Free Thinking - What a hoot!
Post categories: Free Thinking, Gateshead, Radio 3, speech
|10:17 UK Time, Thursday, 28 October 2010
It’s almost time for the Free Thinking festival again; in a week's time I'll be heading for Gateshead and that amazing weekend of ideas and debate, questions without answers, and, for me, just a fantastic amount of laughter and joy - what my mate Dave Beresford used to call ‘head-clutching’. Radio 3 began its experiment in having a ‘festival of ideas’ a few years ago in Liverpool, and now we’re in our second year at The Sage in Gateshead. There aren’t many things I would miss our family bonfire party for, but the Freethinking Festival is one of them.
This year I’m involved in all sorts of ways; I’m presenting The Verb of course, at half past seven on Saturday 6th; our line-up includes the poet Katrina Porteous, who has for many years been preserving and responding to the language of the fishermen of Beadnell on the Northumbria coast, and the novelist and poet John Burnside, who is writing us a new piece based on his love of soul music.
That’s followed by the first ever Radio3/5Live linkup at 9.00pm for a live debate about sport and the arts which I’m going to sit and watch to be part of history, although I have to say I do a similar thing every Saturday night at home when I watch Match of the Day on BBC1 with the sound down whilst listening to Hear and Now on my personal DAB radio. A bit of new music doesn’t half liven up a dull 0-0 draw!
On the Friday night I’m presenting Words and Music, where my job is simply to steer the ship and make sure nobody falls off the (admittedly low) stage and taking part in a pre-concert talk in Hall One. On Saturday morning I’ll be co-presenting Free Ranters, a variation on last year’s Young Ranters where young people spoke (or ranted) for two minutes on a subject of their choice; this year they’re going to be joined by ‘silver ranters’ for a bit of cross-generational ranting. Sounds good to me! In the afternoon I’ll be refereeing a Theory Slam, where people deliver theories to a hungry audience in a no-holds barred atmosphere; last year people sweated, shouted and gesticulated as they got their points across, and I expect nothing less this year. Perhaps a little less sweat.
On the Sunday morning I’m interviewing Terry Deary, author of the Horrible History books that my grandson loves so much, and then on Sunday afternoon I’ll be hooting my horn at the Speed Dating with a Thinker event, where thinkers posit an idea in two minutes, and thinkees get to listen and then move on to the next idea, and the winner gets to keep the horn.
I’ll be around for the whole time, often (when I’m not chairing something) sitting around in the main space at The Sage drinking a cup of tea; please come and say hello. The Free Thinking Festival is a very exciting time for speech and drama on Radio 3, and it reminds us all that we really are a cultural station. A cultural station with a hooter!
- Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival takes place at The Sage, Gateshead, from 5-7 November.
- For a full schedule of events download the Free Thinking festival PDF as a brochure
- Visit The Sage website to book tickets.
- Or call The Sage Gateshead ticket office on 0191 443 4661
- Tickets are free and you can start booking from 16 September.
- Follow us on Twitter @bbcradio3live (link to https://twitter.com/bbcradio3live )
Use hash tag #r3freethinking for your Free Thinking tweets.
Comment number 1.
At 09:04 3rd Nov 2010, Lord Byron wrote:Ian,
Cool that your doing this, poets are free thinkers, Wordsworth and co were always talking about setting up a new community, way of living in the USA, Ruskin was also a poet, on the side.
Perhaps you could ask colin wilson about the free thinking ideas ?
He has read over 30,000 books and published over 110, he is also a serious philosopher who has been looking into happiness and the human condition since the 50s.
Here is an interesting radio interview with colin wilson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdrxI_aGgEs
He is a fan of poetry :)
here is part of an interview with colin wilson
“From the very beginning I felt that the problem of the present age is the enormous amount of gloom that everyone takes for granted. When I was in Paris in the early 1950s, Samuel Beckett had just been discovered. Waiting for Godot was on in Paris and I thought ‘What sillyness! Who is this half-witted Irishman who’s going around saying life’s not worth living? Why doesn’t he just blow his brains out and shut up?’ I felt the same about Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, and later on others such as William Golding. I had always had a passionate feeling that certain people I deeply approved of – like G K Chesterton, who spoke of ‘absurd good news’, for example – and people like Thomas Traherne… the mystics in general, that they were saying that we’re basically blind. One of my basic obsessions is what I call the bullfighter’s cape. Ordinary reality is permanently in front of our eyes, rather like the bullfighter who keeps a cape in front of the bull. It’s only when he twists his head that the bull can see straight ahead. Someone like Beckett just accepts the cape and leaves it there.
“What I always wanted was to get known, to be in a position to say, ‘Now wait! All this is wrong.’ And to point out the enormous problem of modern culture. It was as if some tremendous log had fallen across modern culture and had stopped everything from moving. I saw my job was to get a bulldozer and move it out of the way. So, when The Outsider came out, I thought ‘Good! Finally, I can get started and people will listen to me.’ But of course this didn’t happen.
Colin is nearly 80 now and lives near the sea, in cornwall, on a farm, but perhaps you can get him on the festival via phone ?
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Comment number 2.
At 20:46 3rd Nov 2010, Lord Byron wrote:you can get colin's number via rick lewis at 'philosophy now' magazine, which is especially worth reading :)
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Comment number 3.
At 20:46 3rd Nov 2010, Lord Byron wrote:you can buy philosophy now magazine in wh smiths :)
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Comment number 4.
At 19:59 4th Nov 2010, Lord Byron wrote:o, he was on radio 3, in 2007, on private passions
Colin Wilson
Sunday 21 January 2007 12:00-13:00 (Radio 3)
Michael Berkeley's guest is writer and philosopher Colin Wilson, whose extraordinarily extensive output began with the publication 50 years ago of The Outsider, the book in which he coined the phrase New Existentialism. He has gone on to embrace literary, music and film criticism, science fiction, the occult and criminology.
Wilson's musical tastes range from a Haydn string quartet to symphonies by Prokofiev and Howard Hansen, and operas by Britten and Berg.
So your back office should have his number :)
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