Blog posts by year and monthOctober 2010
Posts (15)
Nicholas Parsons honoured
Richard Bacon, 5 live presenter, in his introduction to last week's Radio Festival, called the rather civilised radio industry conference "our Glastonbury." If that's the case, then it was "our Michael Eavis", Radio Academy Director Trevor Dann, who inducted Radio 4 legend Nicholas Parsons into ...
Charm offensive? Nick Clegg on Desert Island Discs
In Feedback this week we discussed the deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg but listeners weren't concerned about what he said on Desert island Discs about his inability to give up smoking, or where he took his girlfriends in the days before he met his wife. No, our correspondents were concerned ab...
Radio 4 goes inside the cage
Editor's note: The video shows a real cage fight and if you're uncomfortable with the kind of aggression that characterises 'mixed martial arts' you may not want to click 'play' - SB. As a radio producer I think it's very healthy to make programmes that challenge one's own ingrained ideas. I ha...
RAJAR listening figures for Q3 2010
I missed the much-discussed phonecall yesterday about the three-monthly Rajar figures so I went looking for Alison Winter, the Radio 4 audiences guru. We found a quiet corner and whispered the headlines to and fro. It's all rather good - actually I think very good. So congratulations to the pro...
Severed Threads: From Downtown Manhattan to Suburban Minneapolis
Editor's note: radio drama rivals all other media as a source of innovation and adventurous story-telling technique. Fred Greenhalgh worked on a particularly adventurous example for the Afternoon Play slot at 1415 today. The video shows the recording of one scene on location in New York - SB Jo...
Analysis at forty
The BBC is famously good at marking anniversaries. Wars, coronations, Darwin's birth, 'Dad's Army.' So it is right that the fortieth anniversary of Radio Four's Analysis, which takes place this year, should be marked in some way. It was at 21:15 on Friday 10 April 1970 that the voice of the urba...
A History of the World in five minutes and eight seconds
Here it is, the final summation. The whole series: every single object, from Olduvai stone chopping tool to Solar-powered lamp and charger, via Paracas textile and Hawaiian feather helmet. It's a delirious tour of the history of made things. Made itself, to cap the broadcast series, by a highly ...
Radio 4 in Cheltenham and the Nick Clarke Award
Last week R4 was dominated by Chilean miners and Cheltenham chatterers. The most original take on the miners' story must go to Broadcasting House on Sunday which read from Edgar Allan Poe's tale about being buried alive. Further unintentional echoes reached me, in an item that moved me to tears,...
The hundredth object approaches
Without doubt, my highlight of the week will be going to the British Museum on Thursday as we reveal the last object in our series A History of the World in 100 Objects. The Radio 4 series has been a centrepiece of our radio programming over the last year and it is destined to be remembered as o...
More from the You & Yours archive
Editor's note: more quite haunting glimpses of our former selves from the You & Yours archive. We've now published all of the five episodes of the programme from the 1970s found in the archive. If you have a recording of an episode of You & Yours from that decade, please leave a comment to let u...
