Radio 4

Sometimes the mind needs to take a break. And I can’t think of a better stopping-off place than the soothing, gloriously bonkers discussions on the Fashion Neurosis podcast, hosted by the British fashion designer Bella Freud. Its premise is that Freud, daughter of Lucian and great-grand-daughter of Sigmund, encourages guests to recline on her couch and talk over any and every aspect of their relationship to fashion. Her mellifluous, affirming manner is much more soft soap than wire wool, but this is not territory that requires a Robin Day, and the concept proves a surprisingly fruitful route into family history, personal stories and high-grade gossip. The pool of guests is

Intoxicating History is the perfect title for drinks expert Henry Jeffreys and food critic Tom Parker Bowles’s new podcast. Its theme is alcohol, but its contents are predominantly historical, which is good news if, like me, you are quick to apply the word ‘bore’ to any man who talks about wine for more than eight minutes. The first episodes came out before Christmas but they have been gathering momentum since Dry January. Today’s drinking culture, which has spawned this bizarre annual group sacrifice, has an interesting pedigree. Europeans have apparently been on their guard against boozing Englishmen for nearly a millennium. The Portuguese were certainly left in no doubt as

When a phrase really takes off in the political sphere, you will recognise it by the frequency with which it crops up on the Today programme. Many years ago, I noticed that politicians had begun using the line ‘it’s not rocket science!’ when attacking the alleged inability of their opponents to get even the basics right. It had a muscular, common-sense ring to it, which they clearly relished, and it spread like norovirus through a cruise ship. How times have changed. Where once we had politicians who never stopped talking about rocket science, the ascent of Elon Musk in the US has brought us a rocket scientist who never stops

Farming Today airs at an undignified hour each morning on Radio 4. On the few occasions I’ve caught it live I have felt, first of all, relief that I am not a farmer; second, inadequacy; and finally, a surge of evangelism for the farmer’s way of life. I am now reaching the conclusion that getting up early enough to listen to Farming Today is the very least we can all do. Listening to Farming Today helps dispel the romance of living off-grid By no means will everything discussed on the programme hold relevance for your life. One feature last week was dedicated to a project to preserve ten acres of

We are all surely familiar with those stories of naive young Brits who travel abroad and are persuaded by a charming new holiday friend to bring back what they’re told is an innocuous package, only to end up on the sharp end of drugs smuggling charges. The latest series of the BBC’s World of Secrets somewhat inverts those expectations: it tracks the fortunes of three innocent young Brazilian sailors and a French captain who were allegedly duped by a Norwich businessman into sailing a rackety yacht across the Atlantic with £100 million worth of cocaine hidden in the body of the ship. ‘One thing you find on breakfast TV is

I was a weird kid, and though I harboured the usual innocent girlish ambitions of being a drug fiend and having sex with pop stars, I also nursed a desire to appear on Woman’s Hour. As a shy, provincial virgin, the programme opened up a world of women’s troubles from anorexia to zuigerphobia – and I was keen to have A Complicated Life. Here was the wet hand of today’s lily-livered sensibilities I had anticipated From my twenties to my fifties I appeared on it several times; my last outing was in 2016, as – like most other institutions – it was captured by the trans cult, leading to the

It was 50 years ago this week, on 7 November 1974, that Lord Lucan fled what was destined to become the most talked about crime scene of the 20th century. A coroner’s inquest jury named him as the killer of Sandra Rivett, his children’s nanny, but his disappearance ensured that he was never convicted of the crime – or of the attempted murder of his wife, Veronica. Stripping away the sensationalism of the story needn’t render it boring Understandably, given the mystery that still envelops his precise actions and whereabouts, Radio 4 has chosen to mark the anniversary with a soft question rather than to provide answers. Soft, but also

This week’s Archive on 4 is a treat for David Bowie fans. Francis Whately, the producer behind several of the BBC’s Bowie films, including The Last Five Years, has patched together old recordings and new interviews with Bowie’s lovers and friends to examine his life in West Berlin between 1976 and 1978. It was a fraught, make-or-break time. Out of pocket, addicted and depressed, Bowie had grown ‘very, very worried’ for his life. It isn’t entirely clear why he chose Berlin as a place for recovery, other than that it was unstarry, cheap and a good distance from LA, where his troubles had spiralled. Unfortunately, it was also ‘the smack

The most angst-ridden sub-category of the very rich – admittedly a lucky bunch to start with – must surely contain those who have inherited a British country house, along with the exhortation to keep it up. Imagine the anxiety of knowing that one is custodian of a large, crumbling pile of distinguished architecture, stuffed with meaningful antiquities and perpetually besieged by damp, dry rot and taxes. For those of us who are already reliably paralysed by small-scale admin, it would be enough to drive you to drink or worse. In contrast, the landed gentry who survive best in this modern terrain must be energetic, ruthless and ingenious; in all probability

In my next life I intend to have my brain removed in order to become a telly executive. You know: ‘where ignorance is bliss/ ’Tis folly to be wise’ (Thomas Gray, OE). Such ignorance is a state which, happily enough, Rory Stewart, OE and a fully tooled-up Mob from rent-a-thinker (what one of those executives, without a hint of irony or faint praise, once called ‘television intellectuals’) are just now kicking around in the hope that they may rehabilitate it and release it from its sty of obloquy. Rory is a very keen type – what used to be called an all-rounder – and, despite his protestations otherwise, he is

Ask the man in the street to quote a line from one of Salman Rushdie’s novels, and he might struggle. Ask him whether he’s heard the phrase, ‘Naughty but nice’, specifically in the context of cream cakes, and you will probably make his day. It was Salman Rushdie who came up with that slogan in his early career as an adman. Remember the ‘irresistibubble’ tag for Aero chocolate bars? He was responsible for that, too. ‘I feel at bottom that I’m still that boy from Bombay and everything else has been piled on top of that’ If there’s any embarrassment on Rushdie’s part (and why should there be?) that some

For a television talent show, Afghan Star had unusually high stakes. When it first hit Afghanistan’s screens in 2005, four years after the fall of the Taliban, it represented the triumph of music over those who had attempted to smother it. Even from the show’s somewhat chaotic inception, it galvanised a nation, sending supporters out on to the streets to canvas for their favourite performers. When the Taliban first swept into town, people were overjoyed: they were seen as ‘angels of peace’ The first winner, Shakib Hamdard, certainly deserved some luck: he had lost his father to a suicide bomb and his brother to a rocket attack, and was driving

It’s August 2023 when news breaks that artefacts have gone missing, presumed stolen, from the British Museum. I’m about an hour into investigating the story for a feature when a suspect is named in the press. I know him. He’s the curator I was seated next to at a British Museum dinner nine months earlier. Listening this week to three preview episodes of Thief at the British Museum, an electrifying nine-part series on Radio 4, I kick myself for the second time for spending most of that evening talking to the professor on my left. What can I remember of the man on my right? He was quiet. Ruddy-faced. Nothing

The love affair between so many Americans and their guns – long a source of international fascination – appears to be getting more painfully intense. The greater the publicity over gun crime, the more Americans think they’d better acquire a firearm to keep themselves safe. There are now roughly 400 million guns in the US – but most citizens feel more unsafe than ever, and with some justification. Last year featured both the highest level of gun ownership in US history and the highest recorded number of mass shootings. This really is one to listen to in bed, in the pitch dark – even better, pretend you’re in a couchette

Could you live off the land for a year without buying a single thing to eat? This was the challenge a retired journalist set himself on Radio 4 this week. Max Cotton lives on a five-acre smallholding near Glastonbury in Somerset with his wife Maxine, two pigs, two dozen hens and a Jersey-Friesian cross named Brenda. He also has six adult sons who, as far as this project is concerned, ‘prefer to pontificate than help very much.’ Cotton’s hopes for peas by April were even less realistic than I thought Cotton conceded at the outset that he would allow himself to purchase salt as a necessity. For everything else, he

I can dimly remember the internet getting going, gradually staking its claims on our attention with hardly anyone except tech nerds – and famously David Bowie – realising what was going on. In our defence it was the 1990s and we had a lot else to think about: Britpop, The End of History, lads’ mags, guacamole, supermodels, Tony Blair, Monica Lewinsky, etc. But here we all are now, in a world where I can do my banking from bed, America is fragmenting like papier-mâché in the rain, and primary school children can get porn on their smartphones. Can anyone recall the incremental steps that brought us here? If not, it

I can scarcely remember a time before tea: I started drinking it at around four, at home in Belfast, as a reward after school. Before long I was as fiercely protective of my right to a brew as the workers of British Leyland’s Birmingham car plant, who were famously spurred to strike action in 1981 when the management proposed cutting tea breaks by 11 minutes. Decades on, my passion is undiminished. There is no problem to which tea is not at least a partial solution: it restores flagging spirits, calms the over-excited, warms in winter and refreshes in summer. Sathnam Sanghera’s recollections in his Radio 4 five-parter Empire of Tea

Architects are often snobby about – and no doubt jealous of – the designer Thomas Heatherwick, who isn’t an actual architect yet still manages to wangle important building commissions. And he knows this. In his documentary for BBC Radio 4, Building Soul, where he examines what he calls the ‘blandemic’ in today’s architecture, he asks to interview fellow Spectator writer Jonathan Meades, who responds: ‘The last person who should be doing a series on urbanism is a designer.’ Heatherwick wears this as a badge of honour. Indeed, qualifying as an architect is no guarantee of quality – check out the past nominations for the Carbuncle Cup, the now defunct prize

‘What advice would you give to your younger self?’ has become a popular question in interviews in recent years. It’s meant to generate something profound but, musing privately, I always find it a puzzler. Sometimes I think that maybe I shouldn’t have wasted so much of my twenties talking nonsense in pubs, but on the other hand I really enjoyed it. So I usually settle on: ‘Don’t buy a sofa bed, especially not the kind with a concealed metal frame that you pull out.’ Unbelievably, I’ve done this twice. These vast, unwieldy contraptions cost a bomb, weigh a ton, make a terrible sofa and an uncomfortable bed. If you’re 16

The first episode of George Osborne and Ed Balls’s new podcast, Political Currency, opened with an old clip of the pair arguing across the despatch box. Osborne had described his latest Budget as ‘steady as she goes’ and Balls was having none of it. ‘What kind of ship does he think he’s on, the Titanic?’ If producers hoped that the duo would bring something of this, er, biting dynamic to their podcast, they were in for a surprise. The opening number saw little in the way of sparring between the former opponents. Seated in a studio in east London, they spent most of the time doing what so many in