12 February 2005
Saturday 12 February 2005 22:30-23:00 (Radio 3)
Ian McMillan presents a special edition featuring writers Ali Smith and Paul Bailey in a dialogue about dialogue.
Programme Details
The Verb February 12th 2005
Broadcast 22.30 - 23.00
A special edition of the programme this week, devoted to dialogue. It has been said that all writing is dialogue, between the writer and the page, and the page and the reader. Some of the earliest writings in European literature are the Socratic dialogues - questioning, analytical conversations between Socrates and various interlocutors - recorded by Plato around 400 BC. Over two millennia later, our planet is soaked in long-distance dialogue, but, as novelists Paul Bailey and Ali Smith contend, in this week's Verb, the technology which allows this has also made our dialogues increasingly stretched and mediated, as if two texters or emailers communicate through interlocking monologues.
Ian McMillan invites Paul Bailey and Ali Smith to present a sample of their favourite moments of dialogue.
Paul chooses an extract from Charles Dickens' 'Little Dorrit' in which Mr Merdle asks for a pair of scissors...
Ali responds with an extract from the Marx Brothers 'Duck Soup'.
Paul nominates the famous balcony scene in Noel Coward's 'Private Lives'.
Ali selects a song in which there is only one singer, but, she says, two voices: Fred Astaire singing Irving Berlin's 'Cheek to Cheek'.
They finish with a discussion of Grace Paley, author and short story writer of genius, whose densely packed dialogues teem with life, humour and conflict.
The unsaid, the implied, the deliberately misunderstood, the anarchic, the comic and the disastrous: listen to The Verb's dialogue special at 22.30 or on 'listen again'
