Shared Paternity: Ray and Joan

Fi Glover presents Radio 4's series capturing the nation in conversation: in today's last visit Joan and Ray reflect on their widely differing relationships with their late father. Although in his final years their Dad lived just round the corner from Ray, he never met him. But getting to know his half-sister, Joan, has brought the father he never knew into his life for the first time.

The Listening Project is a new initiative for Radio 4 that aims to offer a snapshot of contemporary Britain in which people across the UK volunteer to have a conversation with someone close to them about a subject they've never discussed intimately before. The conversations are being gathered across the UK by teams of producers from local and national radio stations who facilitate each encounter. Every conversation - they're not BBC interviews, and that's an important difference - lasts up to an hour, and is then edited to extract the key moment of connection between the participants. Many of the long conversations are being archived by the British Library which they will use to build up a collection of voices capturing a unique portrait of the UK in the second decade of the millennium. You can upload your own conversations or just learn more about The Listening Project by visiting bbc.co.uk/listeningproject

Producer Marya Burgess.