Bbc radio 4

I’d just heard (on catch-up) Jenny Abramsky (a former director of BBC radio) telling Gillian Reynolds (the esteemed radio critic of the Telegraph) why radio is so special to her: ‘It takes place in my head. It paints pictures in my mind. It talks to me as an individual. It surprises me. It stretches me.’ Then I popped down to the kitchen to make some soup for lunch, reached for the radio button and was hooked instantly as Jeremy Vine talked to a man who had lost his wife in a road accident when their child was just two. (Vine’s Radio 2 lunchtime programme on Monday was focusing on child

Just to prove my esteemed colleague wrong I’ve been out there in podcast space looking for a wireless moment that will outclass the impact, the fascination, the compelling authority of much (though not all) of Radio 4’s daily output. Of course, there’s a lot of good stuff being made but how do you discover what’s worth spending time with? It’s hard to make a serendipitous discovery by surfing the web. There’s no equivalent to the simple switching of a button and that instant connection, our attention held, communication created, imagination fed. You have to work hard to find a podcast that has edge, knowledge, aural style; all you can do

Monday’s ‘World on the Move Day’ on Radio 4 was a bold challenge to government policy and proof that radio is much the most flexible, the most accommodating, the most powerful medium when compared with TV. Without much ado, the day’s planned schedule was squeezed, manipulated, overturned to allow the team behind the Today programme to mastermind a live discussion throughout the day about the migration issue, as if to say to the government, here’s what people not just in the UK but from around the world care about. Let’s listen to them and see what solutions they might have to offer. Angelina Jolie Pitt was the biggest prize as

You might not think that the Eurovision Song Contest (screened live from Stockholm tonight) could have any connection with how we might choose to vote in the coming referendum. Surely it’s just a string of naff pop songs stuck together with fake glitter and a lot of false jollity? The songs are uniformly terrible, the show so overproduced it’s impossible not to mock its grandiosity, the idea that it conjures up the meaning of Europe laughably misplaced. But in a programme for the World Service that caught my attention because it sounded so counterintuitive, Nicola Clase, head of mission at the Swedish embassy in London, tried to persuade us otherwise.

‘Comedy is like music,’ said Edwin Apps, one of the characters in Wednesday afternoon’s Radio 4 play, All Mouth and Trousers (directed by David Blount). ‘The words are the notes and they have to be in exactly the right place. And every line has to pull its weight, add something to the situation.’ Apps was one half of the writing partnership who created that most unlikely of TV hits in the supposedly swinging Sixties, All Gas and Gaiters, set in the cathedral close of St Oggs and featuring a laughably inept quartet of Anglican clerics. Mark Burgess’s engaging drama told the story of how the series (which ran for 33

Sue Armstrong’s programme on Radio 4 All in the Womb (produced by Ruth Evans) should be required listening for anyone dealing directly with the refugee crisis, with those who have fled from intense fear and terrible violence in their home countries. Armstrong has been investigating recent developments in our understanding of the impact of severe trauma, how it affects not just the mind but also the body, creating physical changes that also need to be addressed. Those who lived through the Holocaust, for example, who were in prison camps or were forced to hide in dark, cramped, inhuman conditions, perpetually afraid that at any moment they might be discovered, have

All this week Radio Five Live has been giving us an insight into what it is like not just to confront death every day but also to know that a minor error on your part might end a person’s life. In Junior Doctors’ Diaries on Sunday night, Habiba, Andrew and Jeremy took us inside their daily round, followed by updates throughout the week on Phil Williams’s night-time show. It’s been a timely reminder (politically motivated or not) of how much we need good doctors, and how sad it is that so many of them have felt driven to go on strike. Sad because it’s actually a reflection of how undervalued

It was a toss-up on Sunday between the atmosphere in the Radio Five Live Sports Extra studio in Kolkata for the last over of the cricket world cup (England versus West Indies) and the high-velocity drama of that evening’s episode of The Archers. Which was the more dramatic? In one room my husband was shouting at the radio, ‘Go on, Stokes!’ In another, an hour later, I was staggering towards an armchair, all thought of cooking dinner quite beyond me, after listening to the dénouement of the Helen and Rob story. Who would have thought radio could be so dangerous to the blood pressure? In the heat of the moment,

Could radio, and in particular a weekly soap, have a role to play in the Syrian crisis? You might think, no chance, given the levels of violence and terror that have overtaken the country. How can a mere broadcast signal have an impact compared with all that destruction? But, says the director of Radio Alwan, a station operated by Syrians living in exile in a western suburb of Istanbul, ‘radio is effective’. It’s a ‘weapon’ because it ‘allows you to enter the houses of people and talk to them’. It’s also so easy. ‘You don’t need power, you don’t need electricity — just two small batteries.’ He was talking to

Six years ago, on Good Friday, the journalist Melanie Reid was thrown off her horse while on a cross-country ride in Stirlingshire where she lives. The accident broke her neck and back and left her tetraplegic, paralysed from the armpits downwards. On Easter Sunday on Radio 3 she’s Michael Berkeley’s guest on Private Passions, a timely guest, as he says, because she has recently written in her Sunday Times column about being ‘surprised by a small epiphany of happiness’, of experiencing a ‘rebirth’, if ‘rather cruel’. ‘You find joy in little things …I see all the things that I never saw in my busy life,’ she says, which coming from

Four programmes, four very different kinds of radio, from a classically made drama to weird sonic ramblings, via the best kind of all: first-person narrative, straight to mike. On Syrian Voices this week on Radio 4 (produced by David Prest), Lyse Doucet has been talking to Syrians whose lives have been utterly changed by the war, now passing its five-year mark. On Monday we heard from Sam, a 22-year-old student who lives in the government-controlled area of Daraa and studies English literature at the university. It was here that the uprising began after some students scrawled graffiti on a wall, ‘It’s your turn next, doctor’, calling for their country to

It’s tempting to believe that somewhere in the bowels of Broadcasting House in London the voice of Kenneth Williams is still roaming, rich, ribald and ever-so-fruity, ready to jump out and surprise us. He was just so unmistakable on air, both fantastically intimate with the microphone and very aloof, but never better than playing someone totally off-the-wall. The wireless was tailor-made to suit his temperament, which could be flamboyant and out-of-control and yet was also intensely private and controlled. Without him and his zany characters (he died in 1988, aged 62) radio comedy especially has never been quite the same, with no one to take on his mantle of absurdity.

Much ado about Radio 4’s latest venture into the new smart world of aural selfies. Reaction Time, on Thursday mornings, is a compilation of mini-recordings by listeners telling us about their lives (overseen by Kevin Core). No tape machine needed or sound recordist. Just a listener with a smartphone and a thick skin. For these stories are not the kind of thing you would tell your nearest and dearest (unless they, too, have an equally thick skin). But rather they reveal disappointments in love, embarrassing date nights, ‘how I met my husband’, things you might unburden to a good friend over a couple of glasses — but would you do

For once, the superlatives that have greeted Terry Wogan’s death from cancer have been entirely in keeping with the man. He did truly touch the lives of millions, understanding that the essence of radio, what makes it so individual among technologies, is the way it connects us, person to person, in a single moment of time. Wogan had the knack of making us believe that we were having a private conversation with him in that moment. In his own way he was also an artist, of language, of the music of words, of radio itself, constantly surprised by the strangeness of strangers, the oddities of everyday life, the idiocy that

The new season of the Serial podcast (produced by the same team who make This American Life) was launched last month, releasing one episode a week as the investigative reporter Sarah Koenig looks this time into the strange story of Bowe Bergdahl. He’s the US army soldier who walked out on his platoon in 2009 while stationed on a remote outpost in Afghanistan, close to the Pakistani border. Unsurprisingly, he was captured by the Taliban and held captive for five years before being released, in a prisoner exchange with those held in Guantanamo Bay. At first it looked as though he would be given a hero’s welcome (his release announced

You don’t expect to be brought close to tears by the Reith Lectures, which are after all at the most extreme end of Radio 4’s commitment to ‘educating’ its audience. Yet when Stephen Hawking delivered this year’s talks at the Royal Institution in London (in front of a lucky audience of listeners and scientists) there was both much laughter and a heightened sense of emotion. This was not because of his plight — the eminent professor of theoretical physics has suffered from a rare form of motor neurone disease since the age of 21 and the only discernible movement in his body is in his eyes, and the twitching of