The Radio 4 Blog Feed

Joining in with the Archers 60th anniversary episode

2010-12-29T14:41:28+00:00

Join us on The Archers blog between 10am and 7.30pm on Sunday 2 January to celebrate the 60th anniversary of The Archers as it happens.

Consider yourselves warned (and warmly invited). The special 60th anniversary episode of The Archers is only days away and we want you to join in.

All day, from the beginning of the Radio 4 omnibus episode at 10am until the climax of the 30-minute special episode at 7.30pm we'll be running a live chat on the Archers blog, keeping time with Radio 7's simultaneous day-long Archers epic (classic episodes and omnibuses from the history of the programme running up to the big episode).

We'll be publishing your comments about characters and storylines plus the building speculation about the event expected to 'shake the Archers to the core.' We'll also bring you pictures and stories from the history of the drama all day. Visit the Archers blog at any time from 0945 on Sunday to join in - and tell your friends.

Then, during the anniversary episode itself (an unprecedented double-length programme starting at 7pm), visit The Archers homepage for a 'tweetalong' - The discussion about the anniversary episode on Twitter (which is sure to be lively) will be animated on the page in an app developed specially for the anniversary. Join in by using the hashtag #TheArchers on Twitter.

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

The Archers has five million weekly listeners. It's the longest-running broadcast drama anywhere in the world. Listen on Radio 4 at 7pm Sunday to Friday (and Monday to Friday at 1400 for the repeat) and on Sunday at 1000 for the weekly omnibus.
Download The Archers to listen to on your computer or MP3 player. Subscribe to podcasts for the daily programme and weekly omnibus
The Archers messageboards are among the most popular at the BBC. Follow @BBCTheArchers on Twitter for behind-the-scenes updates, links and RTs.
The picture shows the party to celebrate the 2000th episode of The Archers in 1958. It's from the BBC's picture archive and the caption reads: "picture shows (left-right) Patricia Green (Jill Archer), Norman Painting (Philip Archer), Joy Davis? (Mrs Fairbrother), unidentified female, and Thelma Rogers (Peggy Archer)." Update: Tim Bentinck, who plays David Archer, points out that the unidentified female is Leslie Saweard, who has been playing Christine since 1953.

Frightening the horses - swapping stations on Feedback

2010-12-08T16:53:59+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006slnx

For many listeners to Feedback, it will be many years since they listened to Radio 1 - if they ever did. That's a problem for us on the Feedback team because we're here to represent the views of listeners of all the national networks. But because it's broadcast on Radio 4 - what happens on that station is inevitably what we hear about most from you. So how to introduce other networks into the mix without scaring the horses?

Well prepare for a bit of whinnying because that's what we're trying to do more of - starting with the station you like least - if your comments on the Radio 4 Facebook page are anything to go by. Some of you are very happy with Radio 4 thank you very much. But you might be surprised to know how many people do like to mix and match what they listen to switching - from Today to Fearne Cotton and PM to Scott Mills.

It's something we discovered as part of the Feedback RadioSwap Challenge when we asked two listeners to swap their favourite radio stations for a week. We launched our call to action on Twitter - which is a good place to start. Follow @BBCR4Feedback.

Radio 4ophile Heather Dontenville and her Radio 1 loving stepdaughter Jenni couldn't resist. It was a stroke of luck for us that they were both supertechie types and willingly kept other listeners up-to-date with their adventures across the dial. They are both on Twitter and not only that, they willingly uploaded daily audio diaries during the long seven days between Feedback programmes.

Heather AKA MrsCordial was several days in to self-imposed exile in Radio 1-land when she tweeted:

"Aha, first international news I've hrd on @BBCR1, Korea+Gay Pride India

But she also confessed that she was:

"Really surprised at how many old songs @BBCR1 is playing!"

And that she'd developed a particular liking for a band called The Wombats.

Their daily audio diaries were not up to Radio 4's preferred broadcast quality but we used short excerpts of them on last week's programme to give us an on-the-spot insight into how they were getting on.

Heather mentioned Radio 1's latest social action campaign 'Relationships Week' where presenters talked about everything from dating to divorce. Lots of presenters invited their parents on to their shows with them. Heather particularly enjoyed Greg James's Radio 1 slot which turned into a "bring your Dad to work day".

And still on parenting, one of the highlights for A-level student Jenni was a discussion on Woman's Hour about Ed Milliband and paternity leave. She also enjoyed a lot of Radio 4 comedy - and The Archers although that was partly so she could trade Borchester gossip for news of last week's number one single.

For us at Feedback it was a very interesting experiment not only to discover who likes what and why but also to identify a communications divide on the matter. There are many ways to feed back. Emails on the topic were very slow but the chatter on Twitter and the Radio 4 Facebook page was very lively. @barkingbabs tweeted:

"Swap @BBCRadio4 for @BBCR1 ? I'd rather swap vital organs!"

And on Facebook Andrew Stagg said he'd rather walk naked upon the wolf-infested steppes of Kazakhstan with pieces of raw meat dangling from his body than listen to Radio 1.

Listen to some more of the highlights from Heather and Jenni's interview with Roger Bolton from last week's Feedback. And keep in touch - which ever way suits you.

Are you a one-station man or woman or do you like a bit of a mash-up? The RadioSwap has brought lots of younger Radio 4 fans out of the woodwork - should Radio 4 do more to attract them or is the network perfect as it is?

Feedback is off air now until January 28th but don't forget the programme caters for your views on all of the BBC's national stations. We're hoping the controllers of all of them will come onto Feedback next year so we need to know what you want to hear from them.

Karen Pirie is producer of Feedback

On Twitter, Jenni is @Smidge_xo and Heather is @MrsCordial.
Their audio diaries are on Audioboo: Jenni, Heather.
Jenni's written a blog post about the experience - today is day four.
Listen again to this week's Feedback, produced by Karen Pirie, get in touch with Feedback, find out how to join the listener panel or subscribe to the podcast on the Feedback web page.
Feedback is now on Twitter. Follow @BBCFeedback.
Picture Horse, by Roadside Pictures. Some rights reserved.

Four World Cities - which is greatest?

2010-07-11T10:19:19+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t5l7f

Laurie Taylor wants to know which of these four cities is the planet's greatest: Istanbul, Mumbai, New York or London. The big debate is on Radio 4 tomorrow morning (Monday 12 July) at 0900 but we want your opinion now. Leave a comment here on the blog or tweet using the hashtag #GreatestCity, then - here's the important bit - come back to the blog during the programme and join a live chat with other listeners and contributors to the London Season (we're hoping, for instance, that London expert Tony Travers from LSE will be able to join us). See you there!

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

Listen to the Greatest Cities Debate at 0900 tomorrow morning and to the other programmes from the season on the London: Another Country page.
The picture is a press photo of Scutari in Istanbul during the early twentieth century, from the Library of Congress collection via the Wikimedia Commons.

Moral Maze on Twitter and mob rule

2009-11-04T09:33:41+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nkcfk

This evening starting at 2000, the disputatious crew of the good ship Moral Maze will be debating 'Twitter and mob rule'. Guests are regulars Melanie Philips and Clifford Longley plus Kenan Malik and James Panton. The programme's billing says:

This week the Moral Maze asks "when does a popular and spontaneous protest become mob rule?" Fans of Twitter, the micro blogging site, have chalked up a couple of notable victories of late. Followers helped to expose a legal injunction against the Guardian and Twitter led protests generated tens of thousands of complaints against Jan Moir when she wrote a column using the death of Stephen Gately to criticise gay marriage. Is this net based protest a valuable tool to demonstrate popular opinion or are we sacrificing traditional political engagement for the instant gratification direct action?

Since I expect the Twittersphere will be humming loudly during the programme (it's already started), let's keep track of the conversation using a hashtag.

If you're listening this evening and you feel like Tweeting about the programme or its theme, use the hash tag #moralmaze. That way everyone who's listening will be able to see each other's contributions. Use a search tool like Ice Rocket or Twitter's own. Or use a real-time display gadget like Twitterfall. There's a comprehensive list of Twitter clients and services on Wikipedia. Just follow the hashtag #moralmaze.

I'll be there, listening and tweeting on the @Radio4blog account as will other Radio 4 people. Guests Kenan Malik (a regular presenter of Analysis) and James Panton (an Oxford academic) are on Twitter and they've both mentioned their appearances on tonight's programme already.

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

The Moral Maze is live from Broadcasting House tonight at 2000.
There's likely to be plenty of discussion of the programme on the BBC Religion and Ethics messageboard.
The picture, PDX Pillow Fight #8, is by Sam Grover and is used under licence.

Twitter fever fails to grip Humphrys

2009-09-03T11:50:02+00:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8235000/8235362.stm

A fine kerfuffle (if that's the right word) on Today this morning about - you guessed it - Twitter. Read Alex Hudson's excellent feature about it on the Today site. And what do you think? Are there things that you should be allowed to dismiss out of hand? Is social media phenonemon Twitter one of them?

Reith 2009 in the Twitterverse

2009-06-21T20:54:17+00:00

As I've explained in my previous blog posts, the 2009 Reith Lectures team was keen to extend the reach of the programmes beyond the traditional Radio 4 and World Service listeners.

A key part of our strategy was social networking site Twitter. We wanted to find people already talking about Professor Sandel and his work, or related ideas, and establish a community of listeners which could start engaging with the lectures' themes before the programmes were even broadcast.

Some people found being followed by a broadcasting legend rather unsettling. One user commended Twitter for its ability "to do pure Python at the drop of a hat"; another wondered if we were "lurking behind that bush".

But most people seemed pleasantly surprised to discover the programme's Twitter incarnation: "So delighted you are using Twitter", "Am excited to see such a resource" and "Oh! Oh! You can follow the Reith lectures on Twitter!".

We also wanted to collaborate with our colleagues who run Good Radio Club, an exercise in "social listening" which invites people to tune in to particular radio programmes while logged into Twitter, and then share their comments. And we promised to let you know how it went.

I write this after the first transmission of the second Lecture, and although the experiment has not quite followed the path we intended, it has in fact completely exceeded our expectations.

We had issued invitations for a Good Radio Club event during the first Reith lecture repeat on Saturday 13 June. But the Twitterverse had other ideas. Ten minutes before the first transmission of the opening lecture on Tuesday 9 June, a few messages ("tweets") started to appear, urging people to listen.

That trickle became a torrent, as users spontaneously twittered about Professor Sandel's lecture on the moral limits of markets. Some were already following our feed, but most were not. As radio producers, it was electrifying to see the tweets come in - we were effectively watching people listening to the programme.

The comments were almost universally positive, praising Professor Sandel's arguments, timeliness and approach: "Highly recommended", "Very clear and lucid speaker", "not to be missed", "right on the zeitgeist", "really exceptional", "challenging yet inspiring".

Or as one particularly vivid tweet put it afterwards, "High brow shiznit for your brainbox".

Many people made explicit reference to the BBC's public service broadcasting remit:

"As Lord Reith said, the purpose of the BBC is to educate, inform, entertain...well done!"

"Demonstration of why BBC/PSB is essential - Murdoch wouldn't broadcast this."

There were some critics - one listener was "not that impressed by this year's Reith lectures - no new ideas, or new ways to approach the 'ethic with a busted gut', unhelpful". Another wondered whether "If I say the #Reith Lecture is smug piffle, will it get retweeted [republished]?". It was.

What was also fascinating was the number of unprompted references to listening to the podcast or via iPlayer. Lots of people who had not been following our message stream were so keen to recommend the programme that they published their own links to the podcast, website etc. Many heard the original transmission but wanted to listen again online.

We were able to build on the tremendous response generated by the first lecture - helped in part by Elisabeth Mahoney's warm review in the Guardian, which highlighted our "new-fangled" approach to promoting this year's lectures and the "overwhelmingly positive" response.

Our band of followers continued to grow - sometimes a tweet about Reith was a user's first, suggesting they may have signed up to Twitter just to participate. And the appreciative messages kept piling up.

In Twitter's world, popular topics are given a hashtag (ie "#Reith") which users include in their tweets, thus allowing all related messages to be easily aggregated. As the number of people using #Reith grew, so did our sense of an increasingly engaged community.

The culmination of the week of the first lecture's broadcast was to be the planned Good Radio Club event during the Saturday night repeat.

As a warm up, one user proved you can say much within the famously tight 140 character limit of Twitter, summarising the lecture in a few pithy messages: "markets replace moral judgements with costs" and "Market incentive corrupts/distorts/undermines intrinsic incentive - replaces moral/value judgements with costs".

As before there was a real sense of occasion as we watched the debate unfold in real time. There was a small but dedicated group of active participants joining in across the world - from the UK to New Zealand, Berlin and Tehran. But by tracking the number of people who followed the related content links we posted during the programme, we know that a much larger group was watching (and clicking) in silence.

And more clever technology meant that people who missed the debate could recreate it afterwards, prompted by recommendations from users - many of whom had not apparently taken part the night before: "essential overnight Tweet-reads; #IranElection and #reith discussion of 1st lecture".

The event went very well. In some ways it didn't quite match the excitement of the informal "Good Radio Club" which exploded into life so unexpectedly during the first lecture - and indeed during the second as well. But in terms of plans-not-going-to-plan, the result is pretty good.

As I write this, we have almost 850 followers. In turn they have hundreds - or in some cases thousands - of followers of their own, many of whom find themselves knitted together across the globe by a common interest in the unashamedly challenging thoughts - or "High brow shiznit" - of the Harvard Professor who wears this year's Reith laurel.

The Reith Lectures home page and the 2009 lectures on the Radio 4 web site.
The Reith Lectures 2009 podcast.
Follow Reith2009 on Twitter.
Professor Michael Sandel's biography on the Radio 4 web site.
Scroll to the bottom of this page for a video of Professor Sandel discussing the lectures.
Professor Sandel interviewed by Nigel Warburton on the Philosophy Bites blog.
Lots of useful additional material on the Open University's web site.
Shiznit defined.
The graphic, by Steve Bowbrick, illustrates the response to Good Radio Club 5.

Good Radio Club

2009-06-12T10:45:07+00:00

This weekend sees the return of Good Radio Club, our experiment in 'social listening'. If you joined in last time you'll remember that it involves tuning in to a radio programme and discussing it with others while you listen. There's a blog post over on the Good Radio Club web site that explains how to participate so I won' t repeat it here.

But why social listening?

It's where radio's going. No one doubts that the singular and intimate experience of listening to the radio - voices and sounds from far away - will persist. But the collision of radio and the Internet is producing a kind of hybrid: personal and collective at the same time. Listeners will spend part of their time in the old radio bubble, alone with the voices they love, and part of it in this new social space, where they share those voices with others and contribute to a conversation about them.

We want to test ways of organising social listening. So far we've used the simplest of tools - most of which don't even belong to the BBC: Twitter and third party tools that allow you to search Twitter and find other listeners like Twitterfall, Tweetgrid and Twazzup (we're not endorsing these tools - there are others that do the same job). It must be the cheapest technology experiment in radio history!

We're looking for ways to bring the conversation about Radio 4 programmes back into the programmes themselves. Could we use questions and comments from Good Radio Club participants in the Q&A after a future Reith Lecture, for instance? Or could Twitterers influence the course of a drama?

This weekend's Good Radio Club is focused on Saturday's Archive on Four, The First A&R Man, which goes out at 2000 and on the repeat of the first Reith Lecture, which goes out at 2215. Please join us.
The conversation about Good Radio Club has already begun. You can keep up with it at search.twitter.com.
Follow Reith2009 on Twitter for news about the 2009 Reith Lectures.
Picture by Michael Wincott. Used under licence. Visit radiothings.com for more like it.