Blog posts by year and monthAugust 2009
Posts (18)
The Living World encounters the Great Bustard
At five years old Fergus is beginning to feel like a male, he spent the previous years looking like his mother, distinctly female. He's as tall as a man's waist and testosterone has deepened his voice and developed his brain in a way to give him a greater repertoire of noises. When sexually arou...
When Harry met Sally at 20
Editor's note - Sarah Churchwell is writer and presenter of yesterday's When Harry met Sally at 20. I asked her to tell us more about her subject - SB. The only difficult thing about writing a script - or indeed a blog post - about When Harry Met Sally and its place in the genealogy of American...
Paul Lewis's week
Pitot tubes. Until recently I had never heard of them. But as we headed from Calgary to Toronto on an Airbus I wondered if they were icing up as the outside temperature hit minus 40 - that low, C or F is the same. Iced up pitot tubes feeding the wrong information to the onboard computer are the...
Dramatising the Lockerbie trial
Steve (editor of the Radio 4 blog) asked me if we had any interesting material about the genesis of the Lockerbie on Trial programme that I co-produced with Margaret Renn back in 2001: court transcripts, etc. that he could use on this blog. I thought my offer of sending him the nearly 10,000 pag...
Justin Webb on his first Today appearance
Justin Webb, until recently the BBC's North America Editor, arrived in the Today studio this morning for his first appearance as a permanent presenter of the programme (he's filled in once or twice in the past). We asked Chris Vallance to talk to Justin - exclusively for the Radio 4 blog - about...
Treating radio 4 output as data
Editor's note: BBC techies have been working with their counterparts at The Guardian and elsewhere to build new sources of data - in this case data about the media appearances of our MPs - SB. At the end of July the Guardian held an internal hackday at their offices in King's Cross. They invite...
Sarah Mukherjee's week
There are many advantages to working in August. True, while many of our colleagues (and listeners) are battling with dilemmas like "white or red?", "pool or beach?" and "if I eat anything else for breakfast, will I still be able to get into my swimsuit?", I am trawling through websites, special...
Read the manual? Never!
Ever been on an online discussion forum to inquire about some technical problem you're trying to sort out? Then it's quite likely that after a while you will have received a terse message from some smart-alec, which will end with the acronym RTM, followed by a number of exclamations marks. That ...
Now Show geography
I went to the recording of The Now Show last Thursday night - the last of the current run. It's recorded at the Radio Theatre in Broadcasting House. Free - and a very jolly evening can be had. The News Quiz also records there - as do a lot of other BBC shows. Click here to find out how to get ti...
Test Match Special
Test Match Special is a favourite programme. I first started listening more or less forty years ago. I remember not only the wonderful Arlott and Johnston - but Alan Gibson and Don Mosey and Alan McGilvray and EW Swanton. Like many others I turned down the TV commentary to listen to TMS - unless...
