Free Thinking - Executive Producer Martin Smith's blog

Free Thinking is under way!

Executive Producer Martin Smith will be writing 'Breakfast Blogs' - that's the only time he's free to tap away with one hand while forking Full English with the other. Here are his first thoughts from this morning ...

It's just after 7am and since this is the first day of the Free Thinking festival weekend I'm allowing myself the Full English as I settle down to the first of my breakfast blogs for the festival this year.

Breakfast in the North-East has been something of a Free Thinking zone over the last few days. BBC Newcastle 's Breakfast Show have been talking Free Thinking all week, including this morning Free Thinking Trivia, and Sports Editor Simon Pryde rehearsing live on air for the Sports v Arts debate that he's going to be taking part in on Sunday afternoon. And if your breakfast stretched into mid morning yesterday you could have heard Jonathan Miles talking to Tanya Byron, this year's Free Thinking opening lecturer.

Her event is here at The Sage Gateshead this evening, but you can hear the whole thing at 9.15pm on Radio 3 tonight.

It's not just in Newcastle that the first part of the day has been a place to engage with some Free Thinking. This morning, Radio 3's Breakfast team broadcast the last of this year's Free Thoughts There's been a fantastic range over the last month, and my own personal highlights have certainly included the philosopher Simon Blackburn on the very origins of Free Thinking, comedian Ariane Sherwin 's reflections on truth, fiction and contemporary television and our own Ian McMillan's rather wonderful plea for us all to engage with the avant-garde. All the Free Thoughts are still available at bbc.co.uk/freethinking and are certainly, to mis-quote Kipling, 120 seconds worth of distance run.

Of course you don't have to be up at breakfast to engage with Free Thinking on Radio 3. A colleague of mine told me yesterday that she'd been sitting in with a knitting circle composed mainly those in their late teens and early 20s (in case you didn't know, knitting is very trendy just now) and listened with delight as one of the group began to enthuse about her latest discovery: Radio 3's Words and Music. The live recording of Words and Music is always one of the highlights of the Free Thinking festival, and tonight's event at The Sage Gateshead promises to be really special. It a fantastic line-up, with local hero Gina McKee amongst the readers and members of the Sage's home group the Northern Sinfonia providing some of the music (for full details visit bbc.co.uk/freethinking). It's another event in The Sage Gateshead tonight, but do try to make a date with it on Radio 3 on Sunday night when it's going to form the final part of our live Free Thinking programme that begins at 8pm. Knitting needles at the ready.

Martin

You can find full details of the Free Thinking Festival at bbc.co.uk/freethinking/2009

Saturday Late Breakfast!

I promised Graeme a breakfast blog for this festival, and it's a reflection of the mass of things going on this weekend that it's now half past six and breakfast - and indeed lunch - are yet to come.

However, I am sitting next to what my colleagues here in the Green Room at The Sage Gateshead are calling David Miliband 's biscuits. I have to admit that I thought that a man with a job like being Foreign Secretary would breeze in here and breeze out and not have time to hang out with the likes of BBC producers. Instead, he arrived early, wandered around the building chatting to people and then sat and shared a chocolate hobnob* or possibly two with the crew here. And given that snacking is now a tasty political issue, outing the foreign sec on the issue of hobnobs rather takes the, er, biscuit ... 

But if he's a little disappointed about not sticking to cabinet policy on snacks, it seems that meeting Mike Brearley will have compensated him. It's not often you see a politician star- struck, but it turns out that Miliband was a pretty useful student cricketer and given that he was growing up in the 70s and 80s, Brearley was of course a hero. The former England cricket captain was here at Free Thinking this afternoon talking to a packed house about leadership and narcissism. As he came off stage and met Mr Miliband round the back of the hall the foreign secretary recalled how, as a young boy, he had gone to the Headingley test match in 1977 and waited anxiously to see if he could carry the J M Brearley of Middlesex and England's cricket bag into the pavilion, and was delighted to be chosen as one of the two boys (one on each handle) to do the honours.

And talking of star struck, it turns out the Gina McKee - star of stage and screen - who performed in the Words and Music that's going out tomorrow night, got into acting because of a drama group run by Ros Rigby, the performance director here at The Sage Gateshead. We sent our recording team to see if they could get the full story and you can view Gina and Ros reminiscing about earlier days here.

One of my colleagues has just walked by and grabbed the last of the Miliband biscuits, so I'd better go out and see if I can forage around the building for other sources of valuable nourishment. More tomorrow.

* Other biscuits are available - Ed