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Episode details

Radio 4,28 Dec 2012,5 mins

Diane and Michael: Man's Best Friend

The Listening Project

Available for over a year

Fi Glover presents a conversation between a father and daughter Radio 4's series that proves it's surprising what you hear when you listen. Michael is devoted to his Border Collie and Diane wonders whether perhaps he prefers his dog to his daughter. The Listening Project is a Radio 4 initiative that offers 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 and used 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.

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