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Andrew Motion: Coming Home

2014-11-05T17:15:29+00:00

Editor's note: Poet, Andrew Motion uses conversations with British soldiers as the basis for a series of new poems reflecting on what it is like for British soldiers to come home after their long and dangerous campaign in Afghanistan. Hear Coming Home on Radio 4 on Sunday, 9 November at 4.30pm.

In April this year my producer Melissa FitzGerald and I visited the British Army camp at Bad Fallingbostel, forty kilometers north of Hanover. Our plan was to talk to members of the 7th Armoured Brigade – the Desert Rats - as they ended their final tour of duty in Afghanistan (‘Operation Herrick 19’), and to see what they felt about ‘coming home’. Later, when I got home, I would receive transcripts of our conversations and use them as the starting point for a series of new poems, which I envisaged as a form of collaboration between me and their subjects.

Margaret Evison and Andrew Motion

When we landed at Hanover I still had only the vaguest idea how this would work. But as we drove up the autobahn, and saw the remains of the old pine forest of northern Germany thicken around us, I began to think this was going to be an even more intense time than I’d anticipated. For one thing, I realised we were following almost exactly in the steps my father took when his regiment came this way in the spring of 1945. For another, as we came onto the camp itself and felt the peculiar power of all enclosed communities begin to assert itself, I knew I was about to come face to face with extreme emotional states of one kind or another.

Extreme states that were very well-controlled, of course – the army is very good at that – but probably all the more remarkable for being so well-drilled and rigorously reserved. Relief. Pride. Sadness. Excitement. A very strong and strangely-mixed brew, which existed at an equally strange distance from the world I usually inhabit.

In the course of our time there we talked to about ten people – junior and senior – as well as two medics and a padre (and, when we got back home, to the mother of a soldier who had been killed in Helmand in 2009). Each in their own way had very powerful things to say, but by and large the soldiers were very reluctant or actually unable to speak with much candour about the bad things they had seen. Comradeship, yes; the beauty of the landscape yes; pleasure at being home (and also the frustrations of civilian life) yes. But not death and destruction. Yet in each conversation I felt the pressure of these un-said things very strongly. Every voice seemed to be haunted by difficult memories.

Major Wendy Faux

When I got back to England and began reading through the transcripts of these talks, my first instinct was to look for a linguistic richness that conveyed these ideas. Then I realised I was looking for the wrong thing. The expressions that most interested me were in-between the sentences I had heard spoken. They were implications, not bold utterances. The pity was in the pauses, the silences, the suppressions; the poetry, if there was to be any, had to catch these things, and not hunt for eloquence.

With this in mind, I then set about editing, rearranging, adding to, tweaking, ventilating, and shaping the things I had heard. It was an extraordinary experience. In fact I can’t remember when I last spent a more enthralling few working days. Everyone I spoke to had been profoundly changed by things they had seen and done in Afghanistan. Listening to them, I felt that I had been changed a bit too.

The Gardener

Dr Margaret Evison

In Memory of Lieutenant Mark Evison

We spent

many hours kneeling together in the garden

so many hours

Mark was

he liked lending a hand

watching Gardener’s World

building compost heaps

or the brick path with the cherry tree

that grows over it now the white cherry

where I thought I mustn’t cry

I must behave

as if he’s coming back

It was just after Easter

with everything in leaf

he is so sweet really

though worldly

before his time

I kissed him and said

See you

in six months and he turned round

he turned round and said

I opened the garden for the first time

the National Gardens Scheme

you know

what gardens are like in May

and this man was hovering

outside the front

as we walked down the side passage

he said

I’m a Major

I said

O my son he’s in the army

sort of brightly

Then no one was there

so I went

and I gardened all day

how slow how satisfying

I felt next morning

he was struggling for his life

He would be home

with three transfers

in three different planes

and if he died they would ring me

and they would go back

and they would not keep coming

my daughter Elizabeth and I drove to Birmingham

my mobile there on the dashboard

we had worked out the times of the last plane

and we arrived

and they still hadn’t called me

and he was still

He was lying he was

with this

Mark

with this big plastic hole

sort of

a bandage over a hole

just like

asleep

The reindeer the wild reindeer

giving birth in the snow

with the rest of the herd scarpering

they have seen the eagle above them

but the mother stands still

what am I going to do what

a bit restless and everything

but starting to lick her baby

with the eagle watching

Quietened that is the best word

to describe it I felt quietened

seeing the hills below

as we came into Kabul

I was thinking

Mark lived in a very green place

and here everything is purple

orange Turner colours I call them

In my imagination he is never dead

bandaged lost never dead

with my love

circling

nowhere to go

I was thinking

thousands of lives

in an instant

and the molecules starting again

and the mountains never changing

how was I

quietened

how

but for a moment

I was

then losing height

with the brown earth rushing to meet me.

Poet, Andrew Motion presents Coming Home on BBC Radio 4

Listen to Coming Home

A Hospital Odyssey

2014-06-24T09:01:15+00:00

Editors Note: Poet Gwyneth Lewis was the First National Poet of Wales. Her books include Sparrow Tree and Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage. Her words adorn the front of the Wales Millennium Centre.

A Hospital Odyssey is the Afternoon Drama on Thursday 26th June - and is a contemporary version of The Odyssey set in an NHS Hospital.

Gwyneth Lewis wrote her original poem A Hospital Odyssey drawing on very personal experience after her husband was diagnosed with cancer. For the Radio 4 Blog she writes about those experiences that inspired the work.

I often wonder how people who aren’t writers cope with daily life, let alone a crisis. I use it to help me with common-or-garden feelings of discomfort. I do need other support, of course, conversation, prayer and, at times, therapy. But writing is my best means of digesting what’s happening.

A few years ago, while Leighton, my husband and I were preparing our boat for a transatlantic crossing, we were hit by a crisis. We’d reached Spanish Morocco in Jameeleh and, due to stomach pains, Leighton was admitted to the local hospital. I later found out that the institution was called "El Hospital Fatale". Its fire escape, used by smokers, was closed suddenly when it was seen to be coming adrift from the wall. A drug addict ran amok one night, attacking a nurse with a drip stand. The next day, I came in to visit Leighton, to find armed guards at the ward entrance.

Waiting for news was a surreal experience. The doctors thought it might be appendicitis, but the bloods looked wrong. After eight days of nil by mouth, Leighton was diagnosed with Stage IV non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Stage V is death. We left our boat and flew home for treatment. In a moment, I was losing a husband, had lost a boat and a voyage; we had nowhere to live, as we’d rented out the house.

When we arrived in Haematology in Cardiff’s teaching hospital, the consultant lost no time in starting the chemotherapy. So, our lives fell into a monthly pattern, matching Leighton’s dose of chemo, his debility for a couple of days and then his increasing recovery throughout the months, till he was ready to be hit again.

I felt ill as well and, more than that, completely lost. While Leighton needed to obey instructions and keep his mind off the cancer, I desperately needed a map of this terrifying new terrain. What were the landmarks and the hazards? What was the best way to cope with the surreal hospital world in which we now found ourselves? Stress heightened my powers of observation. I saw hospital scrubs as the ceremonial garb of sugeon-druids, nurses with their form-ticking like restless birds.

By Gwyneth Lewis. A contemporary version of The Odyssey set in an NHS hospital.

Most of all I needed metaphors as tools with which to handle the extreme emotions experienced by patient and carer going through such treatment. I thought of the cancer as a monster, but then understood that it’s a life form as valid as any other. I saw a distant doctor as a knight in armour, trying to avoid hurt by defending himself from emotion. When Leighton’s immune system was destroyed by the chemo, I became obsessed with hygiene. I imagined microbes in a hospital having a ball in insanitary conditions. Logically, germs and viruses are highly innovative entities, I imagined them dancing and getting drunk and forgot about them as enemies.

Leighton’s now been in remission for the last ten years, thank God. We did go back sailing but instead of crossing to Brazil, I wrote of a voyage through a hospital. We all, at some point or another, have to negotiate our way through the good and bad news we receive medically. It seemed as big as the sea as a metaphor of becoming lost and of learning to make your way by new rules.

Maris in A Hospital Odyssey is both me and not me. I loved seeing Alexandra Roach (who plays Maris) giving the character’s language new emotion. In writing A Hospital Odyssey, I’d heard every word inside my head. I hadn’t expected Allegra McIlroy’s production to sound like that internal poem, but it did, except for when it sounded even better. The production made me laugh, which pleased me because when you’re in extremis in a hospital, a laugh is one of the few things that can make you feel better. As for how you know what a greyhound – one of the main characters - speaks, I don’t know. Alex Beckett’s cool reasonableness caught the dog in my head exactly. You know a greyhound isn’t going to panic when he’s faced with a terrible wound or an orchard full of stem cells. He’s the ideal companion for a journey through a hospital. I hope this map helps other carers make the same successful journey with sanity and humour.

Gwyneth Lewis
June 2014

A Hospital Odyssey is the Afternoon Drama on Thursday 26th June 2014
Gwyneth Lewis chooses Laurel and Hardy's dance in Way Out West as part of Front Row's Cultural Exchange
The Guardian review A Hospital Odyssey by M Wynn Thomas

Bookclub: Gillian Clarke

2013-05-03T13:08:54+00:00

Welsh poet Gillian Clarke discusses her poetry collection Ice on Radio 4's Bookclub - listen to the programme from 4pm, Sunday 5 May 2013.

Gillian Clarke

We took Bookclub to Swansea for this month’s programme, and met Gillian Clarke, the national poet of Wales.

We spoke about her collection Ice, but of course it was also a conversation about poetry in general – her attraction to metaphor, to the music of words, to the Welsh bardic tradition. That came to her rather late in life, because when she was a child her mother didn’t want her to speak Welsh. She admitted that, having discovered and learned the language as a grown-up; it came to have a special power for her – the oldest tongue in these islands and one with a particular musicality.

Memory for Gillian is important. When talking about the poems in this collection which play with the idea of winter and the dark, cold season, she was back in an instant to her own childhood and a polar bear rug that appeared on the floor one day, and became her friend. Did she play with it, I asked. “I fed it!” she said.

National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke describes the polar bear rug in her childhood home.

We were in the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea, a natural place for a Bookclub, and of course readers wanted to discuss their favourite poems in Ice and reveal what it was about poetry that attracted and moved them. Gillian joined in, recalling early inspirations and particularly one teacher, a Miss Tierney from Dublin, whom she thanks for opening the door for her. It was from her that she learned the love of words. We all have one teacher who did that, I like to think, and in the course of our conversation we all found ourselves recalling childhood verses and favourite poets who managed to take us out of the here and now and into another world.

As we spoke, and listened to Gillian’s mellifluous readings, I reflected on the happy state of poetry. No doubt there are too many writers who find that if they manage to sell a handful of poems they should consider themselves lucky, and there are many publishers who still won’t give poetry the time of day, but I’d assert that there is more poetry being heard in schools these days than was the case half a century ago. Gillian has been the Welsh national poet for a number of years and is an important figure in the community; in Scotland Edwin Morgan for many years and now Liz Lochhead have had the same role (the “Makar” for Scotland) and I’d suggest that Andrew Motion and his successor Carol Ann Duffy have done a huge amount for the business of poetry: we all know their voices.

Personally speaking, I was lucky enough when I was a student to catch the tail-end of the Scottish renaissance, kicked off in the 30s by the cantankerous, infuriating figure of Hugh MacDiarmid, and in the early 70s Norman MacCaig, Iain Crichton Smith, George Mackay Brown and others were still carrying the torch, in much the way that Seamus Heaney does today. Listening to them read was an education, and often a riot. It was invigorating in Swansea to be in the company of a poet who has such a natural commitment to her work as Gillian and emits such a glow when she talks about where her poetry comes from, how the ideas form. The secret, incidentally, is that she is always listening.

I hope you enjoy listening to her.

Our next programme, on the first Sunday of June, is with a poetic writer of prose – Jim Crace, who’ll be talking about his book Quarantine, a truly remarkable novel.

Happy reading

Jim

In Our Time newsletter: Heraclitus

2011-12-12T13:38:55+00:00

Editor's note: In last week's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed Heraclitus. As always the programme is available to listen to online or to download and keep - PM.

Hello

After the programme Angie Hobbs told us the saying that she most liked: "Mortals are immortal, immortals mortal, living their death, dying their life". Then we talked about drink. "A dry soul is wisest and best", says Heraclitus.

Plato, however, encouraged all older people to drink, even to get drunk, in order the better to enjoy themselves, particularly to dance. And young people, he thought, should drink to test their manhood. Galen said that the soul must be part of the body, because when you are drunk it changes your state of mind and body.

We then tried to work out a word for what this library of In Our Times could be called. It's a sort of encyclopedia. Peter Adamson suggested "audiopedia"; James Warren suggested "acoustopedia". Neither sounds quite right. By the way, there's a DVD of Heraclitus being read in Greek.

In the storms from Europe and the storms from what used to be called the heavens, there were still a few moments. I was in St James's Park the other day and saw a tall, angular, young woman. Near her was a chap, smiling away. She put her weight on her left leg and bent her right leg, and chucked as you do when you want a horse to come to you. A squirrel appeared, ran across to her, paused at her foot, ran up to her knee as she held a breadcrumb between her index finger and thumb, and then from her knee to her thigh, and then up to her shoulder, looked in her face and she popped the breadcrumb in its mouth, and down the squirrel went and back across the path.

She nodded. Her chap smiled. She chucked again.

And another squirrel did the same thing. The chap had a wonderful beam of happiness on his face and so had I. It was a trick she had. It turned out that she and her chap were Estonians, studying here. A bit of circus in St James's Park.

On Hampstead Heath were the birdwatchers beside the special bird pond. Binoculars, beards and haversacks - never can people be more innocently employed. But I wondered what the birds made of this flock on the ground. Did those eyes take them in? Did we even figure in their landscape? Hampstead is well served with magpies.

And walking down from London University through Trafalgar Square, there was Nelson on the top of his column on a mild, dusky evening, with a flotilla of grey clouds beyond him. He looks down towards Westminster. Perhaps he was sending down some relief vessels.

It's been busy. James Cook, a producer, and myself have been doing a programme on Ted Hughes which goes out tomorrow night (Ed's note: That was last Friday. You can hear the programme online for the next five days - PM) on Radio 4 (at 8.00pm!). This was triggered by Ted Hughes's entrance into Westminster Abbey in Poets' Corner.

It was a wonderfully simple service, conducted, with his usual style, by the Dean of Westminster. Juliet Stevenson and Seamus Heaney read poems and Seamus gave a superb address, part of which will be in our programme. Carol Hughes, Ted's second wife and obviously widow, organised the event and she, too, is on the programme, giving a very rare interview.

The other task has been continuing the pursuit of the history of the written word with Tom Morris. This time we went to London University to see an extraordinary collection of more than 15,000 implements and artefacts to do with the written word - clay tablets, papyri, early pens, early books, etc - all collected by a Mr Cole of Enfield, who's devoted his lifetime to bringing together what is a unique assembly which is now to become an online museum.

Where would we be without such benign obsessives?

Then off to York for the final talk of the year on the book about the King James Bible and a chance to look at their magnificent Christianity and Culture resource centre, which is reacclimatising schools and universities to the idea that those two have had, over the past few centuries, a profound connection.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

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Saturday Live Poetry Pop-Up on Radio 4 Extra

2011-10-05T16:10:10+00:00

Editor's note: Thursday 6 October is National Poetry Day and Radio 4 Extra has a special programme featuring the Saturday Live poets to mark it. Full details at the end of this post - PM.

The English romantic poet Shelley said "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". A grand claim but wreathed in truth. Poetry, whatever its cultural resonance, political colour or artistic aim is, at its best, a distilled entreaty to reflect and consider.

When delivered to you in person by a living poet it's an (occasionally raging) bugle call to pay attention, a vibrant and vital mix of high art and sweaty stand up performance.

Poetry can be very bad.

But it can also be sublime, hysterical, scurrilous and moving, as it was in a recently recorded live poetry show at the BBC Radio Theatre in London.

Saturday Live from 9 July 2011: Richard Coles with Cerys Matthews and the poet Murray Lachlan Young

For one short hour last Friday evening Broadcasting House was London W1's own Parnassus, inhabited by the regular poets from Radio 4's Saturday Live and 6 Music's Cerys Matthews who sang a version of a Robert Burns poem. The show was designed to celebrate National Poetry Day and it was a great collaborative effort between Radio 4, 4 Extra and 6music as well as the BBC Big Screens who are showing a film of the event.

Working in the Radio Theatre is always a great pleasure and we had a very warm and generous audience. The shared experience of seeing such a diverse group of artists perform is powerful and for a while we were all poetic mariners buffeted and caressed in a maelstrom sea of spoken verse.

Or as Sylvia Plath less floridly put it: "There's nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends." Quite.

Chris Wilson is senior producer, BBC Audio and Music Factual Production

Saturday Live Poetry Pop-Up is on Thursday 6 October 2011 which also happens to be National Poetry Day. You can first hear it at 10am and 3pm and repeated over the following few days. You can listen online from tomorrow (Thursday) from around midday for seven days.
Mark Lawson interviewed Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy on Front Row last week. You can listen online.
In the next episode of The Culture Show poet Simon Armitage marks National Poetry Day on BBC Two. Timing depends on where you live, details here.

Black Roses: The Killing of Sophie Lancaster - Four years on

2011-08-23T19:00:00+00:00

Editor's note - In 2007 a young student, Sophie Lancaster suffered fatal injuries while protecting her boyfriend Rob from a ferocious attack by a group of youths. She later died on August 24th 2007. Black Roses: The Killing of Sophie Lancaster is a drama documentary marking the anniversary of her death in which Sophie tells her own story through a series of poignant poems written by poet Simon Armitage alongside her mother, Sylvia Lancaster remembering her daughter's life. On the blog Simon writes about meeting Sylvia and the making of Black Roses - PM.

As soon as I heard about what had happened to Sophie Lancaster in the park that night, and more so after hearing that details that came out following the court case, I felt as if I wanted to get involved.

It seemed to me that Sophie had been killed because she was different, and for no other reason, and as well as feeling angry and upset about it, I probably felt some underlying kinship with her, having grown up in a small northern community not unlike Bacup where to be different was to risk ridicule or aggression. Also, in images and photographs that begin to circulate, Sophie seemed so innocent, beautiful and vulnerable, yet she met with terrifying and almost unimaginable violence.

I met Sylvia, Sophie's mum, not long after the offenders were jailed, and was immediately struck by her great courage and her determination not to let her daughter's killing go unnoticed.

In Black Roses, Sylvia's brave and sometimes harrowing testimony is interspersed with poetic monologues in Sophie's voice, based on Sylvia's descriptions of her daughter's life and death, and their heartbreaking goodbye when the life support systems were eventually switched off.

I wanted to give Sophie her voice back, allow her to speak again, and to celebrate her attitudes and character as well as commemorate her.

Black Roses isn't an easy listen, but of everything I've ever written it seems to have made the most impact, in terms of listeners getting in touch and wanting to sympathise with Sophie or to relate similar episodes of prejudice and intolerance in their own lives.

I never mean to campaign or to crusade when I sit down to write, but on this occasion I hope I have done justice to Sophie's story and to Sophie as a person.

Simon Armitage wrote Black Roses

Black Roses: The Killing of Sophie Lancaster is on Radio 4 on Wednesday 24 August 2011 at 2.15pm on Radio 4. There's a debate on the issues raised around Sophie's death chaired by Matthew Taylor at 8pm and repeated on Saturday 27 August at 10.15pm.
Both programmes will be available to listen to on the Radio 4 website for seven days afterwards via these links: Black Roses: The Killing of Sophie Lancaster and Black Roses Debate.
Links: The Sophie Lancaster Foundation; The Sophie Lancaster Foundation Facebook Page; The Sophie Lancaster Foundation myspace page

Rhyme and Reason: helping the nation fall in love with poetry

2011-02-02T18:55:02+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00y1s42

The Rhyme and Reason series is the first programme BBC 6 Music has produced for Radio 4. As it's a series that explores the musical nature of words as found in poetry, it seems only right that the BBC's radio station that digs deeper into the intellectual psyche of music should produce work for the network devoted to intelligent speech. And with the knowledge that half of 6 Music's audience also listen to Radio 4, well, it was a no brainer really.

Still, it came about almost by accident - at least 6 Music's involvement, and almost didn't happen at all. It was a pet project of our then breakfast show producer, Nic Philps and Radio 4's 'Bespoken Word' presenter, Mr Gee. They had worked together at Radio 2 and wanted to do something together again. In Gee's words, 'The initial mission statement for the show was "To help the nation fall in love with poetry again". Poetry is a hard sell: it gives people haunting flashbacks of bad GCSE results and unfinished homework. We wanted to make a program that was more informal and laid back, but still introduced some powerful, thought-provoking works of art.'

Gee's previous work at Radio 4 helped get the series commissioned. Gee would present, Nic would produce it. But 6 Music is a small network and we could not afford to let Nic go to work on this full time. The best way was to incorporate it into his work at 6 with Radio 4 helping out in resources when needed. So it became a 6 Music production.

Nic and Gee created the format and the picked artists who were easy fits on both stations. Billy Bragg is a staple of 6 Music and as the Bard of Barking, easily at home on Radio 4 too. As Gee said, 'We wanted to invite artists who were recognised songwriters and create an intimate space to talk about their poetical leanings and their inspiration from the words. With each show, what inevitably happened was that the artists would become the fans and the poets would become the stars.'

The guests were booked, all was set. But suddenly, due to some unforeseen events, those driving this project were no longer involved. And no one else seemed to know anything about it. When was it supposed to go out? Where was the Tim Rice-Oxley episode? Gee could see all hard work going down the pan. We could see our first commission with another network disappearing before our eyes. We got in touch with our colleagues at Radio 4 and worked out a plan. What was obvious was that both networks were eager to see this special series get made and broadcast.

I appointed one-time Adam & Joe producer Ben Appleyard to complete the series. Fortunately, there were enough pieces of the puzzle to put it together and bring a great idea back from the brink. He had a listen to what was recorded, read through Nic's notes, consulted Gee and produced the amazing series that you hear today. A great idea was saved by the combined efforts of Radio 4 and 6 Music. Hopefully not for the last time either.

Mike Hanson is the Assistant Editor at 6 Music

Rhyme & Reason is repeated on BBC 6 Music this week (Feb 1 - 4) at midnight. Listen to the whole series on the 6 Music web site. Tonight's episode features Tim Rice-Oxley.
Listen to Mr Gee's poetry on MySpace.
The picture shows Florence Welch. Listen to her programme.

The end of the affair

2010-10-11T07:42:50+00:00

Editor's note: Radio 4's new Controller has been in the job for three weeks. Her second blog post concerns the party conferences, poetry and anagrams - SB.

The End of the Affair - I mean the party conference season. The Today Programme's set of leader interviews was unmissable. Ingredients: take four fresh, untried would-be leaders with relatively unknown views, facial expressions and speech patterns. Mix boldly with seasoned, piquant Today programme presenters.

Shake rigorously and sprinkle with chilli, cinnamon, nutmeg and chocolate (the bitter, dark sort - never sweet) and there you had it... four revelatory dishes served hot to the Radio 4 audience in our breakfast programme. Oh - and each followed by a tasting at the refined political palate of our discerning political editor. This is a time when politics and the changing shape of the state will be central to our coverage on Radio 4 and we will be looking for original programme ideas to track and interpret the future.

I was thrilled by the Ted Hughes poem unearthed by our own Melvyn Bragg in his guest-edited edition of The New Statesman.

Wole Soyinka sent me an original poem as a gift to broadcast when I started at the World Service. It was called 'A Moment of Peace' and I include it here as a treat for anyone who cares to listen. We are brilliant at analysis and critique but it is hard to beat the real thing- and a poem on radio... well, it fits:

My Radio 4 aside of the week is David Mitchell in Unbelievable Truths, which featured on Pick Of The Week. A brilliant sequence on rain ended with a statement that there are no anagrams in rain... "Iran" said David in a nano-drop, "Move on."

Gwyneth Williams is Controller of BBC Radio 4

on the Radio 4 web site

Radio 4 is on Twitter and on Facebook.

Cosmic dust and poetry in Cardiff

2009-11-11T11:02:00+00:00

Free tickets for BBC Radio 4 recordings at Cardiff University

Update: the information about Any Questions below is wrong. The panel for tomorrow's live show is: Claire Fox (Institute of Ideas), Tim Montgomerie (Editor of Conservative Home), AN Wilson (journalist) and Chuka Umunna (Labour's Parliamentary Candidate for Streatham - @ChukaUmunna on Twitter).

We are about to embark on the third and final leg of our mini-tour of Universities. We will be in Cardiff on Thursday and Friday of this week (the 12th and 13th November). On Thursday we are recording Material World with Quentin Cooper and new quiz show The Third Degree hosted by Steve Punt that sees academics pitted against their students. On Friday we have Any Questions with Jonathan Dimbleby and Bespoken Word, our performance poetry programme presented by Mr Gee.

The Cardiff venues are large so we have room for members of the public as well as students and members of the University staff. If you go onto the Cardiff University website you will find details of how to book. So if you live in the Cardiff area do come and join us. You are all very welcome.

The following guests have been confirmed:

Any Questions: ~~journalist Bryony Gordon (@bryony_gordon on Twitter)~~, Chuka Umunna (@ChukaUmunna on Twitter), Labour's Parliamentary Candidate for Streatham, ~~Steffan Lewis, the Plaid Cymru prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Islwyn and Andre Walker, Tory campaigner~~.

Bespoken Word: John Sparkes, Dizraeli, Laura Dockrill, Ross Sutherland and Nathan Penlington.

Material Word: Nick Pidgeon and Nick Jenkins from the Energy Institute talking about the Severn Barrage. Haley Gomez will be talking about Cosmic Dust and Nick Pidgeon about public reaction to new technologies including the news about the proposed new nuclear power plants.

Caroline Raphael is Commissioning Editor for Comedy and Entertainment at Radio 4

Get free tickets for the Radio 4 events at Cardiff University from the Cardiff University web site.
The picture, Cardiff University, is by Hashim Talbot and is used under licence.

Morpurgo reads Sassoon on PM

2009-11-04T17:55:10+00:00

In the hour or so before Prime Minister's Questions today, MPs were invited to another event. In one of the Commons' committee rooms, the National Heritage Memorial Fund announced it was donating half a million pounds to save the collection of Siegfried Sassoon's private diaries and pocket notebooks which were compiled while serving on the Western Front.

The collection also includes an autographed manuscript of 'A Soldier's Declaration' which when it was first read out at Westminster in 1917 caused a national storm. Sassoon claimed that the war was being prolonged by those who had the power to end it. Ninety years on his statement was again read out loud - by the writer and author Michael Morpurgo. Michael kindly came in to read it again for PM.

Tony Pilgrim is head of scheduling and planning at Radio 4 - he's currently working on attachment at PM

The donation was covered in The Times and The Cambridge News.
Thanks to the executors of G.T. Sassoon (deceased) for the picture.

Live blogging Front Row from Maida Vale

2009-10-30T19:00:00+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nds0r

1900 Studio MV5, Maida Vale. All around me is the organised chaos of the studio's 75th anniversary celebration. We're on-air in 10 minutes. Bill Paterson, soprano Jane Manning and composer Anthony Payne are in the studio already.

1910. Listen live to the programme here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nds0r.

1915. On air. Presenter John Wilson is walking down from the street talking into a mike. We expect him in the studio about...now.

1918. Poet Paul Farley arrived carrying a sheaf of notes - he claims not to have finished the poem yet!

1924. If you're tweeting about the event, use the hash tag #maidavale.

1930. In the next studio, a funk act is playing for Craig Charles' 6 Music show. Pic here.

1936. We're listening to a tape about the Radiophonic Workshop. Bill Paterson, Jane Manning and Anthony Payne are remembering Delia Derbyshire. "What a character she was..."

1940. Paul's poem is hand-written in a big blue manuscript book.

1943. An incredibly evocative tape of Maida Vale history. Joy Division, Ivor Cutler really stood out for me - my Peel legacy.

1945. Paul Farley tells me he's only feeling the stress of producing his poem now. He looks exhausted.

2012. In the green room. Production team and guests winding down. Taxis arriving. Not sure if live blogging a short programme like Front Row really works. What do you think? Is it worth doing again?

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

Front Row is Radio 4's nightly arts review programme - on at 1915 Monday to Friday. Listen again to the Maida Vale special. And scroll to the bottom of this page for a short video of John Wilson at Maida Vale.
Maida Vale's 75th anniversary was pretty busy. The hash tag was #maidavale

Bono's Elvis

2009-05-15T17:35:59+00:00

When you make a radio programme, you wait for the transmission date, you hope for a couple of reviews in the paper, you listen to the transmission and then it's gone. Elvis by Bono has had a different journey. It's attracted world wide press, has become the most read story this week on the Times Online, been parodied in Private Eye and even been pirated on YouTube.

We knew this programme had the potential to be special a long time ago. Bono had read out his poem 'Elvis - American David' to Des Shaw at Ten Alps while he was recording an interview about Sun Records and said to him that he could do whatever he liked with it. It's written as a 6 minute list of Elvis's life. Des made a CD of the poem, passed it onto sound engineer and composer Chris O'Shaughnessy who gave it to me later that week knowing that I'd listened to U2 since I was 15. When I heard it, I immediately started hearing a soundscape of Elvis archive and music mixed around the poem - it stirred the imagination.

We weren't sure what to do with it, and sat on it for 2 years until Radio 4 seemed ready for this kind of material. When I managed to secure the commission from Caroline Raphael as a joint Ten Alps/White Pebble Media production, I asked Chris O'Shaughnessy to produce it and compose original music to link the sections. I gathered the archive and let Chris do the rest. U2's management graciously let us have artistic freedom. The result is an extraordinary rhythmic 'composition' of sound that charts Elvis's life and music and shines a light on the cult of Elvis.

Since then, the programme has taken on a life of its own. There has been an avalanche of press around it - from all the major papers around the world to tiny websites run from small towns in America. I guess Elvis and Bono sell. U2.com ran it as their lead news story and apparently were pleased with the results. Many of the stories have criticised the poem, the conceit, but those who have listened have been generally positive, calling it a 'radio event'.

Critic Jane Anderson from the Radio Times summed it up by saying, "I was aware that I was meant to feel somehow blessed to hear this, but I didn't. With my headphones heavy with prejudice I sat back and listened, only to be startled out of complacent disdain by the electrifying brilliance of this recording. It's no grovelling paean to Presley, and Bono's surprisingly sharp appraisal of the man's life is made truly remarkable by producer/sound engineer Chris O'Shaughnessy's inspired layering of effects, clips and archive recordings."

Bono, the BBC, the programme's producers and composer Chris O'Shaughnessy have agreed to do something unusual and to make 'Elvis by Bono' available on the Radio 4 web site as a permanent tribute to Elvis Presley. Click here to listen.
The picture was taken in 1964 and was sourced through the BBC's picture library, which is called 'Elvis'

Poetry Please is 30

2009-05-15T16:50:45+00:00

The first time I came down the hill on my bike and turned into the back gate of the BBC in Bristol, I tried to cycle as I tell my actors to read the poems for Poetry Please - ordinarily, as if for the first time, as if nothing was easier in the world, as if there wasn't a microphone in front of them, or - in my case - Karen McGann of BBC4 with a camera to her eye, leaning out the window of a van cruising slowly alongside me.

The take was fine, but once in television is never enough. The next time the wind had got up; how would Byron cycle into work, I wondered. Again Karen and the van tracked past. Poets, famously, don't drive, but I couldn't remember any great cycling poems either. We like to think of Philip Larkin in bicycle clips but what about Coleridge (doped in charge of a penny farthing?), or Stevie Smith (not waving but indicating?), or T. S. Eliot (at least his trousers wouldn't get caught in the chain). When was the first bike anyway (could Chaucer ride one?), and why couldn't I resist throwing some nonchalant I'm-not-looking-at-the-camera-look that could only show me as an arty tosser - the poetry producer, for God's sake, on his bike, of course.

I can do radio, but doing radio for the TV wasn't easy. Next up after the Ben Hur bike ride was me in my office. I found having to act reading or typing or moving listeners' request letters across my desk incredibly hard - every gesture seemed hammy, a pantomime performance of "work", the opposite of the beautiful simplicity of the programme I was trying to show being put together. The talking was easier. The programme is very popular even if a detractor might see it as a mildewed bit of public service - a request show with a poetry DJ - tucked away in a corner of the West Country. I was keen to trip that version up. I too had derisory words for Poetry Please once, but I have changed my mind and have something of the zeal of the convert about me. So I plugged away and said what I thought. The set helped too. My office is echt BBC arts producer, with beetling cliffs of poetry books and CDs and old newspapers. And though I was crap at looking like I was reading it, having a collected A. E. Housman to hand helped somehow. Karen filmed on.

One received idea of the programme - spare me please, an angry performance poet who thinks they are shaking up the establishment - is that it trades in literary warm beer, cricket, English spinsters on bicycles (ah, my imagined poetic cyclist peddles past at last): a world long extinct if indeed it was ever extant, but this is far too crude an account. On Poetry Please we do Grantchester and honey and blue remembered hills and oh to be in England but we do much else as well. Peter Reading and Kathleen Jamie are there, as well as laureates old and new, there are black readers, gay poems, fresh work alongside most-loved lines, and I guarantee everyone will hear new things in every edition of the programme - and by new I mean poems that - as Ezra Pound said they must - make news that stays news. This is what I tried to say.

Making the programme for me is a repeated education - first in poetry itself; it is extraordinary and wonderful that so many Radio 4 listeners carry so much poetry with them; second it offers wider lessons in humankind, that people who write letters on bunny rabbit headed paper or who declare their age to excuse their wobbly hand are not silent and morose or swamped by television or debt but are getting on with their lives, living with poetry that makes reading their letters an uplifting privilege. As producers we must try to rise to the request: the best readings by the best readers (we are good at that, after my clumsy office acting, Karen filmed Kenneth Cranham reading - peerlessly - from 'A Shropshire Lad' for the programme), then the simplest of presentation from the warmest of hosts (Roger McGough, who is marvellous at that), and that's it, then shut up and let A. E. Housman tell you how it was to love a man who died and tell you in such a way that you can never hear enough of him telling you it over again though every time it makes you cry.

Roger McGough reading the poem he wrote to mark the 30th anniversary:

Poetry Please: Thirty Years of the People's Poetry. The BBC Four television documentary is on Sunday evening at 2130.
Poetry Please on the Radio 4 web site.
Let poetry into your life: the BBC's Poetry Season on television and radio in May, June and July.
Roger McGough's page on the Radio 4 web site, his own web site and and his Wikipedia entry.
A nice article from the BBC Shropshire web site about A.E. Housman's 150th birthday.