Blog posts by year and monthSeptember 2009
Posts (16)
Stephen Fry's In the Beginning was the Nerd
The Western world, with a few notable exceptions, poured billions of dollars into electronic pesticides to defeat the Y2K bug. Only to find that for the most part it could have been defeated by turning the systems off then on again. Shades of the hit C4 comedy The IT Crowd. In reality it's the s...
Desert Island Discs comes to iPlayer
It is a grand moment to get Desert Island Discs (DIDs) on the iPlayer. We have always had good relations with the family of the programme's founding father - Roy Plomley - but the programme was conceived in a pre-digital age and so we needed to work out with the family how to make the programme ...
A history of private life
I first met Amanda Vickery ten years ago - her book, 'The Gentleman's Daughter' had just been published, and she gave an interview to our local paper. Something about the interview made me think she would be good on the radio - her liveliness and her sense of fun came across, even in a print int...
Pictures from Iraq on the PM blog
Guantanamo Bay: 245 prisoners. US camps in Iraq: 8,305 prisoners. They're in two relatively small camps near Baghdad. The third - and most used - Camp Bucca, in the southern desert, has just closed. Here's a taste of it: editor's note: these remarkable pictures, taken by Hugh Sykes in a US 't...
Just a Minute reloaded
I think if anyone had thought it worth asking me about creating a series of short animations based on clips from Just a Minute, I'd have said something like "don't bother. It'll never work". Thankfully, nobody asked me and the resulting videos are all brilliant - really witty collisions of words...
Searching for our lost minerals
Drive through the southern Highlands between Braemar and Pitlochry at this time of year and they look pretty bleak. After thirty miles of bleached heather it comes as a shock to see a splash of colour on the horizon. Drive closer and you come to a couple of acres of luxuriant vegetation on an ex...
Iconoclasts - age of consent
Going against the grain in front of your peers takes some doing in any sphere and one of the reasons Iconoclasts has provoked such interest is because our well-known, heavyweight speakers come on and present genuinely iconoclastic views which attract robust challenge - not least from other exper...
Peter White's week
One of my delights over the past few years has been following the so-called 'children of the Olympic bid'. If you've missed it let me fill you in. These are the youngsters who back in 2005 played a key but little known role in snatching the games for London from under the Parisian nose. Aged be...
Inside the Bermuda Triangle: the Mysteries Solved
The idea behind the series was to find primary sources and to uncover original documents which might give some clues as to why the Bermuda Triangle myth caught on in the first place, and why it has endured for so long - and of course to get a sense of whether there is any truth in it. So it took...
The Archers anointed
The hipsters at The Word Magazine have given two pages of the latest issue to a survey of the best and worst of the world's soap operas - from Hollyoaks to Knots Landing and from Grange Hill to Dallas. Thrillingly, it's not Eastenders or The Sopranos (fairly flexible definition of 'soap' in use ...
