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Episode details

Radio 4,11 May 2012,5 mins

Marriage Across the Sectarian Divide: Mabel and JD

The Listening Project

Available for over a year

Fi Glover presents Radio 4's series capturing the nation in conversation: in today's last visit Mabel and her son, JD, reflect on how an attack on their family during the sectarian troubles in Northern Ireland brought them to a new life in Reading. 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.

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