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Big Ben bongs

2017-08-14T09:14:09+00:00

Big Ben is iconic - it was first heard ringing out over London almost 160 years ago and is now the world’s most famous and immediately recognisable bell. It’s a sound that resonates not just in our ears but in our imagination, too. It also plays a crucial role here at BBC Radio 4, heralding the start of the 6pm and midnight news, as well as Westminster Hour on Sundays at 10pm. So, it may come as no surprise there has been much discussion about what to do when Big Ben falls silent from Monday 21 August, while the clock tower undergoes refurbishment.

After much consideration of alternatives, including using the pips or playing chimes from elsewhere, we decided to use a pre-recording of the Big Ben bongs for as long as the clock is out of action.

A number of factors were at play, including uncertainty over how long Big Ben will be silent, and a host of technical and practical considerations. A live broadcast of a bell might appear a very simple matter, but here are a number of things we needed to consider. The chimes must of course be live on air at exactly the right moment and they must chime at the key times for our schedule. And the sound must be clear and undistorted, without background noises creeping in. What may be less obvious is that, as the chimes signal the start of the news, we need to be sure the aural pitch is also appropriate.

Given all these factors, we decided that pre-recording the bongs offers the most reliable option, while allowing us to retain the commanding sound of Big Ben as part our schedule, as well as our listener’s daily lives. Once the clock is back in normal service we will resume the live broadcast in keeping with long tradition. It’s a sound which has been heard on the BBC for over 90 years and one we hope to hear on Radio 4 for many, many more.

Inside the mind of Professor Stephen Hawking

2016-01-21T07:26:52+00:00

Editor: Hear Professor Hawking's Reith Lectures on black holes on 26 January and 2 February or listen online. You can also get downloads of this and previous Reith Lectures.

It’s always exciting to find out who’s giving the Reith Lectures for Radio 4. When we heard it was going to be Professor Stephen Hawking it was clear the world renowned scientist was going to be a hit with the Radio 4 audience. Across the country people would be leaning towards their radios desperate to finally understand the theory of black holes, Hawking Radiation and thermodynamics.

But not everyone is drawn towards listening to such a huge intellect talk about quantum physics. For some it feels way too difficult. Where do they even make a start? It’s a bit like reading War & Peace or exercising 3 times a week. We know it’d be good for us but…

So we thought we'd turn our attention to making this year’s Reith Lectures as enticing as possible by collaborating with one of the UK’s most popular providers of animation, Aardman Studios. Together we wanted to make a very short video that travels inside the Professor’s head to see what made stars and space appeal to him in the first place. It would act as an introduction to the great man himself.

We were after a multi-layered, graphic animation that stressed the child-like wonder which first drew Stephen Hawking towards his subject, hoping it would draw others in the same way, and all in three and a half minutes.

If you like the first we’ve also made a second animation with Aardrman Studios that promises to explain Black Holes in less than 2 minutes. Let us know if we managed it!

The director was Will Studd and the audio is a mix of original music by Max Halstead with words from Professor Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Andrew Strominger and Brian Cox. We should also thank The European Space Agency and NASA who helped with our search for suitable magical space images.

Rhian Roberts, Digital Editor for Radio 4 and Radio 3

Watch the animation Inside of the mind of Stephen Hawking
Download the Reith Lectures - inc Professor Hawking, Robert Oppenheimer, Martin Rees and Bernard Lovell
More clips and programmes about Professor Stephen Hawking

An introduction to Online First

2015-10-09T14:40:48+00:00

The magic of radio is that when you switch it on in your kitchen, in your car, laptop or phone you can probably find something suited to your taste at that moment. However, sometimes that isn't always the case... Maybe the programme on now is not quite what you want. Luckily you can find almost everything you could possibly wish for on demand on all platforms and now for download for 30 days on smartphone and tablet in the iPlayer Radio app.

We now offer the chance to get programmes Online First. So from now you can go online and hear a selection of our programmes before they have been on the radio. This improves the ability to schedule your own listening and I hope it will encourage more listeners to use our digital services.

We hope this will particularly appeal to listeners of some dramas as you will no longer have to wait until the next day for the next episode. One of our first offerings for Online First will be the continuing Radio 4 drama series Home Front. This means that from the Monday of each new week of programmes of Home Front you can get the full week's programmes all in one go. We will also try this for a selection of Books at Bedtime and some history series over the coming weeks.

The BBC Trust approved the Online First offer in the summer and we are selecting programmes from all the radio networks. We do not have the capacity or the rights to offer all our programmes in this way but hope that listeners will enjoy the choice we can make and that we can raise the profile of some great programmes that might otherwise only go out in slots some listeners find inconvenient. The offer will focus on factual programmes and some drama and comedy. Programmes that are primarily music cannot be included.

Programmes that are available Online First can be heard simply by going to their normal programme page online or in the iPlayerRadio app you can download the programme for 30 days and listen offline.
We are excited to see how this service catches on and how far we might expand it in the future.

One note though: We won’t be time travelling with Ambridge as making Tuesday in Ambridge happen on Monday would be too confusing and may also send out too many spoilers.
Keep an eye on the Radio 4 homepage for links to Online First offers.

Programmes that featured in our first Online First outing included:

BBC Radio 4:
• Home Front: The seasonal drama charting the history of Great War Britain through the daily stories of ordinary people. The war has wrought terrible change: those who try to manage at home see it in each other, and those who return from the fighting are almost unrecognisable. A fiction set against a backdrop of carefully researched fact.

• Peter Snow Returns to the Future: A ten-part series during October 2015 - With the aid of the DeLorean time machine last deployed in Back To The Future, Peter Snow and guests go back and forward in time. But this is not just temporal tourism - each episode in this series presents a compelling thesis which connects today with the world of yesterday – or tomorrow. Guests include Alan Johnson MP, Futurist Genevieve Bell and Geneticist Steve Jones.

• Voices of the First World War: Five-part series in November 2015 – Dan Snow brings together the sound archive collections of the Imperial War Museum and the BBC for the first time to tell the story of World War One through the voices of those who were there. In the first programme, the war gets underway with speakers' recollections of the day war broke out, their journey to France, and their first experiences of the Front. Dan Snow also explores some of the issues around oral history as evidence.

• The Invention of France: Three-part series starts in November 2015 - Misha Glenny begins an intriguing new history of France. In the first episode, Misha explores a crucial period in France's history, when Burgundians warred with Armagnacs and the English threatened to become kings of France, until the arrival of Joan of Arc. With contributions from Helen Castor, Anne Curry, the French ambassador in London Sylvie Bermann, Desmond Seward and Professor Francoise Michaud-Frejaville. Future programmes focus on Maximilien Robespierre and Napoleon III, le petit Napoleon.

BBC Radio 5 live:
• Raising the Bar: Criminal barrister Rob Rinder demystifies the legal world. With high profile guests from across the legal profession, he explains what a barrister really does and how they can morally defend the indefensible in the courtroom. Along with his studio guests he aims to show how the justice system in England and Wales works compared to what we think we know from watching television drama series.

BBC Radio 2:
• Comedy Showcases: Five new comedies to air on BBC Radio 2 in November 2015 - The BBC Radio 2 Comedy Showcases are a series of brand new comedies especially for Radio 2, written by and featuring some of the most exciting rising stars and new faces on the comedy scene, as well as brilliant comic actors who will already be familiar to audiences. Recorded in front of a live studio audience, each half hour episode is a standalone piece with a range of themes, from a chat show with a twist, to a couple with very different ideas on how to spend the golden age of retirement.

BBC Radio 6 Music:
• Paperback Writers: In November 2015. BBC 6 Music takes a closer look at the musical influences of some of the UK’s most successful novelists, and how they weave those influences through their work, featuring Stephen King, Mark Billingham, Danny Boyle, Belinda Bauer and Nick Hornby.

Andrew Caspari is Head of Speech & Classical Music Radio Multiplatform

Bookclub: David Nicholls - One Day

2015-09-04T16:12:10+00:00

Editor's note: This programme is available to listen to online and to download.

What is it about David Nicholls? He has a way of telling stories that attracts readers like flies to a honeypot: once they have a taste, they can’t stay away. Talking to him about his novel One Day for this month’s Bookclub, he said this: ‘I like this idea – that there’s no such thing as an ordinary day. I like the challenge of making often mundane days full of event and full of significance and full of intrigue.’ In pursuing that thought he opts, quite deliberately, for a narrative that seems to promise – well predictability, even tedium. In the case of this book, a love story told over 22 years by recounting the happenings on the same day each year – July 15th, the day that Emma and Dexter graduated from Edinburgh University in 1988. The question that underpins the story is one of the oldest and most appealing of all – will they ever get together? It’s as simple as that.

Naturally, the reason that the question stays interesting is that Dexter and Emma are characters who can hold our attention. Dexter intrigued our readers. The first questioner said she found him ‘alternately attractive, frustrating, awful and then vulnerable’. Emma, on the other hand, is a little more obviously likeable. But she’s a character who perhaps reveals more hidden depths. David Nicholls made the point that when he was trying to be an actor (he’s been a much more successful writer) he remembers the slightly outrageous side of the 1990s, the arrogant laddishness that was one of the habits of the age, the kind of vanity that Dexter develops in his twenties. So we’re intrigued by Emma, trying to probe underneath, but as far as Dexter is concerned we’re caught between wanting him to be taken down a peg or two and wanting to see him grow up. As David puts it: ‘There is a decency at the heart of it, and he changes through the course of the novel much more than Emma. It’s really his redemption, the novel.’

As someone who lives part of my life in Edinburgh, I naturally warmed to the background to One Day at the university there. David catches well the atmosphere of a city that he describes as ‘beautiful, romantic and not twee’ in which traces of a bohemian life can still sit comfortably with its character, caught between the Georgian grandeur of the New Town and the rumbustious past that’s always there in the old streets and tenements that take you back to Edinburgh in an earlier time. To be crude about it, David said, you could see Emma as old town and Dexter as new. They’re the ying and yang of Auld Reekie.

The structure of the story – that glimpse of their lives on the same day in each year – means inevitably that fate is always stalking the two characters. How will they meet? Will there be another chance encounter? Will an incident from the past bring them together? I was therefore, intrigued, although not altogether surprised that David revealed his love of Thomas Hardy, who turned coincidence and fate into a method of story-telling. Indeed, he said the idea of this tory came from a passage in Tess of the d’Urbervilles which he read when he was 17. ‘It blew me away.’

And what was the passage?

‘I can’t say because it would give the story away.’ I’ll leave you to guess.

The point is that he’s fascinated by fate. And the choice of July 15th- St Swithin’s Day - as the One Day that we’d see Emma and Dexter down the years is a nice touch – ‘because the whole thing about St Swithin’s Day is that it’s a whole attempt to predict the unpredictable. The desire we have to know the future seems very compelling.’

And that, of course, is why he keeps making us turn the next page.

David Nicholls on Bookclub this Sunday 6 September at 16.00 and Thursday 10 September at 15.30

Bookclub: A.M. Homes - May We Be Forgiven

2015-07-31T11:14:46+00:00

Editor's note: This programme is available to listen to online and to download.

It can’t be common for a writer to start writing a short story and find that it’s still going strong after 700 pages, but that’s what happened to the American novelist A.M. Homes. She didn’t even notice that the book hadn’t any chapters until her publisher wondered where the headings had gone. Such was the conception of May We Be Forgiven, a tumultuous, funny, all-action story of two brothers who, we learn from the very first pages, do not get on. Indeed at the start of the story, Harry says he hates George, and it’s as simple as that. But, of course, as they’re are thrown into a series of disasters, mainly springing from a car accident for which George is responsible, the story becomes much more subtle and reveals, often hilariously, the stresses and strains of a family in trouble. One of our readers at the recording asked A.M.Homes if this kind of trauma seemed to her especially American, and got the lovely reply that it wasn’t obvious that the dysfunction in this family was related to American commercialism – ‘I was in the Tower of London today, ‘A.M.Homes said. ‘Talk about complicated families!’

But, she acknowledges that there is something about the story that seems to spring from its setting. ‘There’s definitely a New York state of mind here, and the humour allows me to write more seriously, because if you can make people laugh and relieve the tension, it’s like - oh my God this is just so awful what’s happening here - then it allows you to go in a little bit deeper, and for me it’s also the psychological. I use the humour to get in psychologically deeper’.

I pointed out that it was curious that the book exuded a feeling of hope, when it described a mess of relationships – a man sleeping with his brother’s wife, when the brother has been responsible for the death of the other man’s wife, and the adulterer also engaged in a life of anonymous sexual encounters, to take one example – yet Homes said ‘The hope comes from interpersonal relationships.’ Even ones that are chaotic.

It will obvious to you, even if you haven’t read the book, that it is a tour de force and full of life. The sheer energy of her writing is exhilarating, and Homes has the knock of creating an atmosphere that’s intoxicating. Harold, for example, is a scholar of Richard Nixon – actually, he’s an obsessive too – and the melodrama of the Watergate years is one of the enjoyable backdrops in the story. Homes told us that her own adolescence and idea of morality were shaped by those years : the sight of a presidency falling apart, the human drama, the TV hearings and the White House tapes being a real -like soap opera. She grew up in Washington, and remembers the regular sight of a presidential motorcade whizzing by, and admits to a ‘super-fascination’ with the whole story.

But this isn’t a book about politics. It’s about people. Homes says, ‘On a daily basis I’m fascinated, awed and horrified by humans, just walking down the street. One person can do all three to me in a given moment. I love people, and watching and listening to them.’

That’s a good starting point for any writer and it’s obvious in May We Be Forgiven that if that fascination runs deep enough to you can write a long novel that never flags, even if you thought when you started that you were writing a short story,.

In our next edition of Bookclub, on Sunday, September 6, we’ll be talking about another book that’s full of fun – One Day by David Nicholls. A perfect book to take on holiday with you.

Happy reading

Jim

Jim Naughtie presents Bookclub on Radio 4

Listen to Bookclub

Download: Bookclub

Feedback: War Reporting

2015-06-26T08:56:18+00:00

Editor's Note: You can listen to Feedback online or download it here.

On Wednesday I was in Tunbridge Wells in Kent. I wasn’t looking for the legendary “Disgusted” correspondent of the town but for the location of a BBC hostile environment training course.

In the past journalists covering conflicts and wars may have been rather cynical about such exercises; now they are increasingly becoming targets and there seem to be fewer clearly defined front lines, such courses are taken much more seriously. It is not just death and serious injury that face today’s reporters, producers, camera people and sound recordists but the possibility of kidnapping and rape.

Earlier, back in London I had talked to the BBC’s chief international correspondent, Lyse Doucet, about how she copes in war zones, and with the appalling scenes she has to witness so that we can be informed about what really is going on.

One of the instructors on the course told me how much he had suffered from post traumatic stress disorder. This was manifested not just in nightmares but in appalling images evoked by the smoke of an ordinary bonfire which brought back the smells of a conflict zone - rotting, burning flesh and smouldering car tyres.

I thought back to when I was a Programme Editor sending teams off into dangerous situations. I thought very little about their mental health until one famous reporter had what seemed to be a nervous breakdown following three trips to bloody war zones.

Reporters have died in the past of course

I remember meeting the charismatic Sunday Times journalist Nicholas Tomalin shortly before he was killed by a missile in Israel in 1973 at the age of just 41. He was hit by a Syrian wire missile while reporting on the Yom Kippur war.

Other teams, who worked for me in the 1980s, had narrow escapes. David Lomax and Mike Dutfield were particularly courageous, though the experience of spending a day in a roadside gutter on a hot Lebanon hillside being fired at by snipers somewhat diminished their enthusiasm not to mention that of their families. David even survived telling the ghastly Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin, that he was a mass murderer, before eventually dying in his bed last year at 75. Still too early.

Mike Dutfield braved many battle fields but was killed on his motorbike on the M1, crushed by a lorry. He was just 48 years old. Those two were very special.

As was Alan Stewart, a producer who worked with me on Thames Television’s This Week programme. When I took over in 1986 he told me, with typical candour, that he thought he should have got the job and then proceeded to be totally loyal, enthusiastic, and hard working. We were both passionate about 5 a side football, which was an ideal way of working off the tensions of work. His tackling was ferocious.

In October that year I asked him to go to Sudan where a brutal civil war was even then in progress. His reporter was the African specialist Peter Gill and we were to call the film they made “Where Hunger Is a Weapon”, as we detailed how food aid was being diverted to the various armed groups and civilian areas were being systematically starved.

It was a far from easy assignment but Alan, Peter and the team went without a murmur, determined to tell the world about this humanitarian crisis.

They had finished filming and were leaving the country by what was said to be a safe dirt road when their two lorries went over a hidden land mine. The first, with Peter next to the driver, got through safely.

Alan was in the back of the second lorry with the cameramen and sound recordist.
The mine exploded beneath them injuring Alan’s two colleagues, who took months to recover. Alan was blown up and hit his head on a tree. He died a few hours later, cradled in the arms of his colleagues, far, far away from any hospital.

Peter then called me and I began the process of telling his loved ones what had happened before they heard it on the news. The metal canisters containing the film the This Week team had shot were buckled and twisted in the explosion, but survived. Peter Gill brought them back to Britain with Alan’s body, edited the material and the programme went out.
It seems trite to say that was what Alan would have wanted, but I am sure that it was.

Whenever I hear politicians castigate biased television journalists I think of David and Mike and Alan, the best of public service broadcasters.

Roger Bolton is the presenter of Feedback on Radio 4

Bookclub: Do No Harm

2015-06-04T08:57:15+00:00

Editor's Note: This episode of Bookclub is available to listen online or for download.

Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm is an unusual book - a doctor’s diary that explains the humanity involved in the practice of medicine, and the consequences of understanding that. Among them, that it is good to realise that there is frailty in a surgeon like anyone else, and that there are worse things than death. Marsh is a neurosurgeon, now 65, and his story - put together over many years and part personal history as well as a meditation on a hospital life - is given excitement by the way it describes the enthusiasm with which he’s always bored into the brain. When he was a medical student he found much surgery unappealing - ‘big smelly body parts’ - but found his calling one day when he watched an aneurysm operation. ‘It was an epiphany.’ This came after his own son had suffered a brain tumour and he had found himself succumbing to depression. Now he was set on his course.

The book takes us into the operating theatre and the consulting room, and more to the point, into the doctor’s head. How’s this for a straightforward picture of how a surgeon copes with the knowledge that he can’t always get it right. ‘You learn by mistakes. Success makes us complacent and less self-critical. The problem in medicine it’s that painful to admit to mistakes, and you learn early on in your career to pretend to patients you’re more knowledgeable and more competent than you are - because when you’re a young doctor, taking blood, you’re sweating and shaking and, yes, you could call in a more senior doctor to do it, but if you don't practice you don’t get better, and you end up deceiving yourself. That’s the best way of deceiving others, and then the problem is that if you’re deceiving yourself you’re less likely to admit you’ve made a mistake and you’re less likely to learn from it.’

This might seem scary, the kind of book you’d rather not pick up. That would be the wrong reaction. It’s reassuring on almost every page, even where Marsh is discussing things that have gone wrong (the cases are completely anonymised, of course). I suspect that even someone who is facing surgery would find this an absorbing story, because it rings true. We’re not dealing with super-humans, but with men and women who remain determined to do their best, every day. And even when you realise the speed at which decisions of life-and-death importance have to be made - quite often, he generates a feeling of suspense - the business seems heartening rather than frightening.

I suspect this is because he places medicine in the context of a rounded life. There is the practical business of the beauty of the well-wielded surgeon’s knife, which he loves, but more importantly a description of the precious relationship that develops between patient and doctor, even when it is brief, and particularly when it ends with death.

That is a considerable achievement. Marsh is a self-confident man, willing to talk about his feelings and his judgement about himself without embarrassment, and without those traits he couldn’t have written the book. He is the autobiographer who is not afraid of himself. That helps. The book has been extraordinarily successful - he told us there may be a television series in the pipeline - and, reading it for the first time, I understood why. He touches the fears that we all have of the operating table and the hospital bed, and demythologises the whole experience. He also makes a case for the doctor who has a touch of arrogance - a belief that although something can always go wrong, if you have the commitment and the dedication to work on your technique it is more likely to go right.

Our readers this month were won over. I think any of them who find themselves in hospital in the coming months will fare better as a result. Let me sum it up. I asked Henry Marsh if he thought he would like doctors to have more authority. The answer - ‘yes’.

I hope you enjoy Do No Harm.

Happy reading

Jim

Feedback: Alan Davey and Radio 3

2015-04-17T08:01:06+00:00

Editor's Note: You can listen to Feedback online or download it here.

Alan Davey has thousands of CDs and LPs. The new Controller of Radio 3 knows that in the digital world he has no need of them but he can’t bear to throw them out. Just to look at them gives him pleasure.

This does not sound like a man who is going to take a yard brush to his new network. Mind you, he would not be popular with the BBC Trust if he did. It said recently that :”we think that the priority for Radio 3 should be to increase choice for radio listeners by maximising its distinctiveness and minimising similarities with other stations”, by which they presumably mean Classic FM.

Mr Davey is a cheery soul who looks on the bright side and is obviously delighted with his appointment but there are causes for concern.

For a start the average age of his listeners is 58, older than the average for Radio 4. Then he has been given no extra money to spend on new initiatives to help him on his way, in fact the 5 per cent per cent cuts per annum continue.

The future is particularly uncertain.

After the Election the BBC’s Charter will be renewed, but on what terms is not clear, and the level of the licence fee is once more up for debate. Few think it will be significantly increased.
It could be cut.

If it is then undoubtedly the Corporation will come under pressure to cut one or more of its orchestras. Imagine if it decided it was the Scottish one that had to go! The bloody internecine fighting that would follow any cut would task the new Controller’s diplomatic skills to the limit.

Although officially under no ratings pressure Alan Davey has to attract new audiences and to steer a careful course which allows him to appeal to younger listeners without offending the older ones many of whom believe they are defending the last bastion of public service broadcasting.

It’s a formidable task for the former civil servant and head of Arts Council England. (Incidentally his successor there comes from Classic FM.)

One thing Mr Davey will not do is combine his new job with that of Director of the Proms, as his predecessor Roger Wright did. He will appoint a Director who will report to him.

It’s a debateable arrangement, and depends upon a good working relationship being established with the boss of the Proms.

I remember a time in the past when the jobs were separate and neither Controller would talk to each other, or to Radio 3’s Head of Music. Communication was only by memo and all three men seem to have avoided being in the same room at the same time. This was extremely difficult for the staff who had to develop diplomatic skills of a high order.

Armed with listeners’ questions I talked to Alan Davey last Wednesday.

By the way, if you are having trouble deciding which way to vote why not ask your candidates about the future of the BBC?

That was a completely disinterested suggestion from me, Roger Bolton.

Roger Bolton is the presenter of Feedback

AA: America's Gift to the World

2015-04-01T13:36:32+00:00

AL Kennedy's new Radio 4 documentary - America's Gift to the World - tells the story of Alcoholics Anonymous and its methods, and asks whether AA is still the best 'cure' for addicts given new science and treatments. This is the background to the story, and how the making of the programme impacted on its presenter.

The initials AA are peripherally familiar to many, as is perhaps the name Alcoholics Anonymous. Nevertheless, I think a lot of people don’t know much about AA or the story of its creation – when Bill Wilson, an alcoholic wall street trader with a big idea about staying sober, met an alcoholic doctor, Bob Smith. They talked and understood each other, helped each other get sober and worked out a way they could pass that on. I’ve seen friends ruin their own lives and those of all around them through dysfunctional drinking: the idea of two people finding a way to unravel that nightmare is truly beautiful and fascinating.

AA’s desire to preserve its members' privacy and to make no grand statements on issues, meant we had to be sensitive about interviews. It’s also probably one reason why AA isn’t well-known outside its membership. AA’s also an intentionally disorganised organisation. I loved looking at a huge association which seems to do exactly what it intends and yet which is specifically engineered to concentrate power and responsibility downwards and to avoid creating authority figures, funding drives, advertising drives and so forth. It seems to reverse modern thinking about success, but has millions of members, has lasted 80 years and still rolls on.

With so many products and experiences now designed to exert an addictive or pseudo-addictive influence, I suppose AA pushes against some powerful trends in society. As was pointed out during my research, alcohol use is central to many of our social occasions, celebrations, even some religious ceremonies. Anyone trying to stay away from drink isn’t going to have it easy. AA isn’t for everyone, but it seems to work very well for those who do use it.

What I was struck by most of all was the generosity, honesty and compassion of all our contributors. We have hours of wonderful stories and insights that we just couldn’t fit into the programme. The professionals we spoke to were genuinely passionate about trying to understand alcoholism and help alcoholics to recover. AA members were searingly frank about themselves – and very funny - and really had a grip on who they were and how they could meet the world. We also interviewed Al-Anon and Alateen members – those affected by the drinking of others. Their experiences and bravery were startling, humbling. It was really a privilege to meet them all.

America's Gift to the World is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 8pm on Monday 6 April.

Radio 4 Extra: Frankly Speaking

2015-03-17T15:50:48+00:00

Frankly Speaking was considered 'risky' and 'unkempt' when it originally aired in the 1950s. Now, as Radio 4 Extra rebroadcasts a selection of high profile interviews from the series, Caroline Raphael sheds light on an archive jewel …

Frankly Speaking, which starts on Tuesday 17th March at 6.30pm.

The interview as a genre courses through modern broadcasting. Morning punch ups to late night hectoring, professional interviewers who are household names, interviewees trained to give the answer they want to give not the one we want to hear, evasive and slippery or prepared to share their deepest sorrows. People talking to each other on the radio hoping someone is listening.

It wasn’t ever thus. On Radio 4 Extra we are repeating Frankly Speaking, which to modern ears may sound frankly old fashioned. But, in 1952, when it was launched on the BBC Home Service it was a completely novel and ground breaking series; novel because instead of the traditional pairing of interviewee and interviewer there were three interviewers. And ground breaking because it was both unrehearsed and unscripted. It wasn’t however, a new idea. Frankly Speaking was based on a French programme, Qui etes-vous? What were then considered unusual and unconventional questions were designed to discover the private person behind the public veneer, to determine through cross-examination, what traits made them successful.

Maurice Chevalier is featured in the first episode, you can listen to a preview clip here

The first issue was this. Would the format work for a British listener? The BBC producer was Joe Weltman and he was very conscious of possible differences between French and British sensibilities. Would his guests feel comfortable with this sort of cross-examination? Would British listeners find it simply rude and discourteous? In the end Weltman took a slightly softer approach, what he described as a “looser, more discursive style which contrasts sharply with the tidy, analytical manner of the French programme…an atmosphere not quite so athletic or tense”. Despite this he still thought in terms of “judgements” and “victims”.

Guests came from far and wide to be interviewed but early reviews of the programme found it a disquieting listen, as Weltman had feared they might. Critics described it as ‘unkempt’, ‘an inquisition’, called interviewers ‘Torquemada’; they wrote of the guest as prey being cornered, quarry being pursued, and called for the end of the unscripted interview.

The Listener magazine described it as “a very risky form. Like violin-playing, unless it is very well done it stirs horribly uncomfortable feelings in the listener.”
The producer of Qui etes-vous? on hearing the English version declared that his questions would have been much more indiscreet.

Conscious of a continuing disquiet Joe Weltman wrote in the Radio Times in 1957: ‘What kind of a person have you got to be – to achieve fame and success? Is it any one kind of person?....Are we sometimes too inquisitive, too personal? Even tactless? Perhaps our ‘victims’ can answer that one. Not one of the many distinguished men and women who have appeared in the programme during nearly five years has ever made such a complaint. Instead, they usually tell us how much they have enjoyed this process of self-revelation’.

Whether it was before or after he wrote this that L.S. Lowry is said to have walked out of his interview after just a few questions saying ‘Oh let’s call it off, shall we?” as he rose to catch the train home, it is difficult to know!

In today’s over-sharing culture where we tell all to everyone all the time without even being asked, Frankly Speaking sounds very much of its time. But the deft speed at which forthright questions are often asked can catch you unaware. In this collection of episodes on Radio 4 Extra, listen to Flora Robson being asked about her looks and consider her honest response. A later episode features Gracie Fields - she is asked several times to consider how she betrayed her fans when she left for America during the Second World War.

If the aborted Lowry is one programme we shall never hear because it was never completed, there are the many others that cannot be heard because as far as we can tell copies have been lost. These include guests such as Coco the Clown, Dr Benjamin Spock, James Thurber, Rebecca West, Walt Disney, Ronald Searle, George Simenon, Joyce Grenfell and perhaps most frustratingly of all, the arch interrogator himself John Freeman. However, he can be heard as one of the interviewers on some of the surviving editions. Radio Times previews of these missing programmes hint at what was spoken of but nothing can quite compare with hearing the cadence of the voice itself, the breath taken, the elongated pause, the laugh, the interruption.

If the format was ground breaking so too was the BBC’s decision to hire often unknown or very inexperienced broadcasters as the interviewers. The first set of three were Stephen Black, a journalist and film writer, Jack Davies, secretary of Cambridge University and Charles Wilmot of the British Council. They all passed their initial test well and went onto present many other programmes in the series. Other notable interviewers, all at early stages of their broadcasting career included John Betjeman, Harold Hobson, Elizabeth Beresford (who wrote The Wombles) and Katherine Whitehorn. Anthony Wedgewood-Benn, as he was billed, took part just once. As that audio is lost we cannot know why he was never asked back or declined further bookings. As the years went on the number of interviewers sometimes went down to two and in one or two instances, for example the Brian Epstein interview, to just one.

The questions are direct and to the point, very straightforward. The inquisitors or interrogators, as they were sometimes described in those not always favourable early critiques of the programme, may have gone onto become personalities in their own right but here it is all about the guest, not them. And in the end the series won over its detractors.

Evelyn Waugh discusses his career in the second episode

The series has been rather neglected but there is one famous edition that is often referred to. It was the interview with Evelyn Waugh, which will be broadcast in full as part of this initial run on Radio 4 Extra. It was considered to be one of the most ill-natured interviews ever put out on air. Waugh later turned the experience into a scene in his novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold with one of his interviewers, Stephen Black, becoming the character Angel who haunts Pinfold in his hallucinations. According to Waugh’s grandson, Alexander Waugh, the writer had been under a lot of pressure at the time, drinking cocktails of bromide and crème de menthe to help him sleep. Evelyn Waugh, who had contempt for many things, particularly loathed the BBC, calling interviewers and journalists ‘electricians with their apparatus’. His grandson recalls that the interview plus the sleeping draught sent him 'rather mad'.

Frankly Speaking starts on BBC Radio 4 Extra on Tuesday 17th March at 6.30pm.

The series will feature the following people:

• Maurice Chevalier (interviewed in 1963 by Penelope Mortimer, Colin Macinnes & Carl Wildman)
• Evelyn Waugh (interviewed in 1953 by Charles Wilmo, Stephen Black & Jack Davies)
• Tennessee Williams (interviewed in 1959 by John Bowen, Peter Duval Smith & John Freeman)
• Dr Jacob Bronowski (interviewed in 1964 by Mary Stocks & John Maddox)
• Bette Davis (interviewed in 1963 by Peter Duval Smith & George Coulouris)
• Dr Mary Stocks (interviewed in 1964 by Audrey Russell & Leslie Smith)
• Brian Epstein (interviewed in 1964 by Bill Grundy)
• Harold Lloyd (interviewed in 1962 by Liam O'Leary & Peter Duval Smith)
• William Walton (interviewed in 1962 by Dilys Powell & Antony Hopkins)
• Flora Robson (interviewed in 1960 by John Freeman & Philip Hope-Wallace)
• Danny Blanchflower (interviewed in 1961 by Roger Bannister & Brian Glanville)
• Gracie Fields (interviewed in 1960 by John Freeman, Harold Hobson & Patricia Brent)

Home Front: The Changing Role of Women in WW1

2015-03-11T11:03:05+00:00

Editor’s Note: To mark International Women’s Day, we asked Professor Maggie Andrews, consultant historian to Radio 4’s Home Front to explore the changing role of women in WW1. Last week Maggie looked at Women in the Workplace. This week she looks at Women in the public space.

Radio 4’s wartime epic, Home Front, tells fictional stories against the factual background of the Great War.

Maud Burnett played by Carolyn Pickles

At least for the duration of the war, some young women had greater earning power and leisure opportunities. Women, even those from the middle and upper classes, began to go to pubs after work; and in some areas to attract these new drinkers, pubs provided meals and improved their décor. One observer remarked on the introduction of white cloths, flowers, artistic prints and shaded lamps which all gave pubs a ‘homelike quality’.

Wartime also gave an added impetus to women’s participation in public life which had been increasing in the Edwardian era as women became Poor Law Guardians, participated in suffrage campaigns and from 1907 were able to stand as County and Borough councilors. In Home Front, a real female councilor Annie Maud Burnett appears in the Tynemouth Season (played by Broadchurch’s Carolyn Pickles).

Joyce played by Tracy Whitwell

There were, however, tensions as women grasped the new opportunities war offered. One area of public life women entered was the temperance movement, attempting to restrain other women’s drinking. Home Front’s character Joyce Lyle is actively involved in the local temperance league. Similarly the British Women’s Voluntary Police also took a role in curtailing working class women’s leisure activities.

Maggie Andrews is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Worcester.

Series 3 of Home Front BBC Radio 4 on Monday to Friday at noon with an omnibus at 2100 on Fridays.

Catch up with Home Front and subscribe to the podcast

World War One on the BBC

World War One on TV and Radio

Home Front: The Changing Role of Women in WW1

2015-03-06T12:27:38+00:00

Editor's Note: To mark International Women’s Day, we asked Professor Maggie Andrews, consultant historian to Radio 4’s Home Front to explore the changing role of women in WW1. Radio 4’s wartime epic tells fictional stories against the factual background of the Great War.

Women in the workforce

100 years ago on 17 July 1915 Mrs Pankhurst led a women’s march through London to demand the right to work. Women already made up a significant element of the workforce, in domestic service, textiles, laundries, millinery, clerical and retail work even as chain-makers in Cradley Heath. Wartime conditions adversely affected some of these trades and when the July march took place, with Lloyd George’s support, some young unmarried women had already moved into new areas of work. Government and local authorities led the way, providing women with working opportunities: collecting refuse or as tram conductresses; firms like Home Front’s Marshalls making munitions followed.

For some women finding work was a pressing need. There was little organized financial assistance for wives and widows of soldiers prior to WWI; arrangements to look after soldiers’ dependents were haphazard, often delayed and organized by charitable bodies with a degree of moral censure towards women, particularly those who were euphemistically described as ‘unmarried wives’.

During the transfer to a fully regulated system and the formation of the Ministry of Pensions in December 1916, some women were homeless, destitute or in the workhouse whilst their husbands fought and died in the trenches. They consequently grasped the new working opportunities available.

At least for the duration of the war, some young women had greater earning power and leisure opportunities; they went the cinema and formed workplace football teams. Women’s football became an increasingly popular spectator sport, especially after the men’s professional game was suspended at the end of the 1914-15 season. A Munitionettes' Cup was established in 1917.

"People didn't have to justify paying women literally half the money they were paying men" - Writer Melissa Murray on women's war work

Maggie Andrews is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Worcester.

Series 3 of Home Front BBC Radio 4 on Monday to Friday at noon with an omnibus at 2100 on Fridays.

Catch up with Home Front and subscribe to the podcast

World War One on the BBC

World War One on TV and Radio

Imperial War Museum North are celebrating #100YearsOfWomen: find out more

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Bookclub: Wilbur Smith

2015-02-27T12:33:56+00:00

Editor's Note: This episode of Bookclub is available to listen online or for download.

To someone of my generation - and a boy, to boot - it’s not surprising that someone who writes in the spirit of John Buchan and H. Rider Haggard has sold more than 120 million books. I did ask, rhetorically, at our recording with the veteran novelist Wilbur Smith whether there comes a stage when even a publisher stops counting…but I suppose that’s not allowed.

The point is that he knows how to write an adventure story, and for those of us who were taken into dreamland by King Solomon’s Mines or by the adventures of Richard Hannay, or indeed by R.L. Stevenson and Jules Verne, the success of Smith’s stories - sagas, I suppose - is easy to explain.

But explaining why people want to read them isn’t the same as explaining how they’re written.

The art of story-telling - putting together a page-turner - is, I suspect, a skill that some people just develop naturally.

But the truth is that it is rare. We all know books that purport to spin a great yarn that simply don’t work, usually because they’re formulaic and the language is stale. Keeping a spring in your prose and turning every plot corner in style is a skill that is in short supply.

I asked Smith for the secret of a good story, and his answer was, I think, the perfect one: ‘You have to make the people believe in your characters, it’s just a matter of faith. Your characters have to act in a certain way, to be believable, and you have to generate an interest in your readers for them to follow the story - for it to be important for them that these people survive.’

That is part of the secret of his style, but there is also the setting - the Africa that he came to love as a boy. It was wild, dangerous and mysterious.

Our book this month is When the Lion Feeds, the first of his novels dealing with the Courtney family (published in 1964) and reflecting the excitements of his own youth. He was about 30 when he wrote the story of the twins Sean and Garrick, the first a lion-hearted adventurer and his brother a more thoughtful, emotional soul.

Smith says he identifies more easily with Garrick - ‘I was at boarding school and I know the top dogs are hard to compete with. I wasn’t top dog. I was third team rugby, not first, I didn’t get colours.’ But Sean’s appetite for the wildness of Africa in the era of the Zulu wars in the 1870s and 80s was a reflection of Wilbur’s own, when his father - a bushman, he calls him - introduced him to the sounds and smells of the open places, and the creatures of the forests and the veld. His boyhood gave him an enduring love of the continent - all its peoples and their customs, the incomers and the native.

This month’s group of readers were naturally interested in how his views had altered in the half century through which southern Africa has changed so radically. He was born in Broken Hill in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in 1933 and his world was unrecognisable to a contemporary generation. He acknowledged that he would certainly have written quite differently a generation later - that’s inevitable - but the guts of the story would have been the same.

He was always interested in the relationship between the colonisers and the colonised, and said that the relationships between his parents and grandparents and the indigenous people around them was a close and fascinating one. He doesn’t think that human nature has changed with the passage of time - ‘I have learnt in my life there are good people and bad people and the good ones outnumber the bad.’

In a way, it’s his motto. He likes stories that pit goodies against baddies - on the land, in the mines, in the scramble for wealth on the trading floor - and in the 37 books that followed this one he’s demonstrated that he understands instinctively how to draw his readers into his own enthusiasms.

That’s the mark of a born storyteller, and although he trained to become an accountant it’s hard to imagine him finding the excitements the he loves in the mysterious world of double-entry bookkeeping.

I hope you enjoy our conversation about When the Lion Feeds.

Next month, we’ll turn to a quite different kind of novel - The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds, a poetic story about the poet John Clare and his incarceration in an Essex asylum in the early Victorian era. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and if you don’t know it, you have a treat in store.

Happy reading

Jim

Jim Naughtie presents Bookclub on BBC Radio 4

Bookclub: Judith Kerr

2015-01-29T17:02:23+00:00

Editor's Note: This episode of Bookclub is available to listen online or for download.

Judith Kerr said something very striking at our Bookclub recording that has stayed with me. She wondered if the children of refugees coming to this country today have the same feelings as she did after her family’s flight from Germany in the 1930s - that the world was opening up, and offering a new beginning. There were excitements ahead. Maybe this thought is lodged in my mind because the depressing conclusion is that many of today’s children will have little of that expectation. Maybe I’m wrong, and I hope I am, but I was moved by Judith’s recollection of the optimism that shines through her story, which became the journey of the family portrayed in When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit.

Following the rule that after a certain milestone has been passed, it’s not only acceptable but almost obligatory to mention a person’s age, we spoke about what it was like for an author now in her nineties to look back to childhood. The book has become a set text in German schools - imagine it! - and the reason that it has become such a family favourite here (for readers of all ages) is that it catches a feeling which is still with her, all these decades later : adventure. Her father had to take the family away from Berlin because he was facing arrest, and probably death, but for Judith and her brother the train journey to Switzerland (which was a chilling though funny incident on the border which she read for us) was fun. She was insistent about that. They heard new voices, saw new places, and in Paris, where they settled first, she learned French and absorbed a different culture. Although she now feels utterly part of this country, where her children were born and where she has always been at home, she has a cheery honesty about the years that preceded her arrival. Compared with her parents’ experience after Hitler came to power in 1933, hers has been a trouble-free life.

I think one of the reasons that the book is so warming is that, as well as some beautifully direct story-telling, it glows with the excitement of a young person’s exposure to new experiences. Anna - Judith’s fictionalised self - is, she says, rather nicer than the author. None of us sitting around her believed that, but it was an honest reflection. Considering the dark backdrop to the book - she discovered a letter of her father’s after his death that revealed that her mother had contemplated suicide in Paris - we had a conversation that pulsed with good humour and optimism.

Judith is still writing - she’s five-sixths through a new book, she said - and she is someone with the twinkling good humour that draws children to her work. We did talk briefly about one of my hobby horses - the silly habit in bookshops of labelling everything for children in defined age brackets, as if a twelve-year-old would ever be seen dead picking a book out of the ‘10 to 12 year olds’ section - and the evidence over four decades now that When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit and its two sequels is a story that can be enjoyed by readers of all ages, and should.

At a time when we’ve marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Judith is a fitting Bookclub guest. But this isn’t a story that takes you backwards. It’s about the resilience and the optimism of the young, as much as anything else. And these qualities are eternal. It brings me back to that first question. Are refugees’ children as hopeful nowadays? Maybe the answer is that they would be, if they were given the chance.

Next month’s book is one that can safely be described as a ripping yarn, Wilbur Smith’s When the Lion Feeds, the first of his novels about the Courtney family, published in 1964. Pick it up, and don’t expect to put it down soon. This programme will be broadcast on 1 March 2015.

Happy reading

Jim

Jim Naughtie presents Bookclub on BBC Radio 4

Remembering Churchill’s Funeral

2015-01-13T09:30:00+00:00

Editor's note: Sir David Cannadine, presenter of Churchill’s Other Lives remembers Churchill’s funeral 50 years ago. You can hear the programme on Monday 19th January.

David Cannadine at Chartwell

Winston Churchill has always been a figure of extraordinary fascination to me. When I was growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, these were the years of Churchillian apotheosis, and he was the most famous man alive. On his ninetieth birthday, greeting cards were sent, addressed to ‘The Greatest Man in the World, London’, and they were all delivered to Churchill’s home address.

As Lord Moran’s diaries would later make plain, Churchill’s last decade was in many ways a sad one: he was old and infirm, which meant he was no longer able to keep the ‘Black Dog’ of depression at bay; and as his own strength ebbed and failed, he also came to feel that his life’s work, to preserve and safeguard Britain as a great empire and a great power, had been in vain. ‘We passed all the tests, but it was useless’, he is alleged to have said, as the British Empire disappeared and Britannia ceased to rule the waves. ‘I have achieved so much’, he observed on another occasion, in what must surely rank as among the saddest words ever uttered by a great man in extremis, ‘to have achieved in the end NOTHING.’ Of course, he did himself less than justice: it had been an utterly extraordinary life, and the more it recedes into the distance, the more extraordinary it seems, not less.

As Roy Jenkins observed, having written the life of Britain’s greatest nineteenth-century prime minister (Gladstone), and its greatest twentieth-century premier (Churchill), and thus being uniquely placed to compare them: Churchill was the most remarkable human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street, and whatever the verdict of the electorate this coming May, it seems inconceivable that it will be such as to cause anyone to modify, let alone overturn, that judgment.

The State Funeral of Sir Winston Churchill as the procession approaches Tower Pier in London.

Since Churchill’s death exactly fifty years ago, a great deal of material has come to light which makes possible a much more rounded and nuanced appreciation of his remarkable, controversial, versatile and lengthy life than anyone could have managed half a century ago. But on his death, as I well vividly remember, there were two sentiments uppermost, both of which were very powerful, but which were also in their way contradictory.

On the one hand, his magnificent state funeral was a final gesture of homage to a man widely regarded (in Isaiah Berlin’s unforgettable phrase) as ’the saviour of his country’. But there was also a very different sense that his obsequies were not only the last rites of the great man himself, but also the requiem of Britain as a great power – a sense that would later be vividly be caught by Bernard Levin in his book on the 1960s, ‘The Pendulum Years’; by Jonathan Dimbleby in his biography of his father Richard, who delivered his last great commentary on Churchill’s funeral; and by Jan Morris, who ended the final volume of his trilogy on the British Empire, ‘Farewell the Trumpets’, with an account of Churchill’s sad but spectacular send-off as the last great imperial pageant.

That he could be at once the saviour of his country, but also a figure who had failed to halt his nation’s decline was a paradox and a contradiction that few then wished to explore in detail. But as Churchill passes from memory into history, it is one of the many ways in which his life is becoming more remarkable and extraordinary, not less.”

Churchill’s Other Lives is written and presented by Professor Sir David Cannadine. It starts on 19 Jan at 13:45 and runs every day for two weeks.