Blog posts by year and monthDecember 2009
Posts (15)
Beyond Westminster: visiting Gladstone
Editor's note - Paul Vickers wrestled with his Sat Nav for a trip to the Welsh borders and the ancestral home of William Ewart Gladstone to mark Gladstone's bicentenary for Beyond Westminster. He recorded this short account of his visit specially for the blog - SB. Paul Vickers is a Producer o...
The home lives of Radio 4 Royalty
It went like this. I called the nice people in the Radio Times press office and asked if I might have a pile of Christmas double issues for a special project on the blog. They arrived in the internal post the following day and I started sending them out to important Radio 4 people. A handful we...
The Controller's Christmas listening
Mark Damazer, as I'm sure you know, is the boss. The Controller of BBC Radio 4. So he's responsible for every one of the 13,000 or so programmes commissioned annually by Radio 4 and - in my own experience - he has an opinion about every one of them. So, can there be a more interesting or influe...
Upshares - a new high
I like to think that every week on PM is a special week, but for regular listeners, this week will be... shall we say, extra special? For this is the week that the great Alexander Faris, composer of the Upstairs, Downstairs theme, will speak unto the nation. For new readers: over the last year,...
Tim Bentinck's Christmas listening
Tim plays David Archer in Radio 4's long-running drama serial The Archers. He's not been in Ambridge for that long but he's a pillar of the series nevertheless. I gave him a copy of the Radio Times' 'legendary double issue' and asked him to get scribbling: he's ringed all the Radio 4 programmes ...
From the diabolical airport lounge of climate change diplomacy
Editor's note. Sarah Mukherjee, Radio 4's Environment Correspondent, was in Copenhagen for Cop15's messy finale. She wrote this sketch from the corridors outside the official meeting rooms as the formal agenda fell apart. As you'll have read, things didn't go exactly as she - or anyone else - ex...
Kirsty Young's Christmas listening
They don't call it 'the legendary Christmas issue' for nothing. The Radio Times at Christmas is a genuine publishing event. Still, in the age of the web and free listings pull-outs, the 274-page issue (the first to feature two different covers since 1923) will sell well over 2 million copies and...
Werry good! Muppet meets More or Less
The More or Less team was in a state of great excitement on Wednesday. We were about to interview one of our heroes: Count von Count, Sesame Street's Transylvanian arithmomaniac. But what do you say to a Muppet? The makers of Sesame Street offered some guidance. They sent my colleague Julia Ro...
Appreciating Smiley
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy part three has been and gone for me - though if you missed it you get the repeat next Saturday evening at 2100 and you can listen again on the Radio 4 web site. And I thought it was fabulously good. We have an audience measurement system for appreciation - called AIs ...
Words and pictures from the National Short Story Awards
The nice people at Book Trust have sent us some pictures from the awards ceremony Monday night - and there are more here on Flickr. Shortlisted Lionel Shriver's got an excellent piece about short stories in The Independent. She writes: Exchange Rates, short-listed last month for the National S...
