I imagine many of you have the same feeling as I do, that I can’t remember whether I first encountered Paul Theroux on The Old Patagonian Express or in The Great Railway Bazaar. It hardly matters. These books, which made him a star by the seventies, were not only a compendium of rattling good stories of life on the road, with the freshness of a writer who was obsessed by new experiences, but a contribution to one of the great traditions. Like Jan Morris – one of my own favourite writers - his evocation of place, and the adventure of getting there, has the diamond sparkle of the fresh-faced explorer determined to find new sounds and colours round every corner, and to encounter different people.

When we met with this month’s readers in Broadcasting House it was no surprise to me to find that one of his cherished writers is Robert Louis Stevenson, and not only because Stevenson ended his life in the South Pacific, where he’d gone to alleviate his chronic ill-health, and where Paul has had a home for many years. In my excitement I even managed to misquote the epitaph of Tusitala – the local word for ‘a teller of tales’, with which they anointed him on the island where he died – and got the last lines the wrong way round. For the record, they are – “home is the sailor, home from sea/and the hunter home from the hill”. That makes me feel a little better. Paul is an enthusiast for Stevenson not only because of the superb crispness and economy of his writing (often undervalued because of his brilliant ability to write for children), but because of that feeling for the traveller’s life and the satisfaction of eventual rest. Whether in Edinburgh, the Pyrenees, the South Seas, or in the wilderness of his imagination, Stevenson was always infected by the excitement of a journey, and the business of getting there. It was appropriate, therefore, that in talking about Paul’s Dark Star Safari we were able to look back on his own writing life from its beginning.

The book is his account of a return to Africa, beginning just before 9/11, nearly forty years after he first arrived on the continent as a young American inspired by Kennedy’s volunteer Peace Corps (JFK had been murdered a month before Paul travelled to the African school where he’d teach). His reaction, second time around, was quite different. In his journey from Cairo to Cape Town, replete with the kinds of encounters that have enlivened all his books, he experience feelings of anxiety, even despair, about aspects of the “new” Africa – worries about the “wrong” kind of aid, corruption and the sort of westernisation that destroys some valuable social customs in the name of progress. Some of his reflections are indeed dark.

But they’re lifted by the experience of encountering a new kind of Africa, the sheer exhilaration of coming across townships where everyone carries a mobile phone but has a traditional knife, perhaps a machete, in the other hand. He describes the difference of Africa with the same freshness as he brought to his earliest travels in India and South America, and his journey is peopled by characters who never seem contrived or put together from predetermined caricatures. The discussion with our readers, who included quite a number who were either born in Africa or had long experience of the continent, therefore turned – as it had to – to the nature of the writer who enjoys the business of travel.

Paul, of course, has become a distinguished novelist, but it is about his character as a traveller that we talked most. He made two striking points. Writing about travel, he said, meant being gregarious – enjoying the unexpected encounter, and throwing yourself into every community that you discover along the way – but it also helped to be a solitary individual, even sometimes a lonely one. The two go together – a joy in being alone, and a relish for the new friend or the strange passer-by.

Our conversation was sometimes serious, but never gloomy. One reader confessed that she had expected him to be a rather downbeat person, even dour. She was pleased to find that she was wrong. For myself, I had my expectations confirmed. Paul Theroux is funny, wise and sometimes sad. And I thought of him, at the end of a day on the road, writing his reflections in longhand and filling his notebooks – an uplifting thought.

I hope you enjoy the programme.

Our next book is the great Bring Up the Bodies the Man Booker-winning second part of Hilary Mantel’s account of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII. And you may be interested in upcoming recordings, for which you can apply for (free!) places as a reader, via the programme website – Matthew Hollis and his Costa-winning life of Edward Thomas (All Roads Lead to France) and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, both in October, and in November Donna Tartt on her extraordinary best-selling and cult novel, The Secret History.

Happy reading

Jim

Listen to Paul Theroux discussing Dark Star Safari on Bookclub

The tulip fever that infected Holland in the 1630s is probably easier for us to understand today than it would have been, say, five years ago. It is one of the biggest, maddest financial bubbles in history. Indeed, economics students are still told about it as the prime example of what happens when a commodity takes on an unreal value, in this case the humble tulip. One day it was worth a few pennies; by an insane process of inflation it was soon being exchanged for houses and businesses and as for the variety Semper Augustus… I can say no more without spoiling the plot of Deborah Moggach’s novel, Tulip Fever. Some of them became so valuable that it ruined families and businesses and, more or less a whole country, when the music stopped and someone asked: what are they really worth? Of course, we don’t need to go back to the seventeenth century these days to find examples of what a financial bubble can do – the lesson of the tulip has too many contemporary echoes - but Deborah’s story uses the sheer excitement – or horror – of the period to weave a wonderful love story into the tangled politics, secular and religious, of the time.

 

The plot revolves round Sophia, married to an old man who does nothing for her, and who falls in love with a painter called Jan Van Loos. From the start of the story, we’re embroiled in the heady artistic world of the time and Deborah’s enthusiasm for the world of the Dutch artists – which sometimes approaches obsession. This was one of the main threads in our discussion with this month’s readers. It’s fair to say, I think, that many of them thought I was too firmly disposed against the husband, Cornelis, who may be unattractive but – I conceded – probably got much more in return than he deserved. In the end he loses his strong religious faith, and finds more contentment. With Sophia, it is the other way round – though I will not spoil the beautiful end of the novel by going into any more detail.

It was not surprising to learn that Deborah had been inspired to write the book by a Dutch painting she bought – “sub-Vermeer” she said, in case any of us were getting ideas – and she described it in a way that persuaded everyone of the passions that lay behind her story. “A woman is getting ready to go out, and she’s wearing a lovely fur fringed jacket of the period, some pearls to put round her neck. Her manservant brings her glass of wine. I hung it in my sitting room and I got sucked in – where is she going, perhaps somewhere she shouldn’t be? And that triggered the whole thing, and my love affair with Dutch painting, which so many of us share, inspired the book.”

Her feeling for painting, which brings the delicacy of high art together with the comings and goings of everyday life, results in a story that teases out Sophia’s hidden life – the passionate world that can’t be touched by Cornelis, however hard he tries. So the painter is the answer.

But of course there is nothing simple about this affair. The country in which they live is in the grip of a collective madness, which no one can explain but which infects everyone. The tulip becomes the innocent agent of mayhem, its beauty turning into an instrument of financial disaster, and we follow the fortunes of the lovers and their families and friends against the background of a society which has moved in the blink of an eye from prosperity and stability to collapse and perpetual uncertainty.

I do hope you enjoy Deborah Moggach.

And if you’d like to come to one of our programmes, our next recordings are with Matthew Hollis on his Costa Winning biography of poet Edward Thomas, Now All Roads Lead to France and Khaled Hosseini on his global bestseller The Kite Runner. Both recordings are in October at BBC Broadcasting House London W1A 1AA, tickets are free and available from the Bookclub web page.

Happy reading

Jim

Listen to Deborah Moggach discussing Tulip Fever on Bookclub

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites.

And so to Freeword on Wednesday night for the 2012 BBC International Short Story Award announcement which was live on Front Row, hosted by the always knowledgeable and enthusiastic John Wilson, in front of a packed audience of writers, agents, publishers and guests, as well as the doughty souls from Booktrust and the London Readings Unit who keep the award running smoothly every year.

This is the third time the Award has been held at The Freeword Centre in Farringdon and it feels a very appropriate space to celebrate the best of short story writing, given the belief in the power of the written word there. It's always a little tense in the run up; perhaps because we had six of our ten short-listed writers present, some of whom had come from as far as Australia and South Africa to be there, the tension was even more palpable than usual last night.

Of course it's the one moment when being on the short-list may feel a little double-edged for some. There's the obvious agonising over whether or not your story has won, coupled with anxiety about either not preparing any speech so as not to tempt fate - or getting caught out and having to ad lib. And of course in the excitement it is also possible to forget any carefully planned words anyway. Last night, watching the faces of the writers as they heard clips of themselves and their stories and counted down the minutes - and they really had no idea what was coming! - I had a momentary worry that this was almost cruel.

And yet the reception once the announcement was made was hugely generous from everyone. Contrary to those suspicious of literary back-biting on such occasions, every writer I spoke to afterwards was full of enthusiasm for the award, for the short story and for the winner. They all felt the journey worthwhile and that being part of what is a genuinely cohesive short-list was a spur to their writing.

And it would take a heart of stone not to have been moved by Miroslav Penkov's utter astonishment and absolute delight at being crowned the winner of the 2012 BBC Award. Indeed Kyoko his wife came close to a dead faint with shock! It was an emotional moment seeing a great word-smith who had already told various people that being on the short-list was more than he could have hoped for and who had been so generous about the quality and strength of his fellow writers, almost lost for words as he accepted the award.

In this year when the world has come to London to compete in harmony in many spheres, it felt absolutely right that we had a Bulgarian writer, who now lives and writes in the US but is heavily rooted in the Balkans, and who is married to a Japanese Maths Professor as our winner and a South African, Henrietta Rose-Innis, as the runner up. And that a story, East of the West, which is part about boundaries and barriers but equally about love and friendship across the water, should be the winner.

Di Speirs is Editor of Readings for Radio 4

• Hear the winner announced on Front Row
• Hear a Front Row interview with the winner Miroslav Penkov
• East of the West by Miroslav Penkov
• Hear the Front Row interview with Henrietta Rose-Innes
• Sanctuary by Henrietta Rose-Innes
• Miro Penkov's website
• Booktrust

Arundhati Roy with Jim and the Bookclub audience

I do hope those of you who have heard the Arundhati Roy discussion on The God of Small Things enjoyed it. There are very few books of this kind that come our way, so it was a natural for us. Sooner or later we had to come to it. You can hear it online and also download it as a podcast to take away and listen at your leisure.
As you will all know by now past programmes are available at the Bookclub website - a facility which I know many of you appreciate and use a great deal.

The God of Small Things is unusual in so many ways. As Arundhati Roy puts it, the story begins at the end and ends in the middle, and she is determined that she was never going to write a linear story.

In our discussion she made it clear that the feeling of a book that has a circular wholeness, so that you can start the story almost anywhere with the same effect, springs from that part of her mind that made her want to be an architect, which is how she was trained.

The result is that the book's power comes not so much from the development of a story along conventional lines - a beginning in the first pages, and an end on the last page - but from the conception of the world in which the action (concentrated in a few days) is happening around you.

The book that obviously springs to mind is Ulysses, but I find it hard to think of settings that are more different than James Joyce's Dublin and Roy's Kerala, where the texture of life is built up of an impossible vast range of smells, colours, tiny objects and competing cultures and religions. Your senses are assailed by the vividness of the world she describes.

And of course it is a story of love and loss, and therefore tragedy. But when we asked her if it was therefore a pessimistic novel, she said that she thought that the fact the kind of love she describes could have come about in a feudal society was in itself "a fantastically hopeful thing".

At the centre of the story, recollected by Rahel as an adult woman, is the love between her Christian mother and a carpenter who, by the rules of caste, is an Untouchable.

In her conversation, especially when we asked her why she had not written another novel since The God of Small Things was first published in 1997, Arundhati Roy revealed the depth of her political commitments: the extent to which she wants her story to reveal not just the intoxicating feel of India, and the way that the mystical and the practical are woven together in everyday life, but the unfairness and cruelties of a system that pitches different religions and cultures against each other.

Since she wrote the book, which became a worldwide bestseller and won prizes, including the Booker, she's devoted most of her energy to various campaigns which she feels to be more important that the writing of another story.

She told us: "I hope I will return to fiction. I don't want to write books because that's what the world expects me to do. I want to write a book when I have a book that needs to be written or wants to be written; not just because that's a profession." That moment has not yet come.

About her writing technique, which has dazzled so many critics and readers, she says that she knows no rules. She thinks or herself neither as a linear nor hierarchical thinker, and in describing the way she tried to capture the society in which her characters were caught, and the way they lived their lives, it became clear that she wanted to paint a picture of how difficult it is to pursue love - which always produces, she believes, vulnerability - in a society where class and caste impose rigid boundaries and exert hard punishment on anyone who tries to stray across them.

Just as she says that pessimism and optimism aren't in a binary relationship - being opposites between which you have to choose - so she sees the pain of love as something that's inevitable if the joy of it is going to be appreciated. She refused to choose between gloom and hope: they're both there in the book.

I suspect that the reason why it was such a success is that the style in which she tells the story - its layers, the overlapping of time, the back-and-forth twists of the narrative, the idea of the compression of a long story into a brief moment in history - is utterly original.

When you put that together with the sheer exultation in the physical presence of India - especially the smells and the colours - you have a powerful mix.

One of our readers who had grown up in India said that when he read the passages in the pickle factory it made him want to go and wipe his hands afterwards.

The emotions in the book are very powerful - it deals with death, love that has to struggle to be fulfilled, and a touch of incest (because of a shared feeling of desolation) - yet they seem to sit naturally in a society where the natural world always seems about to overwhelm the people, and the rules that are forced upon them are often impossible to obey.

I'm glad we have come to The God of Small Things because in the end I think we had to.

Jim Naughtie presents Bookclub

• Next month's book is a cult novel of a quite different kind. Iain Banks wrote The Wasp Factory in the mid-eighties and it became something of a latter-day version of The Catcher in the Rye in the way that it tried to unpick the difficulties, the cruelties and the contradictions of the early teenage years. It divided readers then, and still does. It's our book for November - Sunday 6 November at 4pm - and I hope you enjoy it.
• Visit the Bookclub website where you can listen to the cast archive of author interviews, download the Bookclub podcasts and sign up for the email newsletter.
• Follow Radio 4 on Twitter and Facebook.

Editor's introduction: For the next four weeks Radio 4 Extra's running a season of "gripping, escapist summer reading... twisted family drama, sweeping romance and, above all, great story-telling by best-selling authors old, new and to come..." I asked the producers, Lucy Collingwood (LC) and Gemma Jenkins (GJ), to tell us a bit more about the project on the blog - PM.

LC: It's been great to have the opportunity to produce some different kinds of books for this new season. We searched for popular page turners that are real holiday reads. We spent a couple of months reading dozens of novels on our journeys to work and were really impressed by the ones we ended up choosing.

As we plan our productions quite far in advance, we were reading a lot of these through November and December. It was a good test of the books to see if they could really transport us to a different place and help us escape from a delayed tube journey on a snowy morning in December.

GJ: I decided to undertake a surreptitious straw poll during my train journey up to work to get an idea of what seemed to be the most popular books. I got a few odd looks as I tried to peer at book covers and decipher titles from across the aisle. There were a few surprises - someone was reading teach yourself Mandarin and someone else was engrossed in a book about pure mathematics - but, on the whole, the desire to escape into another world seemed a firm favourite.

During my reading, I discovered I had a taste for the more lurid end of the market - glamorous worlds with genuine moustache twirling villains and revenge plots to rival a Jacobean Tragedy but due to their epic scale it would have been too tricky to abridge them down into 5x30 minute episodes. Shame!

LC: I had really strong emotional reactions to both of the books I ended up producing for the season, Before I Go to Sleep by SJ Watson and To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal - which I thought was a pretty good sign! When I started reading Before I Go to Sleep, it reminded me of the films Memento and 50 First Dates as it is about a woman having no short term memory. However, a few pages in I was totally hooked by this truly gripping, original story and literally couldn't put it down (or go to sleep myself) before I knew what happened to her. I know Alison Joseph, the abridger, felt the same.

To Be Sung Underwater floored me. I was immediately swept up in the writing, in Judith's inspiring teenage summers in Nebraska and her long lost love story. It made me want to go and stay in a cabin and eat muffins with chokecherry jam myself. And in the end (without giving anything away) I found myself sobbing whilst heading home one evening, squashed in between commuters trying to hold on to my book, the pole and find a tissue without revealing anything to my fellow travellers.

GJ: Coming from a close-knit family myself I really warmed to the characters in Joanna Trollope's Daughters-in-Law, although their behaviour drove me mad at times too. While recording the romantic comedy, To The Moon and Back by Jill Mansell, I got the perfect response from the studio manager when we'd finished the first day's recording. As he wasn't scheduled to cover the next day, he pulled me to one side and said, "So, does he get the girl in the end?" Well, you'll just have to wait and see!

It's been a total pleasure working on the series and we hope listeners will enjoy the season as much as we did making it.

Book at Beachtime is produced by Lucy Collingwood and Gemma Jenkins

• Book at Beachtime starts on Radio 4 Extra on June 20th at 2.30pm and runs from Monday to Friday for the next 4 weeks. You can also listen online on the Radio 4 Extra website.
• The picture shows Maracas beach in Trinidad
• Read more entries tagged "book" on the Radio 4 and 4 Extra blog

How much of King James Bible Day did you catch on Sunday? It was hard to miss with 28 readings across a single day and a star-studded cast: Samuel West, Emilia Fox, Hugh Bonneville, Toby Stephens, Henry Goodman, Niamh Cusack, Rory Kinnear, Miriam Margolyes and others.

There were some interesting perspectives on those famous stories too: Simon Schama and David Lodge on Genesis; Howard Brenton picking apart the parablesof David, Solomon and Job; and the always provocative Will Self musing on the final days of Jesus and the Resurrection.

Altogether it was a fairly epic celebration of the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Version and it's all available to download for free until Sunday.

It was certainly the biggest chunk of bible that I've heard since school. Except that, like everyone, I've actually been getting little chunks of bible wisdom on a regular basis because the words of the King James Bible have become 'all things to all men'. (1 Corinthians 9.22)

That was made pretty clear in the third of James Naughtie's documentaries on the history of the King James last week, and it's what the short season of programmes was intended to celebrate: the book's enormous influence on the English language.

As Gordon Campbell, Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Leicester, said:

The bible that they heard everyday worked itself into the language and indeed those biblical contexts were often forgotten. So if we say something like 'fly in the ointment', or 'go the second mile', or 'my boss is a thorn in the flesh',... no-one would say: "Ah yes that's a biblical allusion," because those origins have been lost.

All those readings of the King James Bible, in all those churches, over all those centuries have embedded the words and phrases in our linguistic DNA.

The experts in Wednesday's documentary were discussing those phrases in a pub, and we've been tweeting a few more that you might have heard in your local:

Say the times they be a-changing / Though the blind lead the blind - Aerosmith (Matthew 15.14)

An eye for an eye / And a tooth for a tooth / And anyway I told the truth - Nick Cave (Matthew 5.38)

Your spirit's wilting and your flesh is weak - The Human League (Matthew 26.41)

It was a lot of fun tracking down some of the songwriters who have put a bit of bible in their boogie - and some authors who have, directly or indirectly, drawn on words from the King James in their own novels.

The linguist David Crystal, in his book Begat, identifies 257 phrases popularised by the King James Bible that we are still using today - far more than any other book.

I'm sure we missed out some famous ones and didn't even get to use my own favourite: Freddie Mercury repeating 'Another one bites the dust' 16 times in the same song (sadly the King James quotation is 'lick the dust', though the modern variation of 'bite' probably does derive from it.)

All in all, looking at the way its rhythms and phrases have become woven into our everyday language, it's hard not to agree with the sentiment expressed in Matthew 24.35: "My words shall not pass away."

• There are 28 readings from the King James Bible available to download for free until Sunday.
• You can also listen again to James Naughtie's three documentaries tracing the history and influence of the King James Bible.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pqfb3

It's in the can! All ten episodes of Rebecca Stott's compelling new novel The Coral Thief, are recorded and edited and ready for broadcast.

When I was searching earlier in the autumn for a Book at Bedtime to fill January's wintry evenings, my editor handed me The Coral Thief to see if it might fit the bill. And it did. A pacey thriller, a passionate and heady love affair, peppered with scientific ideas and historical insights, it seemed just the right combination for an ear-catching listen.

Once I had the green light from Radio 4's commissioning editor, the hardest part began: the abridging process. Because of the complicated nature of the tale, the interweaving of detailed fact and an imaginative, page-turning - but in truth, complicated - plot, a highly experienced abridger was necessary - we were turning the book round quickly too. Despite, or because of the challenges, one of the most interesting parts of my job is to work with the abridger, in this case Viv Beeby, making the tough decisions on what should go and what should stay.

Some of the detail had to be sacrificed - a plot like this lends itself to nail-biting endings but you have to ensure you can mold the episodes so that the characters, ideas and the period atmosphere maintain their substance. There was much illuminating detail we wanted to retain. For instance, the bronze horses taken down from the Arc de Triomphe by Wellingon under pressure from the Venetians who wanted them back speaks volumes about the political machinations in Paris following Napoleon's surrender. Then there are the moving sequences where Lucienne describes the experiences of her family during the worst excesses of the French Revolution which say so much, not least about her personality and what drives her.

Casting is crucial - and this time, unlike some others, the narrator's voice was clear to me from the start. I'd worked with Dan Stevens earlier in the year, reading William Fiennes' The Music Room and I knew he could carry off both the drama and the science entwined in the book. I felt he would bring our narrator, Daniel Connor, a young ambitious and engaging natural scientist, to life brilliantly. I knew that he could also lift Lucienne Bernard off the page and make this beautiful cross dressing thief sound seductive and charismatic, and all with a French accent.

Dan was enticed by the book and subsequently the scripts. Well prepared, once in studio he got stuck into telling the story and recreating the characters. He quickly nailed our English narrator, and Parisian temptress, as well as a sinister French detective, a Scottish professor and a number of brigands and thieves. Once we'd finished, the author, Rebecca Stott, came in to record her fascinating reflections on writing the novel; listen to her describing how she recreated a Paris that would be lost by the mid-nineteenth century when the wide boulevards we know today were built. Paris in the days of The Coral Thief was more akin to our pictures of Dickensian London - and a perfect setting for a novel of intrigue.

Listen to Rebecca's reflections here:

Elizabeth Allard is producer of The Coral Thief

• Rebecca Stott's The Coral Thief is this week's Book at Bedtime. Listen again here.
• Jane Garvie interviewed Rebecca Stott about The Coral Thief and her upbringing in the Plymouth Brethren on Woman's Hour before Christmas. Listen again here. She's also got a fascinating Q&A about the novel on her web site.
• The picture shows an inscription on the walls of the Paris quarries. It was taken by Zoriah. Used under licence.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00m0fbm

While Miriam Margolyes was recording the current Book of the Week, Bluestockings, it became clear that the text had particular meaning for her because she had been a Bluestocking herself. Producer Justine Willett writes:

Cambridge University is celebrating its 800th anniversary this year. And on this week's Book of the Week, you can hear award-winning actress Miriam Margolyes reading Jane Robinson's Bluestockings, the remarkable story of how the first British women went on to get a university education. Miriam, herself a former Newnham College gal, in the early 60s, found reading the book took her back took her back to those extraordinary days at Cambridge, where she shone in the Footlights, made life-long friends, and embraced eccentricity by smoking a pipe...

After the recording, Miriam recorded a few words about Bluestockings:

• The picture shows Newnham College for Women in 1871. It's from Cornell University Library's photostream and it's used under licence.


• Bluestockings is on BBC Radio 4 at 0945 (repeated at 0030) all week. Listen again to today's episode here.

Book of the Week on Radio 4 this week is Ben Mezrich's Accidental Billionaires, a book whose subtitle (at least in the American edition) is: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal. Perfect Radio 4 material then. As you'd expect, the book has its own Facebook profile.

Radio 4, like all the top media brands, is on Facebook too, but in a fairly haphazard way, although the Corporation's social media guidelines encourage staff and programme makers to get involved. There's no formal Radio 4 presence but a number of individual programmes have profiles. Only one Radio 4 programme makes systematic use of Facebook to interact with listeners and to solicit contributions: Saturday Live.

The Saturday Live group (2,784 members) is busy and Fi Glover uploads her popular weekly newsletter here. In the group right now there's some debate about Secretary of State for Health Andy Burnham's choice of inheritance tracks. Group member Philip White says:

The Rt.Hon.A.Burnham chose Billy Bragg as his track to pass onto the next generation. The simplistic ideology of B. Bragg might be an understandle indulgence for a student, but for a mature man approaching 40, and a cabinet minister to boot?

BBC Radio 4's profile has 3,151 fans but there's not much going on and this isn't an official Radio 4 profile - it was set up by a fan. Christian John Riegel, on the profile's wall, says:

I'm a fresh arrival from the USA. Radio here is 100 times better. I can't believe I find myself being sucked into radio drama! I was digging the recent sci-fi hard. And the comedy is funny as hell! Thumbs up!

The busiest Radio 4 group on Facebook is an entertaining one with a backhanded compliment for a name: Radio 4 - Its Not Just For The Middle Aged (4,932 members). The group's name echoes the challenges Mark Damazer addressed here on the blog a couple of weeks ago when he explained why Radio 4 is touring universities later this year:

It is an attempt to explain to an audience that sometimes knows distressingly little about Radio 4 (we have evidence that we are not much known among many under 30 year-olds) that we have things to stimulate and amuse them.

Radio 4's talent, especially the comedians, is well-represented on Facebook, as you'd expect. The Now Show's (unofficial) group has 1,365 members, the I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue Appreciation Society has 4,859 and Marcus Brigstocke's (official) Planet Corduroy has 1,666 fans. Shappi Korshandi has 1,278 fans and her Appreciation Society has 2,017 members but only two people saw her in East Sheen Waitrose.

Do you think Radio 4 should make more effort on Facebook? Should there be an official profile? Should programmes and personalities use the social networks to interact with listeners at all? Or are they right to steer clear and leave it to the fans?