07/12/2014

Available for over a year

Fi Glover with conversations between men who have had help to get off the streets from The Connection at St Martin in the Fields, for which the Radio 4 Christmas Appeal raises money, a couple planning a collaborative writing project, and a mother and son who were both sent to boarding school. 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 learn more about The Listening Project by visiting bbc.co.uk/listeningproject Producer: Marya Burgess.