You could say that Neil MacGregor revolutionised radio with his mega-series A History of the World in 100 Objects. In each of those 100 programmes he took us on an extraordinary journey of the mind, to show us what we’ve been up to since the first ‘primitive’ reindeer carvings of the Ice Age. He did
‘That’s the power of ritual,’ said the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, on Thought for the Day last week. He was thinking particularly of the Jewish festival of Passover with its ritual gathering of the family to eat unleavened bread and bitter herbs as a re-enactment of the experience of exile and slavery. ‘It’s an expression
Does anyone ever listen to Radio 4’s Moral Maze on Saturday nights? It is only the repeat edition (the live discussion happens on Wednesday nights), but even so why broadcast such a deliberately discomfiting programme at almost bedtime on the most mellow night of the week? It’s such an odd mismatch. There you are, winding
The drums roll, hollow and ominously persistent. Then come the trumpets, in a minor key, sepulchral, eerie, penetrating. ‘Just imagine,’ interrupts Donald Macleod, ‘the sense of shock mingled with a kind of disbelieving horror of those who performed that music in November 1695.’ Macleod was introducing his Composer of the Week, which as part of
‘The problem is why,’ said the health project officer of a British charity working in the marshlands of southern Iraq close to Basra. ‘No one answers why?’ He was talking to the BBC journalist Hugh Sykes about the state of Iraq, ten years after the fall of Saddam Hussein. He agreed that the Americans and
Deep within the BBC’s inquiry into the Newsnight and Jimmy Savile affair is a comment by Jeremy Paxman so inflammatory as to demand its own investigation (lasting months and costing squillions). The trouble, he said, with BBC News is that it has become dominated by ‘radio people’. This was not, it seems, intended as a
‘Young people under 16 don’t want to listen to the radio unless there’s a picture to look at,’ said Annie Nightingale on the Today programme. It was Saturday morning and I was only half listening. But this woke me up sharpish. Nightingale was talking to Sarah Montague about the new ‘Harlem Shake’ craze on YouTube
‘We hear women’s voices differently from men’s,’ concluded Anne Karpf at the end of her search back through the radio archives to seek out the first women newsreaders on the airwaves. In Spoken Like a Woman (Radio 4, Saturday night), she decided this was the reason why it took so long for women to make
It’s not unusual for Kirsty Young’s castaways on Desert Island Discs to choose music that reminds them of people who are important to them. But Aung San Suu Kyi must surely have been the first politician-guest to ask her friends and family what she should take with her to that solitary isle, instead of carefully
The first competition had 30,000 entries; the second more than 74,000. How many will be attracted to this year’s 500 Words challenge, launched by Chris Evans on his Radio 2 morning show on Monday? It’s open to any young person — under the age of 13 — to come up with a winning short story.
‘How much did you say the TV licence cost?’ asks my American friend. ‘£145.50,’ I reply. ‘One hundred and forty-five pounds,’ she repeats, with astonishment. ‘And everyone has to pay it?’ ‘Yep. Every home with a TV.’ ‘That’s a lot of money.’ My friend is an economist, with the ability to be as precise about
Radio 4’s Book of the Week sounded so promising, pertinent, perfect for these gloomy first days of January. Maybe listening to it day-by-day could help to banish those demons of despair and disillusion which become so virulent after festive over-indulgence and the onset of the New Year? What better antidote to the dank outside than
Something strange, very strange is going on. Take two sparky young, very young men, watch them launch their media careers a couple of years ago by creating zany videos and putting them up on YouTube. Witness the impish, imaginative duo going viral, followed by millions across the globe. Note that what they’re famous for are
Looking back can be fatal and is usually ill-advised, inducing a nostalgia that can only blight what lies ahead. Let’s risk it, though, reliving those radio moments of 2012 (avoiding the Jubilee and the Olympics) when words took shape and became visceral. Most memorable (perhaps because most recent) was John Humphrys’s grilling of his boss
It’s like being a fly on the wall (or maybe an earwig) at one of those fantasy dinner parties where a group of people who intrigue, infuriate or fascinate us are brought together just so we can see how they will get along. 6 Music, as a Christmas treat for listeners, has put Bradley Wiggins
Two really scary programmes this week, and not a vampire or psychopath to be heard. Both gave personal accounts of catastrophic hearing loss. Not something you’d expect to work on radio, the aural medium. How can you explain what it’s like to stop hearing when there’s no pictures, no other way to explain the absence
It’s been challenged as ‘elitist’ and at times in its more than 60-year history it’s been threatened with deletion from the schedule. But CD Review, with its specialist ‘Building a Library’ slot, has been around since I was old enough to listen. Radio 3’s keynote Saturday-morning show is probably the programme I miss most when
Was that it? Was that the sum total of 90 years of radio? Radio Reunited, the three-minute ‘celebration’ of the first BBC wireless broadcast in November 1922, was a very odd affair. Billed as a revolutionary simulcast to a ‘potential’ 120 million listeners round the world, playing out on all the BBC’s radio stations at
By some strange, freakish coincidence, just as the biggest story to hit the BBC in recent years was about to cut through the airwaves on Saturday night, Radio 4 was discussing the question, Who’s Reithian Now? It was as if, by some act of God, Lord Reith, the corporation’s creator, was speaking to us direct
It takes Alistair Cooke three minutes, or about 450 words, before he finally gets round to declaring ‘I was there’ — on the night that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968. Cooke was talking just a few days later on his weekly Letter from America slot on Radio 4. You might think Cooke would
