Archives for March 2010

Editor's note - we're trying something new. We're going to publish one item from Radio 4's weekly accountability programme Feedback here on the blog. We're keen to know what you think of this new way of spreading the Feedback word: leave your reactions and questions in a comment below - SB

When I first met Ceri Thomas, the Editor of Radio 4's Today after his appointment to the job four years ago, he had a young unlined face.

I wouldn't say he now looks like an old man, e.g. me, but the lines on his face have multiplied I reckon and cut deeper and I think I spy a bit of baggage under his eyes.

That's not surprising given his punishing weekly schedule.

Up before 6am to listen to the programme go out, then into the office for a day's work that ends around midnight when he has read the first editions of the next morning's papers and discusses them with his night editor.

And in between quite a few calls from party politicians and spin doctors trying to influence the agenda, and doubtless the odd visit from a presenter wanting to know whether or not she, or more usually he, will get any of the big party leader interviews to do.

It can only get worse for him in the next few weeks as the general election, which looks like being the closest in almost 20 years, draws closer.

I do hope Ceri Thomas gets an afternoon nap.

He didn't get one on Wednesday when he came into the Feedback studio to answer criticisms from three listeners who consider themselves to be candid friends of his programme.

Kate Francis has listened to Today since Jack de Manio presented it and she was at university. Kate thinks the interviewing styles of Today's presenters are too aggressive and thinks there aren't enough women presenters and reporters on the programme.

Andy McIntyre-Pell thinks some items are too short and would like to see political interviews run longer. He doesn't want to hear any more so-called light items.

Peter Hodder joined our discussion down the line from a Birmingham studio. He thinks the Today programme is sometimes politically biased. I asked him for evidence of this:

Roger Bolton presents Feedback on BBC Radio 4

• Feedback listeners Peter Hodder, Kate Francis and Andy McIntyre-Pell are on this week's Feedback with the editor of the Today programme Ceri Thomas. Listen to the whole programme on the Radio 4 web site.
• Feedback will be recording more listener panels in the future and if you would like to take part we'll give details here and on the programme in the next few weeks. You can also find out how to join our listener panel on the Feedback web page.
• The picture shows Sarah Montague and James Naughtie presenting Today. It's from the BBC's picture library.

Drama on BBC Radio 4 is in rude health. The network continues to be the biggest commissioner of original dramas in the UK with 650 hours of drama and readings this year alone. Recent plays illustrate the breadth and ambition of our output: David Hare's Murder in Samarkand, starring David Tennant; Lenny Henry's Othello; and the entire le Carré Smiley series, featuring Simon Russell Beale. We continue to attract the best writers and performers to work on the network.

However, there has been some publicity recently about the decommissioning of the Friday Play. Let me fill in the background. We used to commission 32 fresh plays a year for 9pm on Fridays. The other 20 weeks were repeats of earlier Friday plays. But while our aim is always to offer original drama of the highest quality, we work to a budget and sometimes have to make difficult decisions about where to invest. Rather than spread the budget more thinly over all our drama strands I decided to decommission a single strand - the Friday Play. This will enable us to maintain investment in the quality of the hundreds of plays we broadcast elsewhere across the network. The Friday Play was reduced to 12 new plays last year, before being decommissioned this year.

The thinking behind this being that not only does the Friday Play have the smallest drama audience, but that the best plays we commissioned for the Friday Play strand will also find a home elsewhere, whether on Saturday afternoons or on weekday afternoons. We will continue to commission challenging scripts that examine difficult and contemporary realities. Every now and then there may be a theme or a treatment that just won't work in a daytime slot, in which case we will run it on Friday night. It will be a rare occurrence but let us see what transpires. I should add that drama is not disappearing from Friday nights: we will be scheduling a mix of drama repeats and omnibus editions of narrative history series.

Radio 4 remains absolutely committed to original drama. Looking forward to the next few weeks alone you can hear: a new production of Stephen Poliakoff's Playing with Trains; Goldfinger, played by Sir Ian McKellen and supported by an all star cast; and the 1980s season, including three new plays by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman, Danny Brocklehurst and Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. As a matter of course over the next year there will be nearly 200 single plays. And the opportunities for new writers on the network remain unrivalled - the Afternoon Play alone will premiere the work of around 40 first- and second-time writers for radio next year - some of whom we hope will be the heirs of Stoppard, Pinter, Orton et al...

Mark Damazer is Controller of BBC Radio 4

• The picture shows David Hare and David Tennant during the recent recording of Hare's Murder in Samarkand. It's from BBC Publicity.
• Clarissa is the latest adaptation in the Classic Serial slot. Episode one (of four) is available to listen to for two more days. Final Demands, Frederic Raphael's updating of his own Glittering Prizes is up to episode five of six. Walking on Sunshine, Wednesday's Afternoon Play, was a comedy about a black walking group.

BBC 6Music made an unplanned visit to the Radio 4 airwaves this evening. Just after 1900, at the end of the hourly news bulletin and just before The Archers, The Undertones were to be heard playing Wednesday Week from their 1980 album Hypnotised. It turned out that an error had been made when 6 Music's output switched from a London studio to Marc Riley's in Manchester and, for two minutes, twenty-three seconds 6Music took over Radio 4 on all frequencies.

Speculation about the cause of the incident was especially feverish on the social nets. On Twitter, miss_s_b wondered:

is it just me, or did 6music just hack radio 4? (tweet)

And tayler voiced the question on many listeners' lips:

Lots of people wondering if the strange music played on Radio 4 at 7 - interrupting the start of The Archers - was a BBC6 Music protest! (tweet)

Diana Speed, the Radio 4 announcer on duty at the time of the takeover, apologised on-air for the interruption and has passed me this official account from her log of events:

R4 Network lost for 2'23" when 6MUSIC was transmitted on our six platforms on the Network Switcher. This was due to a mistake in monitoring when the Control Room did the switch for 6MUSIC from Western House to Manchester at 1900 and instead placed 6MUSIC on our output.I was unaware of loss of network because we monitor desk output in Con and that was going out as normal. Apology was made at the end of the programme.

Listen back to this most unusual upset:

Or download the MP3 here.

In a magnanimous follow-up, Shaun Keaveny played the rare full-length version of Arthur Wood's Barwick Green (The Archers theme) on his breakfast show this morning (followed by The Velvet Underground's Rock & Roll - this week's second-most surreal on-air collision). Listen to the clip from Shaun's show:

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

• Listen again to Marc Riley's 6Music show. Last night's edition of The Archers is now available to listen to - in full - on the Radio 4 web site.
• The story was picked up in The Guardian (who also ran with Radio 4's explanation of the error), The Telegraph and Digital Spy.
• Picture by Aidan Wojtas. Used under licence.

Editor's note: Radio 4's network manager explains three recent on-air errors - SB

Radio 4 broadcasts 13,000 programmes a year - a hugely complex mix of human activity and technology which, most of the time, comes out of the speaker in a seamless stream of beautifully crafted radio. Which makes it all the more noticeable for listeners - and frustrating for us - when there's a glitch. This week we've had a couple of glitches. On Saturday, we broadcast the previous week's edition of the Now Show instead of repeating the one from the night before.

This earned us some inevitable headlines about the 'Now and Then Show'. And yesterday morning we read out the wrong Shipping Forecast at 0520, for the second time in a month. These lapses are entirely unrelated to each other: the wrong Now Show was due to an error in operating the digital system that plays out programmes; the wrong shipping forecast was due to the forecaster selecting, at the end of a night shift, an earlier bulletin. We take these things very seriously and after any error we study what went wrong to see what lessons can be learned.

In the case of the shipping forecast, we are already implementing changes that should make such a mistake far less likely in future. The system has been adjusted so that the previous bulletins will be automatically deleted. And instead of the 0520 bulletin being read as the last task of the night shift, it will be the first task of the day shift. I can't promise that we won't make any mistakes in future. But we shouldn't make these ones again.

Denis Nowlan is Network Manager at BBC Radio 4

• Listen to the correct edition of The Now Show on the Radio 4 web site.
• The picture shows the control desk in the Radio 4 continuity studio. More pictures from the studio here.

This morning's interview with Prime Minister Gordon Brown was the third interview with a major party leader in Woman's Hour's 'Winning Women's Votes' series. It's been setting the news agenda all day - on front pages and in the politics sections.

The Guardian responded quickly to the 0830 trail and live blogged the interview (a tough task, I can confirm, having tried it myself a few times).

Christina Odone goes with the PM's alleged banana addiction in her Telegraph blog post.

Elsewhere in The Guardian, Zoe Williams thinks the interview sounded like 'a jolly farmer being attacked by a terrier'.

Peter Hoskin, blogging in The Spectator, reads the interview as a preview of next week's pre-election budget.

James Macintyre in the New Statesman (and most other outlets) focuses on the Prime Minister's assertion that he'll stay on as leader if he were to fail to win a majority.

Sky News also ran with the 'keep going' angle and put on the front page of their web site. So did BBC News Online, Labour List and London freesheet Metro.

Listen to the interview in full here:

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

• Listen to all the features from the Winning Women's Votes series - including interviews with Nick Clegg and David Cameron - here.
• Woman's Hour is on-air weekdays from 1000 - 1100 and Saturday from 1600-1645. Subscribe to the podcast.
• The picture was taken in the studio just before Woman's Hour went on-air this morning. There are more pictures here and here.

Last year the Radio 4 Appeal raised over £1.5 million for 52 different charities. For over 80 years, charities have had the chance to make a direct appeal to the listeners every Sunday morning. If we had kept an autograph book of the presenters over those decades - it would be a great read!

A couple of weeks ago Sir George Martin came into Broadcasting House to record an appeal for Deafness Research UK. He's Vice-President of the charity. A music industry legend, Sir George Martin is perhaps best known for producing The Beatles. He has worked with an astonishing array of talent - from the great classical conductors, Sir Thomas Beecham and Sir Malcolm Sargent, to the comedy of Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers. His most recent work has been the hugely successful score for the Cirque du Soleil show 'Love.'

Sir George suffers from progressive hearing loss and tinnitus, and wears two hearing aids. Chatting in the studio after the recording he recalled the moment when he realised that his days of studio recording were coming to an end. Listen here:

Sally Flatman is producer of the BBC Radio 4 Appeal

• Deafness Research UK is dedicated to improving life for people with hearing impairment through research, information, advice and education. You can find out more about their work at their web site.
• Listen to Sir George Martin's appeal and give to the charity at the Radio 4 Appeal website.

Sheila Cook is producer of Radio 4's weekly personal essay slot - A Point of View. Simon Schama takes over this evening for a 10-week run of the short programme that's been filling the gap left by Alistair Cook's America.

Simon and Sheila stayed on in the studio after Monday's recording to record this fascinating interview - exclusively for the blog. On what's different about writing for radio, Simon says:

This is more 'organised stream of conciousness', which is a danger really because Schama's consciousness is intensely disorganised most of the time but what you lose in formality I hope that everyone - including me - will gain in fun.

On the programme's legacy:

Alistair Cook... was amazingly good at discovering what seemed to be an incidental anecdote and then bolting it to a major theme that connects us all. If I can manage that with even a fragment of his genius for putting things together then I'll be happy.

And on possible themes for later essays, he warns us to expect some sport (although probably not baseball, which he's covered before) and teases us:

I'm sort of besottedly interested in singer-songwriter kind of pop music. It just may be that there's something interesting to talk about there. Who knows?

Listen to the interview:

• The picture shows Simon and Clive James (another A Point of View presenter) in about 1970. It was taken by Mike Payne. Thanks to Clive James for permission to use it. There are some pictures taken in the studio here and a picture taken using my old-fashioned instant camera here.
• The first of Simon Schama's ten programmes is transmitted at 2050 tonight and repeated on Sunday morning at 0850. You can listen again after transmission on the Radio 4 web site.
• Listen to previous programmes by Clive James and Lisa Jardine on the A Point of View web site.

It's been a big day at the BBC - this morning Director General Mark Thompson confirmed last week's leak to The Times and announced the recommendations of his strategic review of the Corporation's activities. The World at One with Martha Kearney gave nearly 13 minutes to the story this lunchtime. Here's the item in full. The review doesn't signal any change at Radio 4: the BBC's document says:

This strategy strongly endorses the current creative direction and editorial performance of Radio 4, Radio 3, Radio 1 and 5 Live. Radio 4, the original Home Service of the BBC, is unique in world radio in its quality and range...

But the proposed changes - which now enter a period of consultation conducted by the BBC Trust - will clearly, if accepted, change the shape of the Corporation substantially.

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

• The BBC Trust's page for the consultation is here. You're invited to participate.
• The Director General wrote about the strategic review on the About the BBC blog this morning. His post already has 118 comments. Discussion on the social networks has focused on the two radio networks proposed for closure. On Twitter, a protest is building.
• The story was picked up today by The Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph and hundreds of other news outlets.