Culture

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

A brief encounter with Radio 4’s Any Questions to gauge the measure of opinion in the shires after the referendum result was enough to convince me we are entering even more torrid times than during the campaign. For some mysterious reason both Harriet Harman and Alex Salmond, billed in Radio Times to appear on the

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.’

Three women, three writers, three very different life experiences. On Monday afternoon the artist Fiona Graham-Mackay introduced us to Imtiaz Dharker, whose portrait she has been painting. While she attempts to capture a visual impression, Imtiaz, who is a poet, tells us what it feels like to be the sitter, the one who is being

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

There are few jobs more dishonest than being a radio critic in Britain. I know this because it was how I got my first break 25 years ago as a columnist. In those days you used to get sent huge yellow envelopes full of preview cassettes, whereas now it’s all digital, but the fundamental lie

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

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

He’s been billed as the new Pied Piper but it’s going to take a while for Tom Service to quite match the engaging brilliance of David Munrow, who back in the 1960s persuaded us that medieval pipes-only music was cool listening. Munrow’s series on what was then the Third Programme was aimed at six-to-12-year-olds but

‘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

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

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

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

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,

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

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

Hurrah for Radio 3 and its (long-overdue) efforts to give us music not just performed by women but composed, and conducted, by them too. Last year’s innovative day of programming for International Women’s Day introduced us to composers many of us had never heard of, such as Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre and Barbara Strozzi,

What makes the World Service so different from the rest of the BBC? I asked Mary Hockaday, the controller of the English-language service. And how does it justify the additional £289 million funding (spread over the next five years) which the Treasury granted it at the end of last year? Will that money, which could

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

The deadline for Radio 2’s 500 Words competition falls next Thursday. Children between the ages of five and 13 are invited to send in a story, no more than 500 words, to compete for the prize, the chance to have their story read on air, live to ten million listeners on the Chris Evans Breakfast

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

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

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

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

Some might say that Jeremy Corbyn is cloth-eared, tone-deaf, socially inept but on Monday morning, as the death of the pop artist David Bowie scrambled the agenda on Radio 4’s Today programme, he was as graceful and twinkle-toed as Bowie himself. The opposition leader had been invited on to the ‘big slot’ just after the

One of the most shocking items of recent news has been the bald statistic that the number of people shot by law enforcement officers in the United States last year was 1,136. Not died by gangland shooting, domestic violence or terrorist attack. But killed by those who are meant to be preventing such deaths. Many

My resolution this New Year is to get to grips with podcasts, to brace up and embrace this new aural wonderland stuffed full of sound stories, experiments, features, adventures. They’ve been around for a decade, and there’s now hundreds of thousands of them, lurking in the web, hoping for someone to stream or download them.

Who would have thought in this visually obsessed age of YouTube, selfies and Instagram that radio, pure audio, no images attached, nothing to hold on to but a voice, a tune, a blast of birdsong, could not only survive the arrival of the new image-making and digital technologies but experience an extraordinary flowering of talent