The Listening Project Live

Available for over a year

From the Booth parked on the historic walls of Derry/Londonderry, Fi Glover talks to best-selling author, Brian McGilloway, about the Irish facility with words and the lyricism of the conversations gathered in Ulster. She meets Victor and Finola, who had one of those conversations, and listens again to The Key of Heaven. And she meets members of the Verbal Arts Centre, who are hosting the Booth's visit. 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.