A couple of years ago I was having a very hard time. I was on the tube on my way to a gig and suddenly I found myself crying so hard that I couldn't stop. I got off the train flustered and embarrassed and on the platform something happened. A woman of about fifty ran over to me, actually ran, and asked if I was alright, and then because I couldn't really answer she just grabbed me and gave me a hug. She held onto me and said "it's ok, it's going to be ok". After what must have been a couple of minutes, which is no time at all and also all of the time in the world she said "do you need me to stay with you?" and I said no, thanks and that I was ok, and she got onto a train.

It was such a brief encounter, but it meant a lot to me. It is really unusual in London for someone to intervene like she did. Out of nowhere she was really kind to me, and full on, too. It was needed and it made me feel better. I never found out her name and I wouldn't recognise her if I saw her again.

I remembered this little meeting while I was thinking about how to describe Short Cuts. It was an unexpected thing on an otherwise normal day and it was a very fleeting thing, too. Sometimes very small things can take on a lot of significance.

Here's a taster from the latest series of Short Cuts - the games that teachers play...

• Short Cuts on BBC Radio 4
• Josie Long - official website

 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites

Often referred to as the Irish Chekhov, the first production you will hear is actually an adaptation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. New productions of some of his short stories sit alongside new stories from Derry writers who followed in his footsteps. And what else of his might we have in the archive that we could place on Radio 4 Extra? Of course an archive catalogue listing does not necessarily mean a programme exists; his earliest professional drama was for BBC Radio but sadly they were not kept. But other productions were. There were all the Ballybeg plays (his sequence of theatre plays about the small town of Ballybeg; Ballybeg is Irish for ‘small town’), further short stories, a feature about the ground breaking theatre company he set up in Derry with Stephen Rae, Field Day, and most exciting, intriguingly, several talks that he had recorded decades ago for BBC Northern Ireland Schools broadcasting. Brian Friel does not give many interviews, there have been documentaries about his work in which he never appears, so I urge fellow devotees to put aside a small amount of time and listen to them. And if you don’t know his work listen anyway, as a primer. 

Here is the man himself talking in the 1960s and 1970s about his childhood, the power of memory (a theme that runs throughout his work), school, his family, the city of Derry. His antipathy to interviews is most wittily and self-deprecatingly illustrated in the talk Self Portrait. Friel asks himself ‘the interviewer’s chestnuts’ such as - which of your plays are your favourites, and replies, none of them. The answer to ‘Do you think the atmosphere in Ireland is hostile or friendly to the artist’ is  ‘Err…I'm thinking of my lunch.’ He questions what autobiography is, how a memory can have a truth of its own even if you know it is untrue. 

For all our technical wizardry, for all the games we can play with sound, listening to a beautiful single voice summing up and questioning a moment in time with almost poetic phrasing, a delight in words and a certain wicked wryness, can still be mesmerising. 

We have shaken the dust off these old recordings and hope you listen to them with the plays and the stories. 

Hedda Gabler: BBC Radio 4 Saturday 9th March 2.30pm
This is the Old Vic production, starring Sheridan Smith and Adrian Scarborough. Friel's version throws new light on its two female archetypes - Hedda, the beautiful trapped and ultimately doomed heroine; and Thea, the less socially admired, yet much freer, new woman. Both women ultimately take their fate into their own hands, in very different ways.

Faith Healer:  BBC Radio 4 Extra Saturday 9th March 10.00pm
Written in the late 1970s, Brian Friel's Faith Healer is regarded as a modern masterpiece and a major influence on modern Irish writing. Its theme of memory, the stories we tell ourselves and the nature of truth run through all his work. In Faith Healer, he explores how these sometimes only shed a half light on truth. Starring Owen Roe, Lia Williams and Phil Daniels. Frank thinks his faith healing powers are waning and he has returned to his native Ireland in the hope of restoring them. 

Self Portrait: BBC Radio 4 Extra Sunday 7.10am & 1.10pm
Brian Friel recorded this talk, a ‘fragment of autobiography’ in 1971. A shy man, Friel rarely gives interviews and this talk is a rare glimpse of the man himself. 

The Green Years:  BBC Radio 4 Extra Sunday 11th March 10.45am & 9.45pm
This talk by Brian Friel has not been heard since 1964. It is Friel’s beautiful lyrical memory of moving to Derry at the age of 10, in 1939. 

Staging Ireland:  BBC Radio 4 Extra Sunday 11.30am
The story of Field Day, the new radical theatre company launched in Derry in 1980 by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea amid a political climate of riots and looming hunger strikes. The first production was Friel’s Translations which can be heard later on Radio 4 Extra. 

Translations: BBC Radio 4 Extra Sunday 10th March 1.30pm
It's the summer of 1833. In a hedge-school in Donegal, the schoolmaster's prodigal son is about to return from Dublin. With him are two army officers. Their aim is to create a map of the area, and, in the process, replace the Irish place-names with English equivalents. It's an act with unexpected and violent consequences. The cast includes Samuel Barnett, Dermot Crowley and Mark Bazeley.

Brian Friel Stories: BBC Radio 4 Extra: Monday to Friday 11.00am & 9.00pm
5 short stories about the everyday faiths, fears and hopes of his characters.  Full of make-believe, illusion and self-deception, Friel's stories are stories of resilience and dignity, told with humour and warmth.  The reader is Adrian Dunbar.

Maiden City Stories: BBC Radio 4 from Friday 8th March 3.45pm
Three new short stories, specially commissioned by BBC Radio 4 to celebrate Derry-Londonderry's status as UK City of Culture, from some of the city's leading literary figures. Seamus Deane, Jennifer Johnston and Brian McGilloway each bring us a new short story, recorded in front of an audience in the city's Verbal Arts Centre.

It was a simple enough brief - I was to lock myself away for one week to talk to people on the internet, to tap into this babble of voices and experiences and explore the global phenomenon of social networking.

It was a venture which would eventually have me talking to a single parent snowbound in Nova Scotia, an Egyptian whose online romance turned sour, a Pakistani yearning for a girl from the wrong caste, a rapper in Lagos, a man car-jacked in Caracas and a student defying the curfew in a Chinese dorm room.

But it's inevitable that a simple idea would take some serious thought to work. How do we hook up, and talk with an individual residing somewhere in internet-land and, crucially, turn it into a piece of radio?

There was a precedent: back in 2002, producer Mark Burman and I created Don't Hang Up, which involved calling public phone boxes to see who picked up. This proved to be a wonderful mechanism to trigger random encounters and the results were often startling.

But whilst we still wanted to capture the serendipity of random encounters with random people Don't Log Off was to be rather different project - requiring an all-new methodology. Firstly, the surprising technological challenges required producer Laurence Grissell and I to construct a "pop-up" recording studio, tucked away in a room at the end of an almost deserted floor of BBC's Henry Wood House. For one week, in the Winter of 2011, Don't Log Off was "on-air". You can see the building of the studio on the the Don't Log Off programme page.

Don't Log Off producer Laurence Grissell and I scripted a simple title and description for the project, hoping to draw in curious minds, and tossed our mission statement into the mix of online chat rooms and message boards. Some failed miserably, nobody cared at all about our Tweets, and certain online networking sites were either too X-rated, or attracted too many jokers wearing ridiculous monster masks for our purposes.

But progress was made through opening a Facebook page and a Skype account - neither of which I'd ever used before so I was inevitably unprepared for what would happen next.

Within hours, I discovered new "friends" on my Don't Log Off Facebook page. Exotic sounding names like Onyekwere, Amr, Luna, Umar, Daria suddenly wanted to be part of the project. We were connected by the internet, some of them were ready to speak right away, and all within hours of my Facebook page going live.

We soon realised this needed to be a round-the-clock operation - in order to truly span the globe, we'd be in for some late nights. There's a certain hysteria which sets in at 4am, believe me!

But speaking for myself, my producer Laurence Grissell, and producer Sarah Bowen who also took to the controls of our strange little pop-up studio, our week on Don't Log off was a remarkable journey - and what started as one programme became two.

This project really was an eye-opener - to hear tales from those suffering with frustration and depression in countries where you just can't speak openly, and it's only though the certain areas of the internet that people can tell their tale. Also, there are those who have fallen in love with someone they shouldn't have fallen in love with on the internet. How real do you want your internet friend to be?

For all these reasons, Don't Log Off is a great leveller, presenting universal themes that span our national borders. Be prepared though, the tales of ordinary people, can be heartbreaking, and sometimes very shocking indeed.

But I must also add, that I'm in awe of all those people I spoke with from Mongolia or Egypt or Singapore or Uzbekistan and from Ukraine to Iran to Venezuela , who spoke all spoke with me in superb, and broadcastable, English. Don't Log Off is about them.

Alan Dein presents Don't Log Off on Radio 4 on 2nd and 9th January at 11am. The programmes will be available to listen to online shortly after broadcast and as a podcast.

• While you're waiting for Don't Log Off to start there's a fantastic podcast archive of Lives in a Landscape, BBC Radio 4's series in which Alan Dein goes in search of original stories from around the country, available to download now.

St Peter's Church in Broughton

While Radio 4's documentary series Lives in a Landscape is off air, we're steadily making the archive available for download - and this week we're putting up a seasonal classic - The Devils of Broughton on the Lives in a Landscape podcast page.

Alan Dein reports on a curious midnight ritual in Broughton, Northamptonshire where, as Christmas approaches, the villagers beat out the devil in a din of pots and pans, milk churns and hip baths, drums and hammers, colanders and frying pans - anything that makes a noise in fact.

Elisabeth Mahoney in the Guardian wrote of a "beautifully produced" programme featuring "exquisite characters". It'll be available from Friday morning - we hope you enjoy it.

Laurence Grissell is one of the producers of Lives in a Landscape

• You can download The Devils of Broughton podcast as well as series 9 of Lives in a Landscape from the Radio 4 podcast pages.
• Read producer Sara Jane Hall's blog about making the first programme in series 9 on the aftermath of the Hackney riots.
• Follow Radio 4 on Twitter and Facebook.

The view from Hindscarth, over High Spy (High Scawdel), Grange Fell and Great Crag to Helvellyn.
Picture by Peer Lawther

I do wish I could call myself a proper fell runner. The truth is that I'm very slow and want to give up on every hill I climb. But something rather wonderful keeps me pushing forwards.

Part of my life, the non-BBC bit, is driven by a compulsion to exhaust myself on the fells of Cumbria and experience occasional moments of supreme joy and one-ness.

My chunkiest achievement to date is to knock off 50 Wainwright Fells continuously for my 50th year - it took 27 hours which is 3 hours too long. But I'm no athlete, I just have to get another fix, and another and another.

The fix is the moment when you crest the top of a hill that felt impossible and all below you is revealed in a wonderful patchwork of highly defined colours; or a moment in a cold, misty, rainy, miserable run when your head leaves your body and the synapses connect in a new way and all is right with the world (then the moment passes and it's cold and miserable again); or a moment when you're belting down a hill like a 10 year old; or in the middle of the night when a beautiful moon lights your way. Joy unconfined. In a 24 hour period this lift happens maybe 4 times - and lives in the memory forever.

Even the names are full of magic: Dollywagon Pike (a high level promontory that gives a perfect view of the stars); Sergeant Man (yes, you need to be forced to slog there from Calf Crag); Helvellyn (the most beautifully named hill on the planet?); Green Gable (a moment's respite from wind and scree); Yewbarrow (the clue is in the name); and Steeple and Red Pike, my personal favourites, with their views and dizzying drops all around.

These are a few of the 42 fells that make up the 70 mile Bob Graham Round, a personal challenge to be completed in 24 hours.

There's something highly creative about using your body and surroundings to achieve a transcendent state.

Not unlike listening to long-form symphonic music as in the symphonies of Bruckner where musician and listener invest a great deal in the apparently repetitive to achieve occasional nirvana.

This is fell running for me and I'm looking to Maurizio Malagnini to transport me there at the premiere of his Lakes inspired commission for the BBC Philharmonic.

To hear the stories of the great, great fellrunner and shepherd/farmer Joss Naylor is to hear the voice of deep culture straight from the rocks and grass and sheep and mud and rain and lakes and scree.

For me the only comparator to this is music; both can move you to experience your unalloyed deep self.

And now I find that words become hopelessly inadequate. You have to find this place for yourselves and that is why this non-runner seeks out pain and magic on the fells.

Richard Wigley is the general manager of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra

• Maurizio Malagnini's composition airs on BBC Radio Cumbria on 14 January 2012 (live broadcast of the world premiere) performed by the BBC Philharmonic in the heart of the Lake District.
• You can hear extracts of the piece in The Bob Graham Round this Friday on BBC Radio 4 at 11am and shortly afterwards on the Radio 4 website.
• The Northerner Blog: The Lake District's mighty Bob Graham Round is set to music
• Thanks to Peer Lawther for the use of the picture under this licence

Old Original Die (Penny Black). See more images from BPMA on Flickr

Last week I received an email from my German friend with whom I've maintained an exclusively paper correspondence for 15 years.

It actually came from his partner's email account via my wife. It felt a little weird, especially since - in my previous blog post - I'd held him up as an unwavering devotee of "snail mail". And it raised some questions - will sending emails change the stuff we discuss? Will he soon be informing me what he had for lunch? Bombarding me with information about his charity run, or business?

In 1840 the post office saw the single most important reform in its history: the introduction of the Penny Black, the world's first postage stamp.

For the first time anyone in the UK could send a letter to anyone else for one flat fee - a penny (about the cost of a mug of coffee). The brainchild of social reformer Rowland Hill, it was intended to help maintain family ties for a population cast asunder by the industrial revolution. But what really boosted mail volumes weren't the missives of ordinary letter writers, but big business. Before long, Victorian letterboxes were crammed with "circulars" advertising the latest consumer goods flooding on to the marketplace, things like:

Bromo-Phosph, The World's Greatest Tonic, Is a Natural Brain Food. Take it for nervous debility, Take it for the Tired Brain, Take it for General Weakness. Post Free from the Rudolph Drug Company, Reading.

The Domen Belt Corset should appeal to every woman who desires a graceful figure combined with a healthy and comfortable support. Domen Belts Company, 456 Strand, London

Keating's Insect Destroying Powder. Kills Bugs, Kills Fleas, Kills Moths, Kills Black Beetles. May be obtained from all Chemists or Free by Post, 14 and 33 stamps

When it took over the Parcel Post, the GPO offered a genuinely joined up service to enable the spread of mass consumerism. Thanks to the post office you could receive a circular through your door offering the latest fashions, send off the requisite number of stamps or a postal order and receive your new shoes within a week. For remote rural communities the world must have seemed a much smaller place.

The Penny Black also changed the way we do long distance relationships. A good example of this is the correspondence of Bob, a man servant and Jinny, a house keeper during the late 19th century. Over the course of a decade Bob sent no fewer than 60 letters to Jinnie revealing his hopes, desires and fears, though not always clearly:

My dear Jinnie,
Many thanks for your dear letter and also for information about the flannel. No love, I am not as big as I said it was only nonsense and you did not read my letter right; it should read I am getting bald not bold. If I put bold, it must have seemed very bombastic. No dear I am not bold enough however, I shall get on alright I dare say...

My Dear Jinnie,
...really my love, I couldn't understand your letter a bit, you didn't finish some of the sentences, so I shall keep that one until I see you...

Before long the post office came to symbolize much more than letters - it offered banking services for the poor and became a pillar of the community. The internet is rightly considered the defining innovation of our age. But in making the Peoples Post I've realized that almost everything the internet does today, the post office did first. Sending messages quickly and cheaply, fostering a wider sense of community, it helped disperse information, ideas and - yes - junk mail.

Joby Waldman is the producer of The People's Post

• You can see and read more from Bob and Jinnie's correspondence at Victorian Love Letters
• British Postal Museum & Archive Blog (postalheritage.wordpress.com)
• BPMA Facebook page (www.facebook.com)
• BPMA Flickr (www.flickr.com)
• BPMA Google+ page (plus.google.com)
• BPMA Twitter - @postalheritage (twitter.com)
• The People's Post reading list (www.postalheritage.org.uk)
• The Penny Black (www.postalheritage.org.uk)

About three times a year an envelope comes through my door, addressed in familiar hand-writing.

It comes from a friend who lives in a caravan in a tiny village in North East Germany. He has no mobile phone, no internet connection and no email address, and if i want to exchange thoughts with him I've no option but to put pen to paper, find an envelope, buy a stamp and remember to post it. To be honest the whole thing feels like an enormous chore. So when my wife suggested the post office as a possible documentary idea (she later came to regret it) I couldn't honestly claim Royal Mail was a big part of my daily routine.

As a young(ish) person working in the media, with family living around the world, digital media - emails, texts, video calls on the internet are a sometimes exasperating part of everyday life. And it didn't take long to realise that for an awful lot of people, over a vast span of time, the post office meant the world, or at least the world beyond their neighbourhood.

Early in my research I discovered a new book by Susan Whyman, The Pen and The People. In it she describes how a gradually reforming postal system in the 17th and 18th centuries enabled ordinary people - labourers, sailors and merchants - to run their businesses and maintain contact with loved ones. As Ruth Followes, a Quaker preacher who travelled the country preaching the gospel, wrote in 1760:

"Dear and Loveing husband in unfeigned Love to thee and my Dear and Tender Children do I now write and although it is so ordered that wee are separated from one another ... yet I am near to you in spirrit...."

It was fascinating also to see how ordinary people addressed their letters, even when one (or both) of them had no fixed abode, and somehow they got through. A sailor's wife addressed her letter in 1697:

"Thomas Bowery on board ye St George Galley Riding in the Downs If ye ship be gone to be returned to Mrs Mary Bowery att Mr Gardiners, an apothecary Pray my dear let me hear from you for that [is] the only cumfor I have now"

For many people like Mary Bowery, sending a letter wasn't a burden but a great privilege. Furthermore it wasn't a privilege they were given, but a right that needed to be fought for, by a series of visionaries and entrepreneurs. Names like Dockwra, Palmer and Hill who introduced Penny Posts, mail coaches, and - ultimately - the very idea of public service.

Having collaborated with historian Dominic Sandbrook on the Radio 4 series, 1968 Day by Day, I knew he was fascinated by the big and small changes which have shaped British life, and after he agreed to present the series, everything else pretty much clicked into place.

The list of valued contributors is far too long to namecheck everyone here (see the credits for full details) but I will say this - There's something about the Post Office which seems to engender goodwill. Throughout the project I've been lucky to work with people as inspired by the story of the post office as I have become.

It seems that although for many of us the post means little more than bills, and the occasional letter, it retains a certain, undefinable, nostalgic affection. Discovering the source of this affection has been one of the underlying questions of the series.

Thanks for listening.

Joby Waldman is producer of The People's Post

• Follow Radio 4 on Twitter and Facebook.

Hannah Marshall: "This is the picture of my grandfather and his family. It shows my grandfather, his mother
and three brothers. The picture was taken in Basra in 1918. My grandfather is the boy
standing at the back of the picture, with the black jacket and tie."

My grandfather was an Iraqi Jew, who ended up living in a North Wales seaside town. I never met him, but I've always been fascinated by this side of the family. A couple of years ago, I decided to find out more. I got in touch with distant cousins, and cousins of cousins, and friends of cousins - everyone in the Iraqi-Jewish community is linked to everyone else, somehow. The stories they shared were shocking, and revealed a deep-rooted history.

In 1917, a third of the population of Baghdad was Jewish.

Today just seven Jewish people live incognito in the city, their lives under constant threat. You're probably more surprised by the old figure than the new one. A third of the population? In fact Iraqi Jews thrived - they ran successful businesses, dominated the civil service and lived in relative peace and friendship with their Muslim neighbours. Then everything changed.

In the 1940s Arab nationalism, Nazi propaganda and anti-Zionism fuelled by the formation of Israel combined to create a wave of often violent anti-Jewish feeling. By 1951 nearly 120,000 Jews had fled, most evacuated to tent cities in Israel in a huge airlift. They left everything behind.

Today ancient Jewish shrines remain across Iraq, but the synagogues are empty and most Iraqis know nothing about the Jewish history which surrounds them. We're used to hearing accounts of Jewish exile, and tales of violence in Iraq, but this is the untold story.

The people I spoke to explained that Jewish history in Iraq goes back 1,600 years. In 597BC King Nebuchadnezzar captured the Jewish homeland of Jerusalem and brought them as slaves to Babylon, as it was then known. They flourished between two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates.

I heard stories of parties on sailing boats and of sleeping on the roof in the summer heat. They talked about Muslim friends and business partners, about feeling proud to be Iraqis. They described a Baghdad in which so much of the trade was in Jewish ownership that on a Saturday the souks would go quiet and banks would close.

And, of course, they talked about food - everywhere I went plates of chewy Iraqi macaroons were pressed upon me until I could barely move. The Iraqi Jews in the diaspora have retained their proud tradition of Arabic hospitality.

Alan Yentob, creative director of the BBC, is himself the child of Iraqi-Jewish immigrants. He has never been to Iraq, the dangers are too great, but he grew up in Manchester feeling part of Judeo-Arabic culture - eating Iraqi food, hearing Baghdadi songs and speaking Arabic with his grandmother. He, too, wanted to find out more about his community's history.

For this programme, The Last Jews of Iraq, we talked again to people who remember life in Baghdad, including members of Alan's own family. We found recordings of Judeo-Arabic mvusic from the 1920s, when Jewish musicians dominated Baghdad's music scene.

But we also heard about Jews thrown out of their jobs, people attacked in the street, and young Jewish girls burnt with acid. People remembered their shock when in 1941 Arab neighbours and friends turned on them in a pogrom known as the Farhud.

One man recalled his mother breaking down when she saw the hanging of nine suspected Zionist spies, all relatives or friends of the family, live on Baghdad TV.

The stories of persecution and terror were many but the common sentiment was astonishment that a country in which Jewish people had for centuries been proud citizens could turn on them so suddenly.

And then, just as we finished making the programme, came news of a fresh threat to the seven Jews who remain in Baghdad. An American embassy memo, published by Wikileaks, has revealed their names and identities, which have been reprinted in local Iraqi newspapers. One is now trying to leave the country, the others are determined to stay in the land of their ancestors, despite the dangers.

It all brought home to us the urgency of telling this story now, before it disappears completely. With the news dominated by Middle Eastern tension, it feels so important to hear the tales of my grandfather's world, in which Jews and Arabs lived side by side, sharing their lives, their music, their food and their country.

Hannah Marshall is the producer of the Last Jews of Iraq, a Loftus Audio production for BBC Radio 4.

• The Last Jews of Iraq is on Radio 4 tonight, Tuesday 29 November at 8pm. It'll be available on the Radio 4 website shortly afterwards.

Charles Dickens by Mathew Brady, US National Archives

In the run-up to the bicentenary of Dickens's birth in February 2012, BBC Radio and BBC TV will be doing the master-storyteller proud, with new productions of four of the novels, and a whole host of other programming, starting with Penelope Wilton reading five extracts from Claire Tomalin's extraordinary new biography - Charles Dickens - A Life.

There are few bits of central and east London that Dickens didn't walk through on his epic walks, observing all of London life and working through the plots of his books.

But the route south from Camden Town, where his family lived when he was a child, to the Strand, and the Navy Pay Office in Somerset House where his father worked, is one that two centuries later is still full of Dickens reminders.

I work at Bush House, and often walk by the Old Curiosity Shop - the slightly dilapidated cottage in Portsmouth Street which inspired one of his earliest novels. And just the other side of Kingsway is Covent Garden, where the young Dickens got lost and found himself walking right out to Whitechapel in the east end. An episode that inspired a terrifying sequence in Dombey and Son, and which also features in the first episode of Michael Eaton's new Radio 4 series Dickens in London.

Dickens was a broadcaster before broadcasting.

Not only did he master the technique of serialisation, with audiences desperate to catch up with the latest episode in each succeeding novel, but he licensed stage performances of his books to coincide with publication, and finally took to halls and theatres across Britain and the United States to perform his own abridged readings.

So when the 20th Century eventually caught up, and the BBC started broadcasting plays and readings, it is hardly surprising that Dickens took to the airwaves.

Jeremy Mortimer is a producer in BBC Radio Drama. Together with Jessica Dromgoole he has produced a new dramatisation of A Tale of Two Cities, starring Robert Lindsay and Alison Steadman, which will be broadcast across the Afternoon Play slots on Radio 4 the week after Christmas. He is also producing Dickens in London for the Woman's Hour drama, for broadcast in February 2012.

The Dickens Season on the BBC

Book of the Week - Charles Dickens: A Life
Monday 28 November - Friday 2 December 2011, 9.45am
BBC Radio 4
Claire Tomalin's acclaimed new biography of Britain's great novelist paints a portrait of an extraordinarily complex man. Abridged by Richard Hamilton and read by Penelope Wilton.

The Verb
Friday 9 December, 10pm
BBC Radio 3
Ian McMillan hosts a special edition of his weekly cabaret of the word before an audience at the BBC's Radio Theatre to celebrate the art of reading Dickens aloud.

Night Waves
Wednesday 14 December, 10pm
BBC Radio 3
Philip Dodd presents a landmark edition of Radio 3's art and ideas programme, devoted to Charles Dickens as the bicentenary of his birth approaches.

A Tale of Two Cities
Monday 26 - Friday 30 December 2011, 2.15pm
BBC Radio 4
Robert Lindsay and Alison Steadman star in a new dramatisation of Charles Dickens's classic, A Tale of Two Cities, dramatised by Mike Walker to be broadcast on Radio 4 as a sequence of five Afternoon Plays in the week after Christmas. Dickens's novel of the French revolution tells a story of the redemptive powers of love in the face of cruelty, violence and neglect. With Jonathan Coy, Andrew Scott, Paul Ready and Karl Johnson, with original music by Lennert Busch.

The Essay - The Writers' Dickens
Monday 19 - Friday 23 December, 10.45pm
BBC Radio 3
In a special series of The Essay, five contemporary novelists - Tessa Hadley, A L Kennedy, Alexander McAll Smith, Romesh Gunesekera and Justin Cartwright - examine the craft of Dickens' prose, and reflect on how the giant of British nineteenth century fiction is both a role model and a shadow looming over their own writing.

The Tale of A Tale of Two Cities
Thursday 29 December 2011, 11.30am
BBC Radio 4
When Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities in 1859 it was, for him at least, both 'the best of times' and 'the worst of times'. He had separated from his wife, started a new weekly journal and was becoming increasingly recognised as a performer of his own works. For this programme, crime writer Frances Fyfield has been given access to those original manuscript pages, held by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and along with the scholar Robert Patten and actor David Timson, she explores the frantic hand-writing, the ferocious self-editing and the sheer energy of Dickens' writing.

The Mumbai Chuzzlewits
Sunday 1, 8, and 15 January 2012, 3.00pm
BBC Radio 4
Award-winning writer Ayeesha Menon's reworking of Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit is set amongst the Catholic community in modern day Mumbai, India. Convinced his relatives are after his money, Martin Chuzzlewit, a wealthy old landlord, has adopted orphan girl Mary as his carer with the understanding she will be housed and fed as long as he lives - but that upon his death, she will inherit nothing. Told from the point of view of orphan Thomas, an observer into the world of the Chuzzlewits, this is a fast-paced drama full of intrigue, romance, suspense and murder. Recorded on location in India, the cast stars Roshan Seth, Karan Pandit, Zafar Karachiwala and Nimrat Kaur.

The Mystery of the Mystery of Edwin Drood
Thursday 19 January 2012, 11.30am
BBC Radio 4
Crime writer Frances Fyfield uses the hand written manuscript of Charles Dickens' last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, to try and answer some of the many questions about the last days of Dickens' life and, more particularly, the loose ends of this tantalising novel. This programme complements the broadcast of Gwyneth Hughes' new BBC TWO drama, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Dickens in London
Monday 6 - Friday 10 February 2012, 10.45am
BBC Radio 4
Dickens in London presents five short plays based on Charles Dickens' journalism about walking in London to tell the story of the writer's life. Adapted by Michael Eaton, the cast stars Samuel Barnett, Alex Jennings and Antony Sher each taking their turn to play Dickens.
Following Dickens' changing relationship with the city that fired his imagination, each stand-alone play takes its title from one of Dickens's own appellations: A Not Over-Particularly-Taken-Care-Of-Boy; Boz; the Sparkler of Albion; the Uncommercial Traveller; and The Inimitable.
Dickens in London is part of an innovative collaboration between Film London Artists' Moving Image Network (FLAMIN), BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio Drama. A commission for film artist Chris Newby, writer Michael Eaton, and composer Neil Brand to produce a set of cross-platform works for radio, interactive television (Red Button) and the Radio 4 website. The project is supported with a Grants for the Arts Award from Arts Council England.

More links

• Details of the Dickens season on Radio 4
• Listen now In Our Time: Dickens
• The Telegraph The BBC's Charles Dickens season: what's on
• The official Dickens 2012 site
• BBC History: Charles Dickens

Edward Stourton on the World War II Freedom Trail

It is a very good definition of what today we would call the "skill set" you need to accomplish the Chemin de la Liberte, the four day, forty mile trek across the Pyrenees which is walked each year to commemorate the escapers, evaders and helpers who made the journey during the dark days of the Nazi Occupation of France.

I am certainly not a he-man, and I hate discomfort, so there has never been any danger of me boasting about my capacity to endure it. I am cheerful by nature, endowed with a reasonable supply of common sense (I hope), and I like achieving my goals. The problem lay in that unassuming little word "fit"; I am fifty-three years old, most of my work involves sitting in studios or at desks, and I like the good things in life.

The BBC agreed to my proposal for a series of programmes on walking the Chemin back in the spring, and immediately sent me off to an extreme sports clinic in Harley Street, where I was put through a human version of an MOT.

It involved attaching a great number of electrodes to my chest and strapping a strangely fashioned respirator to my mouth. I was then required to peddle away on an exercise bike until I reached near collapse. A group of technicians monitored the behaviour of my heart and lungs, chatting away calmly as I huffed and puffed to the point where both seemed ready to explode.

Over the past decade I have developed a passion for programmes built around journeys. It began in 2001 with an odyssey around the Mediterranean in the Footsteps of St Paul, a journey I made with a producer from the BBC's Religion and Ethics department, Phil Pegum.

Since then Phil and I have made radio pilgrimages in the footsteps of Mohammed, Moses and Jesus, and negotiated the waters of the Jordan and the Bosphorus. Every time we do it I am more convinced that travelling helps bring history alive. For my generation it requires a huge imaginative effort to get inside the mind of someone who lived through the Second World War (let alone someone who lived in St Paul's time) but seeing what they saw and going to the places they would have passed through brings their experience that bit closer.

We were well equipped and well fed and watered; those who walked the Chemin "for real" would have had little more than a pair of espadrilles and a stick by way of equipment, and they were often malnourished (almost everyone in Europe was short of food during that period, and it is striking how large the eating issue looms in evader and escaper memoirs). But I suffered enough to be able to get some sense of what they went through.

Phil is as thin as a whip and during the weeks leading up to the walk he was often spotted walking up and down the staircase of the BBC's Manchester officers with a rucksack full of bricks. He brought along another producer to help; Graham Hoyland is an experienced mountaineer and Everest veteran, and polished his fitness with a few days yomping over the Scottish Highlands.

I, on the other hand, found it extremely difficult to keep up the fitness regime I had been given, simply because I was so busy with other projects. There was no doubt about who was the weak link in the chain, and I was duly punished by pain.

On the Freedom Trail

I discovered that a really tough walk like this is, oddly, not a very good way of appreciating nature or views; you tend to keep your head down and your eyes on the boots in front, concentrating on each step, and when we stopped for a break I usually found myself flat on my back staring at the sky. But the trance-like state you hit as you plod along is very good for encouraging reflection.

I also realised how clever Chaucer was to set his masterpiece, the Canterbury Tales, in an inn full of pilgrims. The Chemin is a kind of pilgrimage, and, like Chaucer's, it brings together people who might never otherwise have met, but who share a common purpose. Whenever we could, we talked, and as I listened to my fellow-walkers explain why they had come and what the Chemin meant to them, I came to understand why remembering matters so much.

Edward Stourton presents The Freedom Trail

• Episode 2 of The Freedom Trail is on next Monday, 21 November at 11am. You can catch up with episode 1 of the Freedom Trail on the Radio 4 website.
• You can also download Ed Stourton's report as part of the From Our Own Correspondent podcast - go to the 12 November download

From the BBC archives: "Mrs Dorothy Downs is one of a group of women workers who recently volunteered
to give up their holidays to work very long hours in order to back up the RAF's 1,000 bomber raids over Germany."

Repeating Bomber on Armistice Day of all days is a massive compliment to everyone involved in the programme.

We have also been paid a more subtle accolade. Radio 4 Extra is replicating the original real-time nature of the broadcast. It must have been tempting to chop the thing into more conventional lumps, so I thank them for doing so.

I'm hoping to persuade you to find the time to listen to the programme live. However the reasons to do so are elusive and resist explanation.

Briefly, Bomber tells the story of a bombing raid on Germany by the RAF in 1943. It focuses on the experiences of a handful of bomber crews, the civilians in the town they bomb, and the nightfighter crews sent against them. The bombers take off in the early evening. It will take them three hours to plod to Germany, and three hours to crawl back. Those destined to make it home, or survive on the ground, do so before midnight.

Real time has always fascinated me, even at a mundane level. I was the sort of child who noticed that, in spite of Blofeld's henchman clearly announcing there was only thirty seconds and counting, James Bond always had a good couple of minutes to defuse the nuclear device. Would it, I wondered, be better if he didn't?

Len Deighton's documentary novel spans twenty-four hours. I first read it as a sparks working night shifts at BBC World Service. The backs of my legs aching through tiredness, I learned of fatal lapses of concentration in the early hours. It was, of course, a simple enough light bulb moment: perhaps I could match a listener's physical experience to the remorseless clock of a drama.

Twelve years later (I had meanwhile had a career as a Radio 1 producer) Radio 4 decided to test the real time theory. No-one knew whether this experiment would work or not. I think it did.

Firstly, tension - especially as Len's marvellous characters were impossible not to care about - is rarely allowed to build over nine hours in any medium. That delayed action bomb, fused in the mid-afternoon, only concludes its deadly purpose just before midnight.

Secondly, just carrying on with one's petty schedule (I was unpacking in my new flat), lends a remarkable contrasting insight to the unfolding dramatic incidents. It took an hour to do those three boxes, and an hour for ten Lancaster bombers to be shot down with seven men aboard each one. I have never felt so humblingly safe in my life.

Thirdly, and this was originally me laying the ghost of James Bond to rest, we had time checks that worked in both time frames. To hear the crews synchronise their watches and see the same on the kitchen clock sounds like sleight-of-hand, but it had another extraordinary connecting effect to the drama.

There are many other things about Bomber, not least the performances, the script, the direction, the authenticity for which we strove and the remarkable reminiscences I recorded in peaceful sitting rooms in Britain and Germany, dovetailed into the action.

But the effect of all these will, I promise you, be multiplied if you are able to follow the story in real time. Park the iPlayer for this one. As one listener wrote after the first transmission:

"Thank you for Bomber. It completely ruined my day. I had planned a dinner party, but my guests and I were compelled to sit by the radio right through to midnight."

Bomber is directed by Adrian Bean and produced by Jonathan Ruffle

• Bomber is on Radio 4 Extra on Friday 11 November starting at 2.30pm.
• Radio 4 Extra is available on digital radio, digital television or via the website.

Kit Hesketh-Harvey and nail artist Kirsty Meakin

Look, I'm a bloke. I live in the country. I dig the potatoes for dinner. I fetch coal. I am no stranger to a big end. My fingernails (which I chew) are things without beauty, finesse, or a vividly imaginative makeover.

So it was with trepidation that I came up to London, to Olympia, and found myself in a parallel world of whose existence I had never dreamed.

The Nailympics (I am not making this up) is a three-day competitive event dedicated to the exploding industry that is nail art. What used to be a buff and a polish, or even a splodge of vermilion, is now a wonderland of perfect barrel-curves, of French Pink and White, of crystal-bedecked acrylic extensions and of fantastical 3D graphics that are pushing the boundaries of practicality, post-modern sculpture, and even taste.

Would I be able to carry off a Narnian landscape, an Egyptian tomb, or the Bay of Naples on my fingertips?

Kirsty Meakin works on Kit Hesketh-Harvey's nails

What is the anthropology of such adornment? Why are the sums involved now outstripping the money we spend on hair? Who are these people? And what will happen to England's Great Shining Hope for Nailympic glory, the girl from Stoke-on-Trent whose work is currently in the V and A, the great Kirsty Evita Meakin?

It was nail-biting stuff. I was agog, and so will you be.

Kit Hesketh-Harvey presents Up to Scratch at 11am on Friday 21 October on Radio 4

• Watch a slideshow for Up to Scratch
• The Nailympics website
• Up to Scratch is produced by Lucy Lunt
• Follow Radio 4 on Twitter and Facebook

Shirley Williams and her brother, John

Baroness Williams explained to me how the family had a housekeeper, Amy Burnett, who she described as a second mother. Amy was a bright girl who got into grammar school but couldn't take up the place as her parents couldn't afford the school uniform. Instead, she went to work in service for Shirley's mother.

So strongly did the young Shirley Williams empathise with Amy Burnett that she insisted her parents take her out of her private school as a young child and send her instead to the local state school, where Amy's friends' children went. She was immediately aware of the differences not just in class sizes and teachers but in lifestyles and aspirations.

It's not difficult to trace the forces that shaped Shirley Williams the politician - famous supporter of comprehensive education, and tireless campaigner against social injustice.

It's always fascinating to me to make connections between childhood experiences and the type of writer, politician, scientist, academic, people later become.

Ahead of the news series, Radio 4 has published a new podcast of The House I Grew Up In, featuring highlights of the past four series. This includes my encounter with the actor and playwright, Kwame Kwei-Amah. It was quite something to stand in the room in his west London childhood home where Kwame changed his name, at the age of 12, from Ian Roberts, to Kwame Kwei-Amah, after watching an episode of the television programme Roots.

Former Tory MP, Jonathan Aitken, took me back to a hospital in Dublin, where he spent three years at the age of four strapped to a bed, immobile, with tuberculosis.

He told me how he drew upon this experience when - many years later - he was sent to prison for perjury.

This year I listened in disbelief outside another house, as one of this year's guests, the campaigner against forced marriage, Jasvinder Sanghera, described to me how, at the age of 15, she was locked in her bedroom in Derby by her parents, when she refused to marry a much older man from India.

What we experience as a child shapes and forms so much of what we become, and The House I Grew Up reinforces how memories of these early years can nourish and sustain us - even in the most extreme circumstances.

Wendy Robbins is the presenter of The House I Grew Up In

• Wendy Robbins meets Baroness Shirley Williams for the first programme in the new series of The House I Grew Up In on BBC Radio 4 at 9.00am on Thursday, 4 August 2011.
• Listen to or download the podcast on the Radio 4 podcast pages.

Lesley McAlpine and friend Mandy on their interrailing trip

It was July 1982 and I was on my first trip backpacking around Europe with a school friend. We'd missed an evening curfew at a rather forbidding hostel in Rome and, unluckily for us, the hostel was next door to a prison which was on red alert the neighbourhood was scoured for members of the Marxist Red Brigade terrorist group. Well, that's what the gun-toting officers told us - though I think they had guessed pretty quickly we were just scruffy backpackers. Fortunately, we didn't see the inside of an Italian jail that night. The next morning the same soldiers roared with laughter at us as we slunk past them sheepishly, having slept out overnight on the banks of the river Tiber.

That incident really sums up for me the excitement, hopes and fears of the interrailing experience. In that summer of '82, I remember thinking how amazingly clean Swiss towns were; I remember how my head swivelled round when I saw David Bowie walking down the main street of Lausanne and what great parties the Italians throw! Perhaps not surprising, considering they'd just beaten Germany 3-1 in the World Cup final.

There is of course a downside to train travelling on a low budget - being moved on from park benches by police officers while trying to snatch some sleep between trains; eating spinach for three days after running out of money; and catching nasty bugs after drinking the wrong kind of water. But somehow I've air-brushed a lot of the bad things out. For me, it was all about making new friends, travelling on a whim and of course the lucky escapes.

I wonder if young people planning their own backpacking expeditions this summer will set off with that same sense of excitement I felt? Will they even travel by train? Today's generation are used to cheap flights and long haul trips, if they're lucky, to Thailand, New Zealand or South America. Is going Euro loco just a bit too slow?

I want to know the answer to that very question. So that's why I'm making interrail Tales - two programmes for Radio 4 which will broadcast at the end of August. I want to hear your stories of railing around Europe from the early 1970's, when the blue and white paper ticket to ride was first launched, right up to the present day.

Was your life changed by interrailing? Were you witness to a key moment in European history like the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989? Perhaps you watched first hand the recent protests in Greece or Spain? Are you heading off around Europe on a train this Summer? If you have been part of the interrail generation I'd like to hear your stories, and perhaps have a flick through your photos, too - if I can rise above the shame of bad hair, so can you!

If you want to be part of the interrail Tales on Radio 4, please email me.

Lesley McAlpine is the producer of the upcoming programme Interrail Tales.

• Interrail Tales

is on Saturday 13 August 10:30am on Radio 4 and for seven days after on the website.

We wanted to know what difference it makes to someone, suddenly changing school, perhaps shifting class or modifying accent, in going from state school to boarding at a posh school on a free bursary.

In this case one of the people was your dispassionate reporter. A surprisingly layered assignment.

The hardest part of making a radio or TV programme is the beginning. The toughest part of reminiscence - for me going back to the early seventies, but for some in this programme, recalling schooldays in the forties and fifties - is to trick the brain backwards into opening the gates of memory.

The great Nobel prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing told me a few years ago how she had recalled detailed events from her childhood for a volume of memoirs. Take an object from the past she said, look at it, open it, study the contents.

For the programme, When Wesley went to Winchester the device, was both simple and to hand. The old canvas and wood trunk, which accompanied me at the start and finish of most terms both to boarding school and Cambridge University was now gathering dust in the shed.

Tucked inside were years of theatre programmes and correspondence but, at the bottom, and also in an ancient biscuit tin, were documents pertaining to my feeding regime as a baby, old school reports and the unusual story of how a lad from a foster home had found himself part of a unique county bursary scheme which turned out more extensive than we'd imagined.

Winchester College kindly laid on a reunion with a difference and 33 people who'd mostly never met, but had all benefitted from the same bursaries, funded either by Hampshire or Hertfordshire Council, or in some cases by the school itself after county wide exams, came together.

We decided to use my trunk, as a way to look into this fascinating social and educational experiment, radical when conceived during World War II, but perhaps with lessons for today.

County bursaries enabled 13 year old students from ordinary backgrounds to go to elite schools like Winchester and Eton colleges, and Rugby, for little or no fee.

Did the bursary boys' confidence and schooling benefit? Did we encounter hostility, friendship or both? Did the scheme break down social division? How did I do? Perhaps you'll listen in for the answers in the programme.

It was emotional to make, and also to meet some of the other Old Wykehamists on a bright Spring day. One was a lad I spent three years singing next to in the choir. Do we sing again? It was great to see former teachers, old friends and people who'd been so kind to me as a teenager. And whatever you think of private education Winchester is one of our most historic, picturesque cities, and a flavour of that is in the programme.

Wesley Kerr is a broadcaster and journalist

• When Wesley went to Winchester is on Monday 20th June 2011 at 11am and is available to listen to on the Radio 4 website for seven days shortly afterwards.