which is repeated on Radio 4 on Sunday night just after midnight.
• Sign up for Laurie's Thinking Allowed newsletter.

Editor's note: This episode of Thinking Allowed is available to download or listen to online on the Thinking Allowed podcast page. More listening options at the end of the post - PM.

Even though my dad had to undergo 'instruction' by a priest before he was allowed to marry my Catholic mother in church, it did nothing to alter his view that all religion was nonsense.

Not that he exactly enlarged upon this view. He simply contented himself with brief irreverent interjections whenever the subject arose.

So, for example, when my mother embarked upon a lengthy story about how she'd prayed to Saint Anthony in an attempt to learn the whereabouts of a lost brooch, he would lean forward wearily, wave an arm across his chest as though sweeping away an irritating dust cloud, and mildly inform everyone in the room that mother was talking 'her usual muck'.

His expressions of political allegiance were equally laconic. Any canvasser who knocked on our door at election time and found it opened by dad, was brusquely told 'We're all Labour here', before the door was closed firmly in their face.

Because 'we were all Labour', there was never much talk about political issues in our family. But, under dad's influence, we all took it for granted that the Conservatives only looked after their own kind.

And in dad's vocabulary, this put them on a par with the Rotarians.

Even though I've asked other members of my family, I've never been able to discover the exact origins of any of my father's obsessive hatred of the Rotary Club. But from the age of six or seven I'd come to regard its members with much the same degree of hostility that my mother reserved for Satan and his works.

Rotarians, dad repeatedly told anyone who cared to listen, were local business people who conspired against the ordinary folk. They'd pass business on to each other. So, if anyone local died, the undertaker would pass on the news to the man who ran the floral tribute shop who'd pass on the news to the local probate solicitor.

'They're all in it together', dad would constantly assure us.

He was so adamant about the perniciousness of the Rotarians, that when I grew up, became a university lecturer and was invited to talk one night to the local branch I hesitated for several days before replying.

What could I do? Even though my father was long dead by that time, an acceptance would feel like jumping on his grave. And after all didn't the fourth commandment of my mother's Holy Roman Catholic Church demand that I honour my father?

I eventually wrote back and said that I was too busy. I chose not to mention dad's eccentric belief that all Rotarians were crypto-fascists or indeed that my final decision had been based upon nothing more (or less) than my 'mother's muck'. Sometimes less is more.

Children and politics. That'll be up for discussion when I meet the author of a research paper called The Form of Children's Political Engagement in Everyday Life. That's at four o'clock today or after the midnight news on Sunday or on the Thinking Allowed podcast. Also in this programme - remembering the 1981 Liverpool riots.

Laurie Taylor is the presenter of Thinking Allowed

• You can listen to this episode of Thinking Allowed on the Radio 4 website, subscribe or download the podcast.
• Sign up for Laurie's Thinking Allowed newsletter.
• You can find out more about the programme's new partnership with The Open University and related features by going to their website.
• The picture of Laurie was taken on the banks of the Mersey near where he was brought up.

This episode of Thinking Allowed was first broadcast on Wednesday 13 July 2011 and is repeated on Sunday 17 July 2011.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006slnx

I was drifting in and out of sleep the other day when I thought I heard the sound of Tubby the Tuba, shortly to be followed by Nelly the Elephant, and Burl Ives swallowing a fly. I waited with keen anticipation for Danny Kaye to sing 'Inchworm' or perhaps 'The Ugly Duckling'. Well we do regress to childhood as we get older.

For some reason I was back in the land of BBC Radio's Children's Favourites and Listen with Mother, a safe and secure world far from the Elvis's pelvis, or the sexed up songs of Beyonce or Rihanna. Today the BBC is accused of abandoning children's radio broadcasting and not without cause. In 2009 Radio 4 scrapped 'Go For It' - its only dedicated programme for children.

Then in February this year, as part of its review of BBC Children's Audio strategy, the BBC Trust said that it "regretted that the children's programming on Radio 7 is not serving audiences well, and performs very poorly in terms of reach, quality, impact and value for money". The three point strategy the trust approved in response to this devastating assessment was first a reduction in children's programming on Radio 7, now Radio 4 Extra, from 1400 to 350 hours, ie to a quarter of what it was.

Second, the shifting of Cbeebies pre-school audio to downloadable content instead and third making children's radio programmes available for broadcast by third parties. To examine these issues Feedback talked to Paul Smith, Head of Editorial Standards for BBC Audio and Music, Gregory Watson, managing director of the commercial radio station Fun Kids, and to Susan Stranks of the National Campaign for Children's Radio. I began by asking Susan Stranks, in view of the BBC's less than glorious attempts to make successful children's radio, why bother with it at all?

Next week in Feedback I'll be visiting the BBC's weather centre to answer your questions on that great British obsession the weather - or at least how we hear about it on BBC radio. Do let me know what you think.

Now I'm off in search of Mandy Miller and her elephant.

Roger Bolton presents Feedback on BBC Radio 4

• Listen again to this week's Feedback, produced by Karen Pirie, get in touch with Feedback, find out how to join the listener panel or subscribe to the podcast on the Feedback web page.
• Read all of Roger's Feedback blog posts.
• Feedback is on Twitter. Follow @BBCR4Feedback.
• The picture shows Daphne Oxenford, the original presenter of Listen with Mother on the Light Programme in the 1950s.

[L to R] Barry Letts as Joseph and Frazer Hines as Jan in the 1957 BBC serialisation of The Silver Sword

The first time I saw my father's book The Silver Sword being transferred to another medium was in 1957. I was 7, and Dad took me and my older sister Helen up to Shepherd's Bush, where a black-and-white television version was being filmed. We watched the young actors scrabbling through the studio rubble, and I remember being completely astonished that the producer called everybody "Darling".

Over 50 years later, a question was sent to the Daily Mail's 'Answers to Correspondents' page: "Does anyone remember a TV programme from the Fifties about children looking for their parents in war-torn Europe? I think it was called The Silver Sword". One of the excellent replies came from Frazer Hines, who wrote, "I played Jan, a ten-year-old Polish tearaway. This was in the days when families sat down together for Sunday lunch then watched the afternoon serial. The Silver Sword was a popular show, and even today people will come up to me and say, 'Aren't you off the TV?' When I say, 'What, Emmerdale?', they say, 'No, that thing about the sword.'"

So I was excited when I and my brother Andrew were invited to Manchester to watch the recording of a new radio adaptation by Chris Wallis. "You probably know the book better than anyone else," said Charlotte Riches, the producer. "We want you to tell us if anything doesn't ring true."

I watched fascinated as the group worked fast to get the three episodes recorded in three days. Stage Managers hunted for - or created - sounds of houses being blown up, dogs barking, dustbin lids banging, a silver sword falling to the ground. In any scene involving the youngest child 'Bronia', Charlotte ran quickly between the actors by their microphone and her chair in the darkened studio (the number of minutes children can work without a break are strictly timed). Accuracy was a priority: the Polish children called their father "Tatush", and Jimpy the cockerel was "Yimpy".

In the small actors' room I met the cast and discovered that when not acting, 'Edek' is a carpenter and 'Ruth' a writer; 'Jan', who had starred in West is West, had just got off a plane from America, and 'Bronia' (always accompanied by one parent) much preferred a day at the studio to a day in school. I even got to act one line where a 'woman' was needed! - while my brother became a lorry driver and then provided his beautiful warm voice as the announcer at the beginning and end of each episode.

But all was not straightforward. I felt that one scene in Chris's script clashed badly with the spirit of the book. Chris had inserted a very explicit scene where Ivan takes the children, who need shoes for the next stage of their journey, to a huge dark warehouse, containing 'a mountain of shoes' next to a 'mountain of teeth' and 'a mountain of spectacles.' I felt that this graphic concentration camp image had no place in a play that was otherwise very faithful to the gentle spirit of the original. I wonder what you will think of the compromise we reached in Episode 2.

There seems to be much interest in The Silver Sword at the moment - a year before the centenary of Dad's birth. Perhaps this story about refugees, and the courage of children in perilous circumstances they cannot control, is as relevant as ever. Options are out for a stage version and a TV film, and it is currently featured as one of five classic war stories for children in Once Upon a Wartime, an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum.

It could be that this new radio version will bring the story to new young listeners, and will remind their parents of a book they may remember as having been important to them in their own childhood. Oh - and during the making of this version, nobody called anybody "Darling"!

Jane Serraillier is the daughter of Ian Serraillier, author of The Silver Sword

• The Silver Sword starts on Radio 4 Extra on Sunday 1 May.

Editor's note: last year listeners gave over £1.5 Million to the weekly Radio 4 Appeals. Here, producer Sally Flatman highlights this week's appeal, from Muriel Gray - SB

Please take 5 minutes to listen to Muriel Gray talking about a wonderful charity called Contact a Family. Listeners' donations to this charity could make a difference to hundreds of families who are bringing up a disabled child. Take a look at the charity's web site where families, who are, as Muriel explains, often very isolated, are put in touch with others who are facing the same challenges and given support and advice.

In her Appeal Muriel describes how Contact a Family has been a lifeline to many families with disabled children over the last 30 years and appeals for donations to ensure their work with often vulnerable families continues.

Listen to Muriel talking about the experience of families of disabled children:

And listen to the appeal in full on the Radio 4 web site.

Sally Flatman is producer of the Radio 4 Appeal

• The Radio 4 Appeal is on-air every Sunday at XXXX and repeated at 1530 on Thursday. Make a donation via the Radio 4 web site.
• The picture shows Janet, Paul and Alice (age 12). There are more pictures from Contact a Family on the Radio 4 web site.
• Visit the Contact a Family web site or the charity's Facebook page to learn more.