The tale that I tell in Love, War and Trains has been a family story of ours for as long as I can remember; in fact we told it to each other across kitchen tables and in back rooms with murmuring TVs in the background for so long that in the end it stopped being remarkable, it became ordinary, like the fact that I had four uncles called Uncle Blood, Uncle Terror, Uncle Passion and Uncle Thunder wasn’t too unusual. I’ll come back to the uncles later, perhaps.

The facts are these: my dad was from a place called Carnwath in Lanarkshire and my mother was from Great Houghton near Barnsley. My dad joined the Royal Navy in 1937 and my mother was called up to the WAAFs at the start of the war and they wrote to each other as pen pals in a scheme organised for the services at the time. They wrote for a while as my dad sailed the world and my mother worked in signals at RAF Blackbrooke near Wigan. They met a few times and the letters got more and more passionate. Eventually they got married on a 48-hour pass: my dad got a 48-hour pass, anyway, and sent a telegram to my mother saying GET LEAVE NOW. She couldn’t get leave but he chugged up to Peebles, where the wedding was, on a slow train, not knowing this. She eventually decided to go AWOL and climbed the fence and got on a train and just got to her wedding in time. They had one night together in the Tontine Hotel on the High Street in Peebles, my dad went back to the war, my mother went back to base and got arrested and chucked in the glasshouse for two weeks. Arrested for love: the height of romance.

When I told Gary Brown this story he said I should write it as a play and not only that, I should write it as a rhyming play. I wasn’t sure how that would work but I had a go; he also said that I should be in it as a narrator, with a different kind of rhyme-scheme. So I narrated in rhyming couplets, my dad spoke in quatrains, and my mother spoke in a special way that I invented for her, a six-line stanza that rhymed abc/abc, reflecting the more reflective (!) way she spoke.

After lots of drafts during which Gary and I wrestled with the dilemma that we all knew the ending (or I wouldn’t be here) and we tried to get some jeopardy in and I tried all kinds of new rhymes I’d never thought of before, we recorded the play at Media City in March. Billy Boy and Verity May Henry were fantastic as my parents, and I did a passable job of being me, although I don’t normally talk in rhyme that much.

And the Uncles? One was passionate, one was loud, one liked a scrap and one was scary. That was Terror. His real name was Norman. Of course.

Listen to Afternoon Drama: Love, War and Trains

 

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I've just met five ladies from Florence, and things may never be quite the same again. They've lit up the Italian language, and after many false starts, if one day I learn to speak it, it will all be down to them.

These women, on a day trip to Rome, have flicked a switch in my mind that students and teachers alike lust to find. I've tried twice to get started on the language. I spent a month in Italy at a language school, alongside a party of Nigerian nuns, and random classmates staring at a pricey text book.

Each night, instead of homework, I'd hit the town, speaking English and pointing at menus and staring at guide books. When I left the class I knew nothing, and years later I tried again at a class here in the UK. Despite it all, I can say little of any use, and the whole enterprise ground to a halt. Until the moment two days ago I pointed a microphone at a line of women in their seventies taking a break from sightseeing in Rome.

I'd travelled there for Broadcasting House, to meet the woman who organised those parties for Silvio Berlusconi. The Prime Minister faces one of the most serious scandals of his life, in part down to the people he met there and the claims surrounding his behaviour. We wanted to ask other women in Rome how they viewed these events, known as 'bunga bunga parties,' and I set out looking for views.

The ladies were furious about the scandal. They shook their heads in shame for public life in their country. One, then all spoke the words that made me hear their anger, but also feel the flash of a linguistic lightbulb in my mind.

"Non frequentiamo bunga bunga!" They said. I heard them, and finally, I understood.

Paddy O'Connell presents Broadcasting House

• Listen to Sunday's Broadcasting House on the Radio 4 web site.
• Paddy took the picture on his trip to Rome.

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Whenever the BBC surveys its audience to find out what it least likes - bad language is usually at, or near, the top of the list. Even those who enjoy using occasional expletives in company don't seem to want to hear them on the radio, and certainly not when children are around.

So why did the Radio 4 comedy series 'The Party,' written by Tom Basden, which has just finished a run at 1830, do just that and include some? The programme's use of the sexual swear word which rhymes with tanker, and is often accompanied by a gesture, shocked some listeners and baffled others.

New radio comedies often undergo baptisms of fire, but 'The Party' was widely applauded in our mailbag, and many listeners hope there will be a second series - but minus the bad language which they felt spoilt the comedy and their enjoyment of it.

In Feedback this week I put these concerns and criticisms to the Head of BBC Radio comedy Jane Berthoud, and this is what she had to say:

Please tell us at what you think of that interview and the use of explicit language on air by adding your comments here or by contacting Feedback via the web site.

Roger Bolton presents Feedback on BBC Radio 4

• Listen again, find out how to join Feedback's listener panel or subscribe to the podcast on the Feedback web page.
• The picture shows the cast recording Party at The Pleasance, London. From left to right: Tom Basden, Tim Key, Jonny Sweet, Katy Wix, Nick Mohammed (sitting) and Anna Crilly. There are more pictures on the Radio 4 web site.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/johnson-syllables/

Editor's note - Simon Elmes is Radio 4's Creative Director, producer of some of the network's most important arts programming and author of a history of Radio 4. He's recorded 18 definitions from Dr Johnson's great 1755 dictionary for broadcast between programmes between 5 and 18 September - from 'art' to 'world', via 'credit', 'mayor' and 'woman'. I asked him to record a short item about the task. SB.

• Listen to all 18 definitions and to the other programmes in the A-Z of Dr Johnson.
• Follow Dr Johnson on Twitter. Honestly.