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Episode details

Radio 4,28 Jun 2013,5 mins

Andy and Fran - What Makes Us Who We Are

The Listening Project

Available for over a year

Fran knows that her husband Andy was adopted, but they've never really spoken about how he feels about it. Fi Glover introduces a conversation in which she finally finds out, in the series that proves it's surprising what you hear when you listen. 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. Most of the unedited 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 Producer: Marya Burgess.

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