Programme Details

"A spectre is haunting humanity, the spectre of fear", writes historian Joanna Bourke in the introduction to her new book Fear: A Cultural History.  "Death stares unblinkingly at us. Danger dallies in everyday situations" .

In tonight's Night Waves Philip Dodd talks to Joanna Bourke about her cultural history of fear which explores the extraordinary scope of our fears, from terrorist threat, natural disaster and war, to Madness, illness and the bizarre spectrum of phobias - anything from agoraphobia to the terror of being buried alive. How useful is fear? How deeply engrained is it in the human condition? And how does a historian set about imagining the fears of previous generations?
Joanna Bourke discusses this most basic and powerful of human emotions live in tonight's Night Waves.

As part of Comic Relief's campaign to raise awareness of the issues of elder abuse in this country, playwright Lucy Gannon has written a new drama for BBC television. Dad, starring Richard Briers, Kevin Whately, Sinead Cussack and Jean Heywood, is the story of an elderly couple and their changing relationship with their son as the his mother slips deep into the dark world of Alzheimer's. Night Waves reviews the drama and considers the plight of the elderly in our society and how television and the cinema cover such big social problems.

Also on the programme: Chris Dark reports from the Berlin film festival on a controversial new film which dares consider the personal life of the late French PresidentFrancois Mitterand.

And the writer Suketu Mehta offers a personal letter from Bombay - the Indian city now reborn as Mumbai and which is rapidly becoming one of the biggest cities on earth with a worryingly divided population.

Night Waves, with Philip Dodd, live at 9.30pm.




Presenter: Philip Dodd
Producer: Anthony Denselow





Additional Information:

Fear: A Cultural History by Joanna Bourke is published by Virago Press
Dad : on BBC 1 24th February at 8pm.