The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Imagine a small room, no windows, institutional cream on the walls. Bare of all decoration except for a circle of cheap chairs and the most basic of recording equipment. A gathering of people squeeze into the space — three young men, a strained-looking couple, an official-looking woman with clipboard and notes, a man in jeans
On the page a minute’s worth of words doesn’t look like much. A hundred and forty-four or thereabouts. But try spouting forth for 60 seconds on any given subject without hesitation, deviation or repetition and those 144 words become an awful lot to find, especially when they have to be summoned up at speed from
‘It’s like acting,’ says the illustrator Quentin Blake about his latest project. ‘You imagine yourself there, in that situation. You imagine you are that person.’ The first-ever children’s laureate has been taking his acute eye for gesture, for character, into hospitals, as part of the Nightingale Project. His funny, colourful, bursting-with-life paintings are now decorating
Life-changing moments are not always as dramatic as Saint Paul’s Damascene experience. Often they emerge from conversations that begin with mundane exchanges about last night’s Masterchef, the film you saw last week, the last time there was a drought. Then gradually the talk moves on to other, deeper matters. Something is said, some connection is
What took them so long? For weeks and weeks he’d been limping into the farmhouse whining about how cold he is, how tired, how he’s had enough of Tom gadding about Borsetshire selling his gruesome-sounding pork meatballs while he’s stuck on the farm trimming leeks and getting up at the crack of dawn to do
It’s a bit of a surprise to discover that my young nephews are huge fans of radio. Since Radio 4 abandoned programmes designed for children, and CBeebies disappeared from the airwaves, radio has become a kids-free zone. What on earth do they find to listen to? Why, of course, Radio 4 Extra, and especially the
Not much fuss has been made about it. We might not have realised it was happening if news of the leaving bash with its tales of uninvited guests (former staff members) had not been gossiped about in the press. But from March the BBC World Service will no longer be broadcasting from Bush House, that
He writes about the stuff you’d rather not know, prefer not to think about, pretend to ignore. But it lives on with you in the mind. It won’t let you go. By his words, the sharp, brittle, spot-on dialogue, he forces you to recognise the limitations of your experience, your understanding. Roy Williams’s new trilogy
Maybe he was asking for it. Maybe his article in the New Statesman was a subconscious attempt to undermine his brother’s authority. But what was the point of grilling David Miliband about his relationship with his brother Ed on the Today programme (Radio 4) on Monday morning? What we wanted to know was whether Miliband
No red carpet was rolled out on Sunday night when the first ever Audio Drama Awards were presented to best actor (David Tennant), best actress (Rosie Cavaliero), best drama (The Year My Mother Went Missing)…in a Hollywood-Lite ceremony at Broadcasting House. No tears were shed as the winners sought desperately to find the right words
It was uncanny, discomfiting, even a little bit alarming. He seemed to be reading my mind, as if my thoughts were being hurled back at me through the ether. Why are we so tired? Why does it feel as though time itself is speeding up, making midlife so much more nerve-wracking an experience than it
Where mostly do you listen to the radio? In the kitchen, on the M25 or M62, under the duvet, soaking in a bathtub? We’ve got used to moving around with the wireless, often listening with just half an ear, not really connecting at all, and with no opportunity to share the experience with anyone else.
The trouble with Dickens is that there’s just far too much plot. How do you make sense of his incredibly complex stories in just three hours as the BBC tried to do at Christmas with its TV version of Great Expectations? It looked fabulous but the storyline made no sense because there was no depth
‘Do you feel like crying?’ asked Shaun Keaveny on his 6 Music breakfast show this week, before replying, ‘Text us your tears.’ It was Tuesday, the first day back at work for many listeners. And Keaveny was trying to cheer us up. Then he played ‘Grey Day’ by Madness. Keaveny’s lucky. 6 Music reckons that
Since the Home Service was relaunched as Radio 4 in September 1967, the station has established itself almost as the ‘heartbeat’ of the BBC. The chance to direct, shape and enhance such a treasure-house of programmes — ranging from Farming Today to ElvenQuest via Something Understood, Classic Serial and The World Tonight — must be
It might cheer the spirits of our over-stressed EU leaders this weekend if they were allowed time out from their delicate financial machinations to listen to the Day of Christmas Music broadcast on Radio 3 on Sunday and in the other 55 countries of the European Broadcasting Union (set up in 1950 as a cultural
Too much dark, not enough light, often leads us inwards, into those dark regions of the mind where memory resides. Between the Ears (Radio 3, Saturday evening) echoed the mood of the month by taking us on a journey back into that hinterland of darkness where names begin to disappear, places can no longer be
Keep awake, urges the Gospel messenger in the readings for the beginning of the Christian festival of Advent. That’s not easy in late November when by lunchtime the sun is already fast dropping to the horizon. The propensity to nap, to switch off, can be overwhelming. In Finland it must be so much worse. For
The changes to the Radio 4 schedule have been in operation for a couple of weeks. Have they made any difference? The extra 15 minutes added to the lunchtime news programme, The World At One, has had the knock-on effect of squeezing the afternoon. Do we need another 15 minutes of current affairs analysis? After
When I was a student of history, the first book we were asked to read was E.H. Carr’s What Is History? I never understood Carr’s question. Or the answers that his book gave. If history is not about people and events, but causes and ideas, then I could see no sense in bothering to study
At the debate on parliamentary democracy recorded last week in Portcullis House for The Forum (broadcast on Sunday on the World Service) as part of Parliament Week, we in the audience were asked whether we thought democratic values were universal or whether they applied differently in different places. Most people voted for them being universal
What’s the best way for a dictator to fall, wondered Owen Bennett-Jones on Saturday night’s Archive on 4 (Radio 4, produced by Simon Watts). Is sending the deposed dictator into exile better for the recovery of the abused nation than execution? Would a domestic trial lead more quickly to justice than an international tribunal? These
The Australians do suburbia well. We seem to be interested in the working classes and the poor (EastEnders, Coronation Street, searing one-off dramas about sink estates), Americans like the rich (Dallas, Dynasty) and well-to-do urban folk (Frasier, Friends). But in Oz they are fascinated by the people who live in medium-size houses in leafy streets
‘We chose to believe things that could not be true,’ says Velma Hart, the American finance officer who famously confronted President Obama at a town hall meeting in Washington DC and told him straight that she was tired of constantly having to defend him against his former supporters among the middle classes. She voted for
Before we knuckle down to the week’s offerings I’m going to seize the opportunity (this review is a one-off, so no need to panic) to champion a regular programme: Something Understood (Radio 4, Sunday mornings at 06:05 and repeated at 23:30). It’s on every week and, while some are better than others, I’ve never heard
Back in the Fifties, it was possible for a single TV sitcom to capture 92 per cent of the small-screen audience; 92 per cent? It sounds astonishing to us now. The idea of so many people watching the very same comic gags at the very same time. Those fabled water-cooler, coffee-machine chats about what was
Sad to say that none of the ex-pats who were interviewed in India for Home from Home (Radio 4, Friday) talked about missing the BBC. Their removal to the subcontinent from the UK might have left them with a longing for a pint of Guinness, but not a word about Jazzer and the Grundys, Nicky
It’s such a relief to come back from a trip to America, to switch on the first available radio and fall into Francine Stock talking about Nicholas Ray on The Film Programme. Americans have lost the radio habit. You won’t find sets in any, let alone every, room in the house. No one I know
Having argued last week that it takes time (maybe a couple of generations) before fiction can be appropriately applied to traumatic historical events along comes a Radio 4 season celebrating the work of the Russian writer and ‘heroic war journalist’ Vasily Grossman, who wasted no time in translating his bitter experiences into a series of