BBC Make it Digital season - Radio

Published: 8 September 2015

Woman’s Hour – 7-11 September

All week Woman's Hour will be interviewing women who are using digital skills to do innovative, creative, exciting work in a wide range of business and creative industries.

BBC Make it Digital Ones to Watch – from 9 September

A new programme and digital influencer list in partnership with BBC Radio 5Live - BBC Make it Digital Ones to Watch - with a judging panel that includes Maggie Philbin, CEO of TeenTech and former Tomorrow’s World presenter; Emma Mulqueeny, founder and CEO of Rewired State; Phil Smith, CEO of Cisco and Chair of the Tech Partnership; and BBC Technology Correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones. The initiative will launch on BBC Radio 5Live at 3pm on Thursday 10September, with nominations for BBC Make it Digital Ones to watch starting on Thursday 17 September.

Across the eight-week series we will feature a range of different digital disciplines from gaming and dating to artificial intelligence and national security. BBC Make It Digital on BBC Radio 5Live can be heard as part of Afternoon Edition, each Thursday afternoon at 1500 from 10 September. The series begins in the shadow of Colossus, the first large scale electronic computer, at the National Museum of Computing. There we will talk to graduates of a ground-breaking free coding class. And presenter Michael Rundle (from WIRED.co.uk) will report on digital innovation and creativity for BBC Radio 5Live’s Afternoon Edition.

The Museum of Curiosity: Coding Special – 10 September, 6.30pm to 7pm

BBC Radio 4’s The Museum of Curiosity: Coding Special sees John Lloyd and Sarah Millican find out about computing with comedian and mathematician, Matt Parker; computer pioneer, Eben Upton; and illustrator and writer, Sydney Padua.

This week, the Museum's Steering Committee discusses computers made with dominoes, praises the mother of all computer programs and reveals that the first computer bug was actually a moth.

4 Extra at Bletchley Park – 12 September, 9am to -12pm

4 Extra at Bletchley Park will mark the BBC Make it Digital season with a three-hour broadcast from Bletchley Park, the birthplace of the world's first electronic computer. Maggie Philbin unearths some gems from the BBC sound archive that tell the remarkable story of IT and how one of the most important evolutions of modern history is also a reflection on us as human beings.

When Maggie Philbin joined the BBC's Tomorrow's World team in the early 1980s, there wasn't a single computer in the office. Today, along with the internet, they have come to reshape the way we live, work, communicate and play.

Joining Maggie at Bletchley Park to shed their own insight into the archive and this journey along the information superhighway are three denizens of the digital world: Aleks Krotoski, author of Untangling the Web; Tom Chatfield, author of Netymology; and Chris Monk from the National Museum of Computing.

Maggie also gets to peak behind the scenes at Bletchley Park with Michael Smith, the author of the Secrets of Station X, and Joel Greenburg, the author of Gordon Welchman: Bletchley Park Architect of Ultra Intelligence, to find out how the Buckinghamshire site could have been the UK's very own Silicon Valley.

Desert Island Discs Revisited: BBC Make it Digital -– from 13 September

Desert Island Discs Revisited: BBC Make it Digital on Radio 4 Extra features dot-com millionaire and businesswoman Baroness Martha Lane Fox, Dame Wendy Hall one of the world’s leading computer scientists and tech entrepreneur Dame Stephanie Shirley.

The Turing Solution – 14 September

The Turing Solution on BBC Radio 4 is an exploration in to the life and times of Alan Turing, famous for his key role in breaking German codes in World War II. But for mathematicians, his great work was on the invention of the computer.

The Letters of Ada Lovelace – 14 September

Radio 4’s The Letters of Ada Lovelace, brings to life the intense intellectual and emotional world of the computing pioneer Ada Lovelace through a dramatisation of her correspondence.

The series features letters to the young Ada from her absent father, Lord Byron; letters from Ada revealing her sharp intellect, vivid imagination, and manic depression; and letters to and from her mother who, concerned that Ada might inherit her father’s feckless and ‘dangerous’ poetic tendencies, tutored her thoroughly in mathematics.

In her correspondence with her great friend and mentor, Charles Babbage, she spotted the great potential of his new ‘Analytical Engine’, suggesting that it could be used for much more than just adding and subtracting – ‘for music and art perhaps’. Ada Lovelace grasped just how many problems – and not only mathematical ones – could be solved by rigorous, logical analysis. In so doing, she anticipated the birth of computer science.

Computing Britain – 14-25 September

In Computing Britain on Radio 4 Hannah Fry looks back at 75 years of computing history, to reveal the UK's lead role in developing the technology we rely on today. In the first episode, she travels back to the 1940s, to hear the incredible story of the invention, in Britain, of the computer memory.

Three teams from across the country - in Teddington, Manchester and Cambridge - were tasked with designing automatic calculating engines for university research. But which team would be first to crack the tricky problem of machine memory?

Meanwhile, tabloid headlines proclaimed that engineers were building 'electronic brains' that could match, and maybe even surpass, the human brain, starting a debate about artificial intelligence which still resonates today.

Noreen Khan Show – 15-17 September

On Tuesday, the man in the know, James O'Malley, joins Noreen to talk about all the latest technology news and answer any questions you may have!

Mark Turpin, CEO of the YouTube network Yogscast will be joining Noreen live in studio on Wednesday as part of BBC Make it Digital. Yogscast have over 20 million collective subscribers with 5 billion views on Youtube! Yogcast has many podcasts and their own Minecraft book ‘The Diggy Diggy Book’.

On Thursday female tech expert Shivvy Jervis - the Creator and Host of Digital Futures - will be joining Noreen to talk about digital technology. Her YouTube channel demystifies riveting future technologies & fires up meaningful debate.

The Infinite Monkey Cage: Secret Science – 16 September

Also on Radio 4 Extra The Infinite Monkey Cage: Secret Science, with Robin Ince and Brian Cox. Robin and Brian are joined on stage by comedian Dave Gorman; author and Enigma Machine owner Simon Singh; and Bletchley Park enthusiast Dr Sue Black. They discuss secret science, code-breaking and the extraordinary achievements of the team working at Bletchley during WWII.