Hello, 

I felt more than usual trepidation about this morning’s programme.  Of course, I trepidate every time.  Who wouldn’t, when faced with some of the world’s best scholars on such a range of subjects?  But their generosity usually dissipates my anxiety, which would only get in the way if it were revealed and became part of the programme.

But there’s something very special for me about religious programmes.  As I may have said before, I was brought up as a Christian, a very eager Christian, until I was about sixteen and began a falling away which, having completed its course, has returned as a powerful nostalgia and interest in thinking about the meaning of the impact that religion has had for so long, the scope it gave to people, as well as the well-documented (especially recently) horrors that it helped inflict, although I think it was more used than using.  But that’s another matter.  I must have heard extracts from the Old Testament three or four times a week from the age of six until I went to university, when I was in the chapel choir for a very short time (I lasted about a couple of months and that was the end of that chapter).  And there was a familiarity about the names, not only from hearing them at school and in church, but the fact was that I lived in a town of five thousand people which had twelve churches in it.  Twelve.  Each one of which I remember being busy and controlling and, in effect, running most social as well as religious aspects of the town.

So we had people called Solomon and Sarah and Esther and Jacob and Ruth of course, and so it was rather like moving through the Torah.

The Talmud, of which I had the merest knowledge, proved to be a revelation in many ways.  Just to take one.  In my late teens and early twenties I began to read American fiction massively.  Soon I came across that great run of Jewish writers, from Isaac Bashevis Singer, Malamud, Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer, right through to Philip Roth, and revelled in them.  Also, when I went to Oxford and then came to London, I met for the first time Jewish men and women and have retained strong friendships with some of them and even made new friendships in London.

What the Talmud revealed to me was that the extraordinary argumentativeness, one-to-one, could well be rooted in the way that the Talmud is constructed; indeed in the way that yeshivas are constructed: two students together all the time, two sides of an argument, dissecting, diverging, almost ad infinitum.  The excerpts from the Talmud I read in preparation for the programme could have been in those novels.  In fact, I felt that I almost recognised sentences which could have come out of the books of those writers I admire.  My friend Howard Jacobson rang up after the programme.  He is carrying on that tradition in this country and I realised that one of my reasons for trepidation was that I didn’t want to let myself down in front of him as well as others.

So, skimming the surface as far as they (the contributors) were concerned, but a serious toe in serious waters as far as I was concerned.

Then back to the office and now I’m dictating this from the Paul Hamlyn Hall in the Royal Opera House, where I’ve just done some links to camera for a series to be called South Bank Show Originals.  The ones I did today were about Mama Lou Parks, Merce Cunningham, Sylvie Guillem and Michael Flatley.

Covent Garden has totally, totally changed since first I came to London, when the great thing was to hang around, if you could keep your eyes open and money in your pockets, as long after midnight as you could and see the lorries crowd into crowded streets, manoeuvre down narrow lanes, fruit piled up, goods everywhere, Dickens stalking the land, echoes of opera and raunchy London sexual excitements at every turn.  Or so it seemed.  Memory is deliciously treacherous sometimes.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

PS: I think I didn’t explain the trepidation well enough, partly because here in the Royal Opera House they seem to be moving every piece of furniture in sight.  The fact is that the notion of the Word of God being given to Moses and him bringing it down to the people of Israel, the continuation of that story in the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old Testament, whichever way you want to refer to it, and the sheer roll and might of it through the centuries, the horrors, the triumphs, the literature, the learning, is formidable.  It is a mighty fact and you feel, or rather I feel, daunted in the face of it.  So I was more than ever in need of the generosity of strangers this morning.

 

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Hello,

After a bracing fifteen minutes with Farming Today, I look forward to who is going to be introducing the Today programme.  When it’s John (Humphrys), with whom for reasons deep in mystery I seem to have formed a special relationship (rather like that between the USA and the UK), I have to think of something that will somehow tease out a laugh. There are not many laughs in the works of Max Weber. So it was quite a long haul between six o’clock and about ten past seven before I thought of a way of doing it. Then when I came in, I road-tested it on the keen, cutting mind of Tom Morris and I got the green flag. So then came the delivery, which could have been a disaster this morning because I scribbled the last bit in my own handwriting (not very legible at the best of times), and in the rehearsal read “this morning’s hangover” instead of “this morning’s handover”. It got a laugh from the control panel in the rehearsal, but those actions are impossible to repeat unless you’re an actor.

All three contributors this morning were first-timers, but you couldn’t tell, could you? Partly because they are so accomplished at talking about their own subject, and partly, I think, they know the programme and sail in, well prepared for the attempt to put quarts into thimbles.

After that, back north to the dentist. Not much fun. The instruments they use are okay, given that they regard your teeth as a sort of quarry. It’s the noises the instruments make that are more than a little worrying. At one stage there was the suggestion of a small anaesthetic. Easy to turn down. Fifteen seconds or twenty seconds of pain is a snip compared with walking around feeling as if you have a wad of bubble on your gum for the rest of the day.

Then I walked into town which took about an hour and a half. What a great walk. Down into Primrose Hill, over Primrose Hill itself, looking across the city full of mists, and then into Regent’s Park, for which I get more affection the more I walk in it. Even when the gardens are out of flower they still have an English magnificence about them. Then down the full length of an extremely busy Regent Street and into the best bargain brasserie and most stylish restaurant room in London. Lunch with a friend of mine whom I met on my first day at university. Been friends ever since and have these regular, non-agenda lunches.

Then up to the cutting rooms to watch the beginning of some short films we’re making, and then … I can feel Ingrid’s impatience.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

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Hello

I hate to say anything in the slightest critical about Diarmaid MacCulloch. He's an extraordinarily fine writer and a wonderful broadcaster and invariably a tremendous guest on the programme.

BUT. When I pointed out this morning that Cranmer (later Archbishop of Canterbury) while at Cambridge had made pregnant and married a barmaid (which meant that Cranmer was stripped of his fellowship at the college and only reinstated after his wife died in childbirth), Diarmaid queried whether the word 'barmaid' was appropriate. I said that it was in the notes of one of the three people before me around this table. She was more, Diarmaid maintained, the daughter of the hotel keeper. (I'm not too sure that there were hotels in Cambridge in that period. The word is French and didn't come over – both the word and the building – until later.) But anyway, part of the job is to get egg on your face and keep going.

BUT AGAIN. As Diarmaid left the studio to flee back to Oxford to get on with his day job, he confessed that it was he in his notes who referred to the first wife of Cranmer as a barmaid.

What do we make of that?

After he left, Martin Palmer talked about the consolation of parts of the Book of Common Prayer. He mentioned particularly the Nunc Dimittis which he had referred to as his grandfather lay dying: "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace..." He also pointed out that the confession in the prayer book had been described by Graham Greene as sounding like an old lag pleading his case before the bench yet again.

And yet again we had someone on the programme who had not done radio before. Alexandra Walsham followed in the triumphant paths of Caroline Petit and Suzanne Aigrain in sweeping in, sweeping up and sweeping out again. I think it's because they are with two other academics of equal stature and equal enthusiasm that they can relax on a live programme, which they know will be heard by some of their friends and a number of their contemporaries. Anyway, Alexandra was, I thought, tremendous.

Tom Morris, the producer, came in afterwards to chat and was quizzed by Martin as to which type of programme got the strongest reaction. He said that the strongest electronic reaction came from science programmes. Martin wanted a few facts at his fingertips about the programme, so Tom told him that since we started to be podcast we have had e-mails from about forty countries. The latest coming from Pakistan.

After the programme Tom and I went across the road to have a cup of coffee and deep study about the next eight programmes. That done, I set off back to the office. Not much time to talk about walking through the streets or the parks these days because I do not want to bring down on myself the wrath of Ingrid. Been in the Lords very regularly to go through the Care Bill. Off to a wrap party this evening, i.e. everybody who worked on the films we made for BBC Two on John Ball and Tom Paine.

Now I myself will depart in peace.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

 

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Hello

One characteristic of Thursday's programme was the scholarly calm with which the three contributors discussed what, for many people in many parts of the world, is an explosive subject. Religion. A new factor in our programme is that people tweet us as we go along, and Tom Morris can somehow produce the programme in the adjoining booth and bring in tweets at quarter to ten. A couple of these tweets were from self-described atheists who asked us why were we discussing this subject? Why bother? It was all so irrelevant. It is almost impossible to think of a subject more relevant to so many aspects of life on the planet at the moment than religions. The Islamic movement in its most extreme form is driven by extreme reactions to, and interpretations of, the Qur'an. Issues such as gay marriage are being challenged by reference to the Old and New Testament. The Old Testament plays a major part in the current tension in the Middle East. It bewilders me that people who call themselves atheist – for wholly understandable reasons of not believing in a God, a Resurrection, a Virgin Birth, a Trinity – think that this gives them the right to dismiss a massive body of knowledge which has informed people for almost two thousand years, led to some of the greatest artefacts mankind has ever seen and, for better and for worse, has to be taken into account if we think at all of the past in terms of morality, history and art.

Put that aside. Mona called the Muslims the 'People of the Book'. I thought that that phrase – 'People of the Book' – had been pre-claimed by the Jews. And then later on, in the early seventeenth century, when the Presbyterians from Britain went to the east coast of America in order to worship through their own form of Protestantism, they too became the 'People of the Book'. The Qur'an, Mona said, was the nearest you get to God. The Bible does not fulfil that function, I think, in Christianity and Judaism, but it certainly has been the nearest you get to a revelation of faith.

It's been a switchback week. First seeing the programme on Tyndale go out and being met by – well, more than usual positive reactions. We also managed, on BBC Two, to pip BBC One, which gives childish satisfaction to we arts programme makers. Though it's worth pointing out that neither of those programmes at nine o'clock in the evening on television came within reach of the audience for In Our Time at nine o'clock in the morning on Radio 4. Then switching from the documentary on John Ball to Thomas Paine, we started to film on a wonderfully sunny day in London on Saturday. The Guildhall, Clerkenwell, Westminster, Cecil Court with its bookshops – still the most attractive street in London – and on the way to our second radical. On Monday we went to Lewes, where Tom Paine came of age as an intellectual writing for the local newspapers and forging his early reputation through being a Customs and Excise officer. He led a raw life on the high seas, tackling smugglers, setting up a business, running a tobacconist's (badly), and all the time filling every spare minute with learning.

It's a bit busy at the moment so I won't bore you with the rest, but it did include going to Sheffield, to the great documentary festival where I was talking about arts programmes, and was stunned when I came out of the station at Sheffield by the splendour that those who run Sheffield have made of a town which seemed at one stage to have everything going against it. It looks like a modern European city from the moment you come out of the railway station and this documentary festival is magnificently organised.

And on we go. Next stop Derry, City of Culture, and then Paris to film more of Tom Paine, who was elected to the French Assembly in the French Revolution, who was integral and perhaps even essential to the making of the American Revolution, and who was imprisoned for sedition in London. In Lewes the local brewery, the famous Harveys, there since 1790 in the hands of the same family, has a fine strong ale called Tom Paine. His great patron Benjamin Franklin said beer was invented by God to show that he loved us. They must have had fine evenings together when Franklin got this pugnacious young man over to Philadelphia.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

 

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Last night I slept outside.

As soon as I was instituted as vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square six months ago, this was something I knew I needed to do. St Martin’s has shaped its life around people with nowhere to turn since the First World War, when it gave shelter to soldiers toing and froing from the front via Charing Cross. If I was going to speak publicly about these issues I needed to know what sleeping outside felt like.

Of course I had precisely what most people in this situation don’t have – a network. Two people who often sleep outside took me under their wing. We went out at 8 p.m. We quickly headed for locations where food is hard to come by. Then my companions took me on a scavenger hunt. We called in some favours: a muffin from this coffee bar, hot water from that burger joint, a chocolate bar from an off-licence where one of my friends has offered an unofficial protection service now and again. We sourced flattened cardboard boxes from the streets and newspapers from the stands to soften our bedding. It turned out another shopkeeper and hotelier habitually stored a sleeping bag or two in return for gifts in kind.

The night began around 11, after a few cigarettes and story time. My companions found a dry, windless garage outlet. But I didn’t sleep much. Every few seconds a car raced by or a shout or step announced that a (usually drunken) body was heading our way. One man even fell on top of me he was so loaded. Random, reckless violence filled the imagination, and inhibited sleep. Only at 3.30 a.m. did things settle down.

My companions showed me how to live – not just outside, but anywhere: with no self-pity, plenty of wit, and incredible resilience. Next time they get in trouble, I doubt they’ll come to me. But next time I get in trouble, I’ll most likely go to them.

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From October 2008: "Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Dante's 'Inferno' - a medieval journey through the nine circles of Hell." Available now as a podcast to download and keep.

To date we have produced 517 editions of In Our Time. All of these are available to be downloaded - and so will every future programme. In brief, you can get hold of and keep the whole collection at home on your own computer to listen whenever you want.

It's become a library of the air.

When we started in 1998, the idea of being of such value was off the radar. The main idea was to survive the first six months with what seemed to be a rather overambitious notion that we could take the cleverest academics in the land, and let them loose on the most recondite subjects available, and hope to gain a respectable Radio 4 audience just after nine o'clock on a Thursday morning.

We underestimated the Radio 4 audience in those first few months - not in their intellectual reach or in their enthusiasm but in their numbers, and as time went on in their loyalty to this eclectic enterprise.

It now seems that we are becoming an encyclopaedia (I say "we" not in the Mrs Thatcher sense of "We are a grandmother" but "we" in the sense of "the succession of producers, researchers and myself"). There couldn't be a much better outcome, could there? We are asking people to come in and talk whose work furnishes the great written encyclopaedias, and who themselves are salami-slicers of encyclopaedias, and they are now being recycled into a soundipaedia. Can we claim that as a new word? The wizards of the website have divided these 500-plus programmes into different categories (science, religion, history, culture, philosophy) so that they're easy to sort through.

When I look at the range and see the way that the work has built up, I can, in an unwary moment, kid myself that there was some purpose at work in the early days. I'm afraid it wasn't so.

The basic idea, among those of us who did it, was to educate ourselves and to find subjects which tested us - therefore we needed to be at full stretch; or baffled us - therefore we were looking for clarity. Others were part of an initially loose but increasingly resolute attempt to lasso areas of knowledge not very often brought to a wider public.

I suppose one of the best examples of that is works from the great Arabic Courts of learning from the 8th to the 14th century, or the outer edges of science, which contain so many rich ideas, opaque to most of us (with very much me included) but available, it seems, through the generous minds of the academics who turn up on Thursdays from all four points of the United Kingdom and give us the cream of their knowledge with quite remarkable concision.

The wonderful thing about it, as far as I'm concerned, is that it is simply never-ending.

We have done quite a few programmes about the history of China, although I'd like to do many more. The same applies to India, while we have barely touched on South America, which we must do more of. We have been reasonably good on philosophy, but I'm glad to say that has spread around other programmes, and so you feel maybe we can move a little more heavily into other areas. The classics, especially the Greeks - well, once upon a time I wanted to call the programme "It all Began with the Greeks", or a phrase to that effect.

It did at one stage appear to be the case, and I was not even daunted when a formidable lady on the front-row pew of a church in Putney, when I was talking about IOT, said that if she heard the phrase "Let's go back to the Greeks" once more she'd lose the will to live. Nevertheless a few weeks later, when we did "go back to the Greeks", she dropped me a note to say she was still with us!

I think at the best these programmes can be thrilling - well they certainly bring a great deal of excitement to me. It's rather an experiment to see if their freshness and vivacity will endure in this sonic encyclopaedia (or whatever the word is) and linger as long as works in some of the great libraries of the past. That's asking an awful lot - but who knows?

Melvyn Bragg is the presenter of In Our Time

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I gave up my day job as Head of Religious Broadcasting at the Beeb in January 2001 and began presenting Beyond Belief in January 2002. It was just three months after 9/11 and the events of that day gave it a context: All of a sudden everyone was interested in world religions. Britain woke up to the fact that most of the world takes faith seriously, sometimes deadly seriously.

Even now, nearly nine years on, I have a spring in my step on the morning of a recording because I know I am likely to learn something new. The best programmes are nearly always the ones that hit a tender spot. How does Islam treat women? Why is the Yemen such a hotspot? In a programme on suicide, from the current series, we ask "do people have the right to take their own life?"

The best contributors are the ones who have strong convictions - most of my guests do, because their faith, or lack of it, is at the heart of who they are - but they are prepared to engage with opposing views. I'm very proud of the fact that no-one has ever completely lost it on Beyond Belief.

The big letdown occurs when a contributor expresses strong convictions on the phone and then ducks away when we get on air - and yes it happens quite often! Nothing annoys me more. Some of our contributors have a natural tendency to glance over their shoulders at their constituencies to try to make sure they are following a party line. The opposite can sometimes occur too: guests who allow fellow panellists to make their points unchallenged. Sometimes, once in the studio, contributors forget that they represent a constituency of the audience, and, in a bid to be polite, fail to stand up to opposing views. In such cases we have been known to stop the recording and remind all the gusts of their role and the importance of their contribution to the programme.

Religion is by nature contentious. As far as I'm concerned no series is complete unless we've annoyed a few people by raising sensitive subjects which they would rather keep hidden. People who agree to take part respect the programme; they understand that we are trying to deal with serious issues in a serious way.

I've been very lucky in my producers, all of them women. We sit down at the start of a run and draw up a potential list of subjects. It always changes because the programme reacts to current events. I like to think that Beyond Belief tackles subjects that no other programme on Radio 4 addresses. When we started out, Helen Boaden who was then Controller of Radio 4, said she thought that we would have exhausted the subject matter after one series. She was gracious enough to admit that she was wrong. 240 programmes on, we're still going strong.

Ernie Rea is presenter of Beyond Belief

• The next episode of Beyond Belief - about Ayodhya - is on Radio 4 at 1630 on Monday. Listen to the programme archive (over 100 programmes are available) on the Radio 4 web site.
• The picture, 'My other religion...' is by Tim Duckett. Some rights reserved.

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Editor's note: securing a Thought for the Day from Pope Benedict XVI wasn't a simple matter. Head of Radio, Religion and Ethics Christine Morgan explains - SB

When I first began to talk three years ago about the possibility of the Pope doing Thought for the Day everyone laughed. I was told it was impossible. But I kept raising the idea with senior figures in the Catholic Church in this country and then in Rome. Three years on, after various trips and endless conversations, letters and calls we found a way of making it happen.

The call to say it was definitely going ahead came on Monday lunchtime. It was a bit like moving house; after months of tortuous preparation suddenly it was all happening very fast. I didn't even know for sure if I'd be able to get out there with the weather conditions causing so much chaos. Then we found there was one seat left on the last flight to Rome that day. I had 40 minutes to pack and get to the airport.

I arrived late Monday night. Unfortunately my luggage didn't. The airline managed to lose my bag so, next day, Pattie Parttee from the BBC Rome office marched me across the city to the shops to get on with finding something suitable to wear to meet the Pope.

This time last year I was in Rome to see some of the key people. The British Ambassador to the Holy See, Francis Campbell's advice and assistance through the labyrinthine paths of Vatican diplomacy was invaluable. The visit to the Vatican in February by the Director General Mark Thompson was a game-changer. But the success of the Pope's four-day visit to Britain in September clearly made a big difference to the Pope himself. He developed a genuine warmth for the people of Britain and was receptive when David Willey, the BBC's Rome correspondent, asked again. He then agreed to this morning's historic broadcast. It's the first time any Pope has ever written a script for a particular broadcaster - let alone an individual programme.

Over the past 20 years I've produced so many exceptional contributors on Thought for the Day. But I never thought that on Wednesday I would be sitting with Benedict XVI in the Vatican recording the first 'Thought' ever done by a Pope. The atmosphere was amazingly warm and relaxed and in conversations with officials beforehand it was clear he had agreed to do this because he likes radio.

It's a real real endorsement of the very distinctive nature of Thought for the Day and its profile as a key part of Britain's morning agenda. As I listened to it coming out of my bedside radio this morning it felt, quite simply, amazing!

Christine Morgan is Head of Radio, Religion and Ethics, and Editor of Thought for the Day

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• The picture shows a view of Saint Peter's square at the Vatican as Pope Benedict XVI celebrates a mass on Easter Sunday (Getty Images).

BBC Radio 4 has just made this announcement:

Pope Benedict XVI, will deliver his Thought For The Day on Radio 4, Friday 24th December at 7.45am.

Pope Benedict's Christmas message to the British people follows his UK visit in September. In an unprecedented move - the Pope has not presented material specifically written for a radio or television audience before - Pope Benedict recorded Thought For The Day in Rome on Wednesday 22nd December.

Gwyneth Williams, Controller, BBC Radio 4 said: "I'm delighted Pope Benedict is sharing his Christmas message with the Radio 4 audience. It's significant that the Pope has chosen Thought for the Day to give his first personally scripted broadcast - and what better time to do so than on the eve of one of the biggest celebrations on the Christian calendar."

Thought for the Day is broadcast within the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 at 7.45am Monday - Saturday. It offers approximately three minutes of personal reflection from faith leaders and believers from a range of religious denominations. Those contributing to the programme have included Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Archbishop Vincent Nichols, Indarjit Singh and Mona Siddiqui.

Thought for the Day was first broadcast in 1970, succeeding earlier religious thought strands Ten to Eight (1965-1970) and Lift Up Your Hearts on the BBC Home Service (1939-1965).

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• The picture shows Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to the UK in September 2010.

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Editor's note: another edition of Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time newsletter, a communication written weekly, right after the live Thursday morning transmission. Details of how to get the newsletter delivered to your inbox are at the bottom - SB

I don't know what the ethics are about saying "it's great" about a programme in which you've taken part. But I thought that the three contributors this morning had got over not only an immense amount of information about Foxe's Book of Martyrs, which for two centuries at least was one of the dominating books in our culture, second only to the King James Bible, but they had achieved a level of transferring the passion felt in the 16th century to a rather cold London studio in 2010. The Tudors must have bewildered their congregations with regard to religion.

To be uprooted, re-rooted, tossed aside, reclaimed, burnt, tortured, dismissed, told to read different texts, their saints destroyed, their saints propped up again, walls whitewashed, walls painted again ... I thought that came over. We didn't quite emphasise what a very good man Foxe himself was. He seems not to have sought any financial advantage from his book or any preferment in his career.

Afterwards Elizabeth Evenden told us that she had written biographies of the 2,238 people who had participated in the Marian martyrdoms. These included not only those who were burnt, but also their persecutors, their defences, their witnesses, their judges... it had taken her six years and she had spent most of that time in Lambeth Palace, because it was the only place where she could get the full, necessary editions of the Book of Martyrs side by side. Considering that one of them was over 2,000 pages long and the others not so far behind, it makes you realise that a scholar's work has an aspect of labouring to it.

She is bringing out a book in January on the making of Foxe's Book of Martyrs. While we're talking about books (there's a blanket ban on talking about contributors' own books in the programme) it would be only fair to mention Diarmaid MacCulloch's wonderful A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, which has been invaluable to me as I've been putting together my own book over the last year or two.

Justin Champion is working on Hobbes and has discovered that Hobbes, towards the end of his life, wrote ten essays on natural philosophy which have not been recognised or worked on before. This is like a gold prospector finding the great seam. Hobbes is still underrated. What he wrote predated a lot of what Spinoza wrote (Spinoza seems to have recognised this). He fell out with the Royal Society. He tended to fall out with a lot of people. He was a notoriously mean man and only had one overcoat all his life until the last two years when he bought a new one. He must have felt that he'd made a bad purchase with only two years' wear out of it. He died aged 90. He used to sing loudly in his bed before he went to sleep because he'd been told that that would protract his life.

I'm afraid I have sadly to bring to an end any more comments on the puppy in the office. Poland Street is now beset by puppyrazzi who are very dogged in the attentions they are paying to this beautiful little dog. I refuse to reveal his name because his privacy must be respected. He has the most wonderful long ears and is black and white and I may return to him in a year's time.

Only the unicorn has aroused a similar sort of interest. The puppy and the unicorn proved to be too toxic a mix for some of our readers. So I'm dropping the puppy and leaving the unicorn to be undiscovered in Mallorca.

Melvyn Bragg is presenter of In Our Time

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• The full text of Foxe's Book of Martyrs on Google Books.
• The picture shows the testimony of Anne Askew, one of Foxe's martyrs. It's by Stephanie Graves. Some rights reserved.

One of the most exciting things about A History of the World project is the way that it has been picked up by other BBC programmes, from Radio 4's own Making History or BBC Scotland's Radio Café through to CBBC's Relic: Guardians of the Museum and many local radio teams working with museums in their area. Each of them seems to find something in the idea of a history through objects that sparks their interest.

Next week the theme for A History of the World in 100 Objects is 'Meeting the Gods' - looking at religious objects from around the world between AD 1200 and 1400.

However, Radio 4 has already been looking at the idea of objects and belief thanks to another one of our partners the Sunday programme, which has been asking a variety of people about objects that speak to them about their faith or beliefs. They've already spoken to Sir Ben Kingsley, Richard Curtis, David Morrissey and Andrew Motion and this week it's the Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols.

Now he's going to have an amazing religious object, right? Some priceless relic from the church vaults, like the Holy Thorn Reliquary which we will feature on Monday morning.

No. Instead he has chosen a crudely moulded pewter badge pulled from the muddy slime on a bank of the Thames. It's certainly old, but as he says, "It's neither precious nor scarce." But, as with many of the objects in our series, a modest object can tell a fascinating story. Here's a preview of why he's chosen it:

That's what I love about A History of the World: a cheap piece of pewter suddenly opens up into the story of a dutiful pilgrimage undertaken in a wholly Catholic kingdom of England. In previous weeks, the stories of a Sin Eater's grave and a witch's pot opened up other stories of faith and superstition.

Sunday Worship has also been getting involved with more modern tales and added a memorial hymn sheet from the 1960 mining disaster in Six Bells colliery, Wales, and a community quilt patched by women in Christian missions.

I think the mission quilt, which is still being sewn, highlights an interesting aspect of many of the spiritual objects that have been added to the A History of the World website: they are imbued with potential as well as history.

All the objects on the site have a historical dimension that helps us look into the past but the way that people describe these spiritual objects you see that they also pull powerfully in the opposite direction, into the future. These buddhas, rosaries, pilgrim badges and quilts seem to be more than just physical souvenirs they have faith and hope invested in them.

Perhaps other objects in our lives do the same: the pair of football boots that will make you dip the ball like Ronaldo or the new swimsuit that promises the perfect summer. Do we all have faith objects, irrespective of our religious beliefs or lack of them?

We've got over 3,000 objects on the site now from museums and listeners and perhaps there are others in there that are about the future as much as the past. You can add your object to the collection and give us your piece of history or hope.

And don't miss the Sunday programme's interview with Archbishop Nichols or next week's programmes looking at objects from Christ's crown of thorns to the statues on Easter Island.

Paul Sargeant is editor of the A History of the World blog

• The AHOW web site is steadily becoming an extraordinary historical resource, with thousands of objects contributed by the British Museum, regional museums from all over the country and from Radio 4 listeners everywhere.
• Visit Paul's A History of the World blog for entries by curators and producers about the objects and their stories and the Facebook page for daily updates from the project.
• Listen to Sunday at 0710 on Sunday morning and on the Radio 4 web site. Subscribe to the programme's podcast and follow the programme on Twitter.
• The picture shows the Archibishop holding his pilgrim's badge.

In Our Time is both in a central slot in the schedule and something of a cult. When it began 12 years ago it was a leap into the dark. Would a mass audience (over 2 million a week listen to at least some of it - and mostly all of it) take to something so straightforwardly intellectual - and so simple in its format.

Melvyn Bragg had been master of ceremonies at Start the Week for 10 years but had left it after becoming a Lord. And everyone at R4 wanted to keep him. Thus was born In Our Time. It rapidly became clear that the audience not only coped - but loved it. And now many hundreds of editions later it is one of the keystones of Radio 4.

The programme was a pioneer of 'Listen Again' - as we called the facility to listen after the programme was broadcast in pre iPlayer days - and then became the first Radio 4 programme to be podcast. Melvyn at the time was not 100% au-fait with the technology - but he saw the point and his on-air trails for podcasts were works of art. And there has always been a big demand for 'listen again' in what ever form - 300,000 podcasts a month for instance. The website is the most loved of any Radio 4 programme. (We measure these things).

But we have often been asked why the audience only has 7 days to listen again - and why we can't make available the brilliant - and enduring - programmes that have been made in recent years.

And we now can do that. Every edition of the programme is now available from the website. So if your thing is the measurement problem in physics: man is not the measure of all things or Heaven: a journey through the afterlife or any one of hundreds of others - you can now listen when you want. Enjoy.

Mark Damazer is Controller of BBC Radio 4

• The next episode of In Our Time is about unintended consequences. It's on Thursday 11 January at 0900 (repeated at 2130 on the same day). Listen to the first two episodes from the current series - and all previous episodes - on the In Our Time web site.
• Picture by Steve Cadman. Used under licence.
• The In Our Time podcast has 300,000 subscribers.

The Thought for The Day ruling by the BBC Trust was never going to be greeted with universal applause - or anything like it.

In a nutshell the Trust says that restricting Thought for the Day to speakers who espouse a faith does not breach the BBC's obligation to impartiality - but the Trustees say that it is up to the management to decide whether to include non-believers.

As I have said before I think it's a very finely balanced argument. I know humanists, agnostics and atheists are frustrated. They tell me so - loudly. (And mostly politely). But the slot has its merits. It is distinctive and even if you sometimes scream at the radio when it's on - and I have done this myself - it nevertheless often gives a sharply different perspective on the news - and thus can be stimulating. Maybe infuriating - but different.

One more thing before I duck for cover. We do many programmes and items on religious and ethical issues. There are many perspectives on offer - and many of them are not rooted in faith at all.

I discussed the state of play on Thought for the Day on yesterday's PM. Here it is:

Mark Damazer is Controller of BBC Radio 4

• The BBC Trust's ruling is here.
• The ruling was covered in The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Mail and on Digital Spy.
• The picture is by Windward CC Library and is used under licence.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nnp0k

The seeds for Sunday Worship from Helmand were sown more than five years ago. I'd always been interested in the role of religion in an organisation where the job - when all else failed and to put it bluntly - was to blow things up and kill people. It took about 18 months from first contacting the Ministry of Defence until Martin Bell and I stepped on to a flight from Brize Norton to Iraq just before Christmas 2006.

We were heading for Basra to meet the Reverend Andrew Martlew, who was then stationed at the Shaiba Logistics Base with 40 Regiment Royal Artillery and the series for Radio 4 was called 'God and the Gun'. In the jargon of the Church his job is known as incarnational ministry. Getting out of the churches and on to the ground. Sharing the lives of the people who need you. And for a padre in the military, that can mean going in to some very uncomfortable places, both physically and spiritually.

The programme was a success, winning the premier award from the Sandford St Martin Trust, but I felt there was unfinished business. 'God and the Gun' was a documentary and came, I hope, with its own insights. But there was another way of exploring the experience of religion in a battle field. Why not through an act of worship? I thought that would allow us to explore the human side of this story at a much more profound level.

'Sunday Worship' is Radio 4's weekly act of worship. Mostly it comes in a conventional form as you'd imagine, from a church or cathedral, but occasionally it goes 'out on the road' and is recorded as a feature - still recognisably an act of worship with prayers and hymns, but with added documentary elements.

When the causalities started to mount in Operation Panther's Claw everyone I spoke to in the military told me that the atmosphere on Remembrance Sunday this year would be different. In July I suggested recording a Sunday Worship in Helmand on the themes of sacrifice, service and remembrance and that Andrew Martlew, who's still a serving padre, would be the ideal man to do it.

So, after a lot of behind the scenes negotiation with the Ministry of Defence, that's how we found ourselves early one October morning once again at Brize Norton waiting for the RAF flight to Afghanistan. When you're making a programme dealing with such powerful and emotional themes, getting the right tone is the most important and difficult challenge - giving an honest account of what the people serving this summer in Afghanistan have been through, without being voyeuristic and sensationalist, or sentimental and mawkish.

I'd be lying if I said that I had an exact image of the tone I wanted for the programme and I think I'd doubt any producer in similar circumstances who told me they had. I don't believe you can ever have an advance plan; you've just got to rely on your antenna and thankfully, in this case, your presenter. We were interviewing the sergeant major of the hospital in Camp Bastion. He's a member of the Territorial Army and in civilian life worked for BT. In Helmand he found himself, among other things, in charge of the mortuary.

He'd steeled himself for preparing the bodies of soldiers for repatriation; what he didn't expect was to be wrapping in shrouds the bodies of young children - victims of accidents who'd been brought to the hospital, or who'd been caught up in the fighting, and sometimes victims of IEDs - those roadside bombs can't tell the difference between a British soldier and a local child.

As the SM told us, you can't see the sight of small children in large body bags without it changing you and not surprisingly he started to cry. And so did my presenter Andrew Martlew. But then something extraordinary happened. Something which I, coming from a documentary production background, had never encountered. Andrew Martlew the presenter, instinctively and unselfconsciously became Padre Martlew, the army chaplain. He reached out to that soldier knowing, in a way that only another soldier would, what he was going through and offering comfort and reassurance. For chaplains, this is what incarnational ministry is about.

For me this small moment, mirrored countless times in different guises, distilled the essence of remembrance from a soldiers' perspective. This is the window I wanted to open for listeners. I think only Sunday Worship could do that and perhaps only an army padre would understand what tone to take. And there were three people crying in the corner of that ward in Camp Bastion hospital.

Phil Pegum is a Producer in the BBC's Religion & Ethics department

• Sunday Worship is on Radio 4 at 0810 Sunday. Listen again to the Remembrance Day special.
• Both episodes of Phil's God and the Gun, presented by Martin Bell in March 2007, are available on the Religion and Ethics web site.
• Phil also produced last week's Moral Maze about Twitter and mob rule.
• Phil took these photographs while he was at Camp Bastion.