Radio

Barbed wire, concrete, razor blades, passports, Bakelite and the sewage system are all crucial to the way we live now yet what do most of us know about who, when, how they were invented? In an ambitious new series for the World Service, 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy, Tim Harford intends to put

There was something unexpectedly moving about hearing not just one but several renditions of the somewhat naive and rose-tinted but always heartfelt ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ when I switched on the radio after several days’ absence. America has been so much in our thoughts these past few weeks, but a distasteful, shameful version of itself. It

You may not listen to them every year. Or even to every lecture in the current series. But the survival of the annual Reith Lectures on Radio 4 from the old days of the Home Service and Radio 3 (they were established in 1948 to honour what Reith had done for the corporation) is crucial

‘I went in at seven and came out aged 22,’ said Brian as he looked back on the day in October 1966 when his primary school in Aberfan was smothered in a great black wave of coal slurry. On that day, of his small school of just 141 pupils, only 25 children survived. Brian lost

When Jane Garvey announced to the audience who had just ‘taken part’ in the 70th birthday celebrations of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour on Monday morning that a woman listener had sent in an email asking, ‘Why do we need a programme like this in 2016?’, she almost caused a riot in the BBC Radio Theatre.

Quite how one person is expected to oversee not just radio but also ‘arts, music, learning and children’s departments’ was not made clear by the BBC when it announced the stratospheric rise to power within the corporation of James Purnell as the new director of everything that’s not TV or light entertainment. You may recall

The weather was ‘treacherous’ on Saturday, 23 November 2013, the day chosen randomly by Gary Younge as the focus for his latest book, Another Day in the Death of America. As he described it, a ‘Nordic outbreak’ of snow, rain and high winds swept across the desert states and up into the northern plains. It

We now think of Radio 3 as the music station, but when it was created in 1946 as the Third Programme music was only meant to take up one third of its output. Dramas, features, talks were just as crucial to its identity, and poetry especially was to be heard ‘three times a week and

Cooking really shouldn’t make good radio. On television, it’s already frustrating that you can’t taste what you’re seeing, but on radio you can’t even see it. ‘I’m just cracking an egg,’ they tell you. ‘And now I’ll crack another egg.’ The sounds — violent thuds, hissing gas, moist chewing — are more ominous than appetising

Such a hoo-ha about The Archers this week as Helen faces trial by jury — and, much worse, has to confront her horrid husband Rob face-to-face for the first time since she tried to stab him with a knife in the kitchen of Blossom Hill Cottage. Whatever the decision of the court (and of Sean

The last thing we need right now, in these divisive times, is a series that spends all its time crowing about how special the North is, that continually insists it’s the fount of English art, faith and civilisation and also the region where our notions of justice and equality have been forged. The Matter of

One of the weirdest responses when someone close to you dies is the gradual realisation that now at last you know them fully. They become to you complete, rounded, fully themselves, in a way that just does not seem possible while they are still alive. It’s so frustrating. Just when you’re at last ready and

‘We think we’re in charge of this stuff but we’re not,’ said Quincy Jones, the composer, arranger, jazz trumpeter, musical genius. He was talking to Julian Joseph at the Montreux Jazz Festival for Jazz Line-Up on Radio 3 (Saturday). ‘It’s divine intervention.’ Jones, who masterminded Michael Jackson’s Thriller as well as countless other hits, film

‘I’m off now,’ says Michael Heath, signing off from his selection of Desert Island Discs on Radio 4, ‘to go and do a gag about God knows what. I haven’t the foggiest idea.’ You’d think at 80 he might want to stop, or have to give up because he’d somehow lost his touch. But not

It’s a brave dramatist who would seek to adapt for radio the hit novels of the Italian writer Elena Ferrante. As soon as her quartet of novels set in Naples from the 1950s onwards began appearing in English translation a few years ago they created a bestselling stir because of the unusually bold flavour of

It cost just £4/10s for 19-year-old Alan Dryland to buy a season ticket that would take him inside the stadium for all ten of the World Cup matches held in London in that magical summer of 1966. The pound was falling, the Vietnam war raging, but England made it through to the final and the

It was hard to believe that Monday morning’s introduction to the Italian writer Primo Levi on Radio 4 lasted for only 15 minutes. It was so rich, multi-layered, filled with meaning. Presented by Janet Suzman, it was intended as a fanfare for the 11-part adaptation of Levi’s most original book, The Periodic Table, in which

In After the Vote, her talk for this week’s special edition of A Point of View (Radio 4) on the subject of Brexit, the philosopher (and former Reith lecturer) Onora O’Neill suggested that the media have played a large part in creating our current crisis. All branches of it failed ‘to communicate with the public

Fifty years ago on Monday the World Service programme Outlook was launched as an innovative news and current affairs programme presented ‘magazine style’ with live interviews featuring ‘star’ guests. Such ‘soft’ journalism was highly suspect back in 1966, as England won the World Cup, Russia landed the Lunar 9 mission on the moon and China