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2016-09-08T14:25:47+00:00

Radio 4 has an enormous archive of permanently available programmes just waiting to be discovered. While some of these are well known ongoing programmes, many are in short series or one-off documentaries that are difficult to find.

With programme subjects as diverse as Neptune, barn owls, the Russian revolution, Gothic art, Wittgenstein and time travel it wasn’t easy to find a way of grouping them together to make them easier to find that didn’t involve spending lots of time searching the archive that we’d rather have devoted to programme making.

Our colleagues in news and sport were using linked data to arrange their content and we decided to try the same, using the properties of that data which had already been created elsewhere to provide the connections. We found the links that came from Wikipedia categories were really interesting, with topics such as evolutionary psychology, philosophers of science and astronomical objects known since antiquity alongside the more obvious ones, which we simply couldn’t have added manually ourselves.

We ran a trial of using linked data using Wikipedia categories on In Our Time because it covers such a broad range of subjects including people, places, events and philosophical concepts. This trial beta site got a rating of 4.15 stars (out of 5) on BBC Taster and we received hundreds of helpful comments from the form. We’ve taken that into and are now starting to introduce this new way of browsing programme by programme, starting with a small handful, including In our Time of course, and gradually adding more over the coming months.

What will this new linked data content look like?

For programmes like this one on Margot Fonteyn you should see a list of topics below the description of the programme, and up to three recommended programmes with a link to the topic which connects them.

Following these links you can either go to the related programme, or to the topic page which will show you all of the programmes under that brand on the same topic. There are also aggregation pages such as this one for Cosmopolitan animals which are not restricted to a single brand, and will allow you to see all of the available content.

Of course, you’ll still be able to navigate by date and A-Z where available, but we hope you’ll enjoy exploring these new connections too.

2014-11-24T11:47:06+00:00

Back in October we asked for your suggestions about what you’d like to hear on Woman’s Hour, In Our Time and Saturday Live. Listener Week starts on Monday, 24 November and runs until 29 Saturday. There’s been a brilliant response and we’re grateful for all your ideas – we certainly couldn’t have predicted all of them.
In Our Time had an overwhelming response, with almost a thousand on topics ranging from the history of belly dancing to the Hanseatic League (me neither) but which subject will be picked? Melvyn will announce ‘the chosen one’ on the Today programme on Thursday morning (27 November).
Saturday Live’s inbox ranged from the importance of your allotment to what belonging to a trade union means to you, and even an invitation to one woman’s walk around Wales. But this Saturday, the programme will hear from an extraordinary Derbyshire community who came together to renovate their own town centre. Plus, a listener who’s written a series of stories about things he got up to when he was a kid and never told his mum:
Woman’s Hour is dedicating the entire week to the topics its audience wanted to explore. If you find something tedious, don’t complain to me or Jenni…every single item will have been suggested by a listener including: whether 50:50 shared care works as well for the child as the parent, staying fit above the age of fifty (tip: I fear it may involve a certain amount of exercise and moderation in all things you might enjoy) and why anyone would choose to be a social worker. And throughout the week, you, the listeners, will give advice on other listeners’ problems, including one who asks ‘Do I get back in touch with my ex?’ (where do I begin?). I’ll start the week with a listener who wants to discuss her husband’s addiction to pornography and its impact on their marriage
Of course, we would be nothing without our listeners and your input, no matter what the programme. Please don’t stop giving us ideas and inspiration. We’re always here so if you fancy getting in touch any time of the year for Woman’s Hour, In Our Time and Saturday Live, just click on the links below. The 21st century has its knockers, but one of the best things about it has got to be the wonderful opportunities we have to interact with and respond to you. Thank you. And we don’t even mind if you complain. Much.

Jane Garvey is a presenter on Woman's Hour

Woman's Hour on Twitter - @bbcwomanshour
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Saturday Live on Twitter #bbcsaturdaylive
Send an email to Saturday Live
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2014-06-23T09:11:20+00:00

Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed the philosophy of solitude. As always the programme is available to listen online or to and keep

Hello

Just before the programme started, I said to our three contributors that each one of them could have done the entire programme single-handedly. They were a philosophical troika of formidable qualifications. Three professors and between them many books considered seminal.

And so we attempted to do one of our Grand Nationals. From Plato, we hoped, right up to the present day talking about solitude. We didn’t get to the present day. We spent more time than I thought we would on hermits and anchorites, which left me feeling that perhaps the whole programme could have been devoted to them and that would have been no bad thing. We didn’t get to Kant and Hegel, which was a titanic contest. But the thing about these gallops is that it frisks up the minds of those taking part and, I hope, entertains you. Now and then, a survey of the whole territory is also helpful for Tom Morris and myself in deciding what we can pluck out for deeper study next time. Nevertheless, I felt that we had bitten off a little bit too much.

But of course the reaction afterwards from the three contributors was that we had not bitten off enough! They said we had not done this or that or the other. It’s called lose-lose.

Tom Morris had his tail up this morning; very, very good news indeed about the In Our Time podcast, with the number of s up by 60% in a single month. Lovely e-mail directly after the programme from Piers Plowright, a friend, but even so. He used to be a star producer for Radio 3 and is a man of total integrity. I should know, I was Trinculo to his Caliban and how much closer could you get to anyone">Twitter and Facebook

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2014-06-13T12:37:26+00:00

Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed Robert Boyle. As always the programme is available to listen online or to and keep

Hello

There was a substratum of extra pleasure in this morning’s programme for me. Robert Boyle cascaded into Oxford in the 1650s and was snapped up by the Warden of Wadham College – Wilkins. As it happens, I went to Wadham College about 300 years later to read history. When I was there I didn’t take much notice of what had been happening in the gardens 300 years ago. The gardens were splendid enough for the present. There was a totally magnificent, listed copper oak in the corner of one of the gardens. As big as a dome. Unfortunately, it got the tree equivalent of total dry rot and wet rot and had to be chopped down. I rescued a small log. There were also little boxed-in areas where we could do plays and plenty of benches to sit on and pretend we were being studious, when we were just dopily gazing around at the trees and the honeyed walls and feeling – Good God, I’m in Oxford!

That was many moons ago. But I went back to make a film and do a radio programme when I was doing something about the beginnings of modern science, and it wasn’t difficult to imagine Christopher Wren and Wilkins and Hooke and Willis and Boyle himself in the gardens, making observations, putting up eccentric inventions, and to a certain extent self-consciously – but moved by the zeitgeist – coalescing into a group which would become the Royal Society in 1660.

I went on after the programme with Simon Schaffer to do what will become another series, produced by James Cook who used to produce In Our Time. It’s to do with the history of ideas, and we did what began as a pilot but ended up as a transmittable programme, just down the road at a studio the BBC hires for some of these occasions. Meanwhile, Tom Morris, our producer, went off to Lord’s to see the Test. So far, so very characteristic!

It’s been one of those good weeks. Last night there was the first night of Romeo and Juliet (Prokofiev) with Tamara Rojo and Carlos Acosta in the Albert Hall. It is strange to see such an intimate ballet produced in a space as big as a piazza in Siena. But there it was and the dancing of those two, and indeed of all the main characters, was extraordinary. But let’s stick to those two. Tamara Rojo and Carlos Acosta were dancing this for a very short season and for the last time, and that gave it a sense of history, in its own way as resonant as the idea of Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren and Wilkins and Hooke being round the corner, behind the chapel in Wadham College gardens.

And roving the streets and going to a studio to do an interview about Dennis Potter for Radio 3, and trying to think how I’d answer a very generous letter from a listener in Israel about the Talmud. And wandering through London down to the Lords on a sunny afternoon. It’s not the Lakes, but it’s not nothing. Trafalgar Square seized in a polyglot way which would have been unimaginable just a generation ago. I miss the pigeons. I have very good photographs of my children when small, crouched, with cupped hands holding a few pigeon beans, and the pigeons delicately pecking away. But I suppose progress is sometimes cleaning up the store. Down past Downing Street. The Ukrainian flags, only three of them now, leaning disconsolately against the railings. There were many more in recent weeks and great chants used to go up. I’m always impressed and rather touched that people from almost every country in the world think that by standing across the road from 10 Downing Street and shouting they can convey a message to the Prime Minister. I mean it. I am indeed impressed. Impressed for them and impressed for us.

And so tonight to a wrap party. We’ve just about finished making three series for Sky Arts, and tonight we will resort to a cheap and cheerful restaurant nearby and toast each other’s health and programme-making prosperity.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

PS: Just walked through Trafalgar Square. The Brazilians have taken over. There was a bandstand and they were tuning up there. Tents selling various Brazilian delicacies and goodies. Tons of people in the yellow strip of Brazil, no less prominent for the fact that the London security chaps are wearing yellow jerkins. They’ll all mix in together before the night’s over. Compared with when I first came here, London is so wonderfully unbuttoned and all the better for it.

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2014-05-16T10:51:33+00:00

Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed photosynthesis. As always the programme is available to listen to online or to and keep

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss photosynthesis.

Hello

A couple of things from the conversation after the programme. I think it was John Allen who said that the United States aerospace industry is giving quite substantial to research into photosynthesis. The reason that NASA is interested is because they are looking for ways in which they can identify on the surface of planets what may be the origins of life as we know it. Seems a terrifically oblique way to subsidise science, but in my view, the more oblique the better. John ended the programme with a wonderful quotation from Priestley about the practical discovery of photosynthesis. It was, he said, as a result of Priestley’s curiosity. All of Priestley’s research was curiosity-driven. Again and again research has been curiosity-driven.

I’ve picked up from academics over the past few years a feeling, sometimes of sadness, sometimes approaching despair, that that sort of research – i.e. intellectual curiosity, knowledge for the sake of knowledge – is not in favour at the moment. Why on earth have we become a box-ticking, bureaucratic, over-managed society wherever you look? Why don’t we follow the talent, instead of (as in the case of universities and elsewhere) driving the talent out because of ways of managing which only make sense in some sterile boardroom, in some godforsaken place inside the M25? Answers on a postcard.

Okay, what next? Well, I’m going to the annual conference of the Reader Organisation at the British Library this afternoon, run by Jane Davis who’s established a substantial centre for readers in Liverpool, and this is a day where I’ll be talking on the theme of dementia in fiction. In between trying to walk carefully through sunny London. Carefully, after a sedative yesterday for the yanking out of back teeth in upper jaw right, which has left me feeling sore and groggy and … what was the subject we talked about this morning">Facebook

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2014-04-11T15:14:15+00:00

Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed Strabo's Geographica. As always the programme is available to listen to online or to and keep

Hello

It’s still rather a mystery why Strabo was not picked up more frequently before the sixteenth century. Perhaps geography didn’t penetrate the consciousness of Europe until post-Renaissance times. Certainly it was not as useful as the work of Galen and Ptolemy in medicine and astronomy. Nevertheless, it was a vast enterprise and it survived complete, and so it still could be said to be rather strange that it was not taken up with more fervour.

After the programme, to the office to attack the pile of e-mails and prepare for filming with Daniel Radcliffe in New York in a couple of weeks’ time. Then lunch with an old pal and commentary on the Kate Atkinson film which we’re putting out on The South Bank Show in a month or two’s time, and then to the Cinema Museum just outside the Elephant & Castle where I did various links for various new arts programmes. The Cinema Museum is extraordinary. It’s tucked away in a Victorian building and around has the air of a neglected, if not even abandoned, place. Inside it is stuffed to the rafters (there are rafters) with what could best be described as a cinema fanatic’s dreamland. Posters, postcards, old cameras, tripods, pieces from this or that film, collections, DVDs, books, etc, etc. The higgledy-piggledyness of the arrangement (the organisers will probably and justifiably rise up against that description and point out the deep order inside the apparent disorder) adds to the feeling of discovery or discoveries. There’s so much to see. And yet there’s a sadness in the photographs. Those rose-tinted, Hollywood stars of the Thirties and Forties. The posters, which like so many theatre and film posters, started off as quick ads and ended up as something approaching works of art. They say so strikingly that this was young and vibrant and new and now it’s gone completely. But it is a place to see.

Now on my way to Euston station to catch a train to the deep North to breathe the clean, pure air of the Lake District and stride across rain-soaked fells in a high wind. What could possibly be better">Facebook

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2014-04-04T12:15:01+00:00

In Our Time: States of Matter

One of the things about broadcasting is that you feel hungry when you’ve finished. Especially after a live programme.

It’s odd because you haven’t done anything particularly strenuous. It’s the same enigma that governs the feeling of tiredness after merely sitting for a few hours at a desk, scribbling away.

But what I had to eat after this morning’s programme, or rather before that, after the Today programme trail, was a good dollop of humble pie.

John Humphrys is so fast-witted and such a sport that it’s great fun trying to get a rise out of him, despite the fact that I have never succeeded in, as it were, beating him to the punch.

This time, talking about the states of matter – solids, liquids and gases – I intimated (no, let’s be clear about this), I said that Today was good and solid, tea-dependent on liquid, but was rather over-abundantly full of gas.

I know I shouldn’t make jokes. I’m no good at them. That was not only a rotten joke, it was wrong.

I would have no talent to keep up the clipped, precision pace of the Today presenters, as they range over the world from 6 to 9am. But of course, John, as usual, had that extra cylinder and put me down with a beautifully murmured "you are too kind". Ouch.

Physicists are widely regarded as the cleverest of people.

Again what struck me this morning was their heroic attempt to make things which are on the far edge of knowledge, and as arcane as alchemy, clear to me and, I hope, thereby to many of you.

The thing that strikes me as extraordinary about the top scientists we have on, and it was fully in evidence this morning, is that they are doing work for the love of doing the work, i.e. thinking about thinking for the sake of thinking, and yet now and then there’s a twinkle which says this might turn out to change the entire world of communications, or technology, or manufacturing, or whatever.

And so it will. The gap between discoveries in universities and developments in industry is closing, and it’s these people who, in a rather bewildered way, I sometimes feel, are at the centre of what we are now in – the full rush of the knowledge industry. And yet, paradoxically, they can only stay at the centre by ignoring the fact that they are part of any industry.

And so – London. A couple of days ago I walked from my house in North London to Lambeth Bridge to talk to David Puttnam.

About an hour and a half in fantastic sunshine, through three parks – Primrose Hill, up the hill (a test of puff), and then looking over London, a Dick Whittington moment (although he was two or three hills away to the east).

Then cutting a swathe through the grandeur of Regent’s Park, down Regent Street itself and into the magnificent congestion of St James’s Park, with rugby teams of young children completely blocking the path, but eventually being polite enough for the rest of us who would rather go forward than stand still all day (or, come to think of it, they might have the right idea).

And this on a morning for which our mighty meteorologists had predicted Saharan sandstorms sweeping up the Thames. The Thames sparkled. The white daffodils in St James’s Park looked white. The sky was blue. The sun shone brightly.

I am so pleased that they know what the weather will be like in a hundred years' time. Now and then you feel that tomorrow would be handy.

Rather too much going on in television, with many new programmes and repercussions from Tony Hall’s fanfare for the BBC’s New Deal on the arts, and … even though I sit at a telephone some distance away, I can hear the accretion of impatience from Ingrid, who types these missives …

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

In Our Time: States of Matter

2014-03-28T17:09:11+00:00

Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed Weber's The Protestant Ethic. As always the programme is available to listen to online or to and keep

Hello,

After a bracing fifteen minutes with Farming Today, I look forward to who is going to be introducing the Today programme. When it’s John (Humphrys), with whom for reasons deep in mystery I seem to have formed a special relationship (rather like that between the USA and the UK), I have to think of something that will somehow tease out a laugh. There are not many laughs in the works of Max Weber. So it was quite a long haul between six o’clock and about ten past seven before I thought of a way of doing it. Then when I came in, I road-tested it on the keen, cutting mind of Tom Morris and I got the green flag. So then came the delivery, which could have been a disaster this morning because I scribbled the last bit in my own handwriting (not very legible at the best of times), and in the rehearsal read “this morning’s hangover” instead of “this morning’s handover”. It got a laugh from the control in the rehearsal, but those actions are impossible to repeat unless you’re an actor.

All three contributors this morning were first-timers, but you couldn’t tell, could you? Partly because they are so accomplished at talking about their own subject, and partly, I think, they know the programme and sail in, well prepared for the attempt to put quarts into thimbles.

After that, back north to the dentist. Not much fun. The instruments they use are okay, given that they regard your teeth as a sort of quarry. It’s the noises the instruments make that are more than a little worrying. At one stage there was the suggestion of a small anaesthetic. Easy to turn down. Fifteen seconds or twenty seconds of pain is a snip compared with walking around feeling as if you have a wad of bubble on your gum for the rest of the day.

Then I walked into town which took about an hour and a half. What a great walk. Down into Primrose Hill, over Primrose Hill itself, looking across the city full of mists, and then into Regent’s Park, for which I get more affection the more I walk in it. Even when the gardens are out of flower they still have an English magnificence about them. Then down the full length of an extremely busy Regent Street and into the best bargain brasserie and most stylish restaurant room in London. Lunch with a friend of mine whom I met on my first day at university. Been friends ever since and have these regular, non-agenda lunches.

Then up to the cutting rooms to watch the beginning of some short films we’re making, and then … I can feel Ingrid’s impatience.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

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2014-03-21T15:51:20+00:00

Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed Bishop Berkeley. As always the programme is available to listen to online or to and keep

Hello

I think I’m a bit stumped. Tom Morris, the producer of In Our Time, and myself hatched the idea that we would leave the microphones open after programmes, because some of the chat afterwards (technical term for deconstruction) might be of interest to our listeners, and Tom would affix it to the podcast as a footnote. We slipped it in this week without any publicity and we’ll see what the reaction is after a few months.

The reason I’m stumped is that this 10 minute chat after the programme as often as not forms the basis of what I report in this newsletter. So where do I go from here? I sense a philosophical problem coming on. One of the first tweets we got, as the programme this morning proceeded on its philosophical journey, was: “If nobody listens to In Our Time, does it still exist?” Beats me.

One question I did ask in the aftermath, of Peter Millican, was how would he describe an idea? I’d liked to have gone on and said what did it look like? How did it arrive at the idea of being an idea? And how did we distinguish it from a sensation? I never got round to that.

I tend to take what they say of what we missed out as almost a personal reproach, although most of them are sensible enough and sporting enough to know that in 42 minutes you can only deliver 42 minutes’ worth of information and not 4 hours’ worth of information. On reflection, I don’t know what I’m worrying about. I always have far more material than I can use in this newsletter, and half of what I write about happens outside the studio in any case.

Afterwards I went to talk to Gwyneth Williams, who runs the channel, and found around her open-plan office a nest of creative talent which would be hard to meet in any other radio outfit.

On then to the office and the usual e-mails and interviewed by a 12-year-old, the son of a friend of mine, who is doing a project at school and asked some horribly difficult questions about the state of the world. When asked what he should be thinking about, I said, truthfully, “getting out and enjoying yourself and running around” and continued in that vein. I felt extremely frivolous. The New Seriousness is coming up on the outside very fast.

Off to lunch with an old pal who is one of the cleverest people I know. He did a brilliant but bleak anatomy of the effect of mega-money on London, of which, perhaps, more later.

After lunch found time to go for a brisk walk in Green Park. Just outside the park in Piccadilly was a group of people with whistles and megaphones, shouting very loudly but in a good, strong rhythm, to ‘Save the Dolphins’. It’s still very touching that people who want to save anything, preserve anything, overthrow anything or release anybody come to London to speed on their cause.

In St James’s Park just time to see the cherry blossom in fullest bloom, the daffodils in fullest trumpeting form and a little snow beginning to fall.

The Lords were debating the level of unemployment in the United Kingdom. And after I’ve finished this dictation I’ll be meeting Tom Morris to have a cup of tea and discuss what we might put in the next eight programmes. He’s told me he’s coming in a dinner jacket.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

PS Tom and I had a cup of tea and a piece of fruitcake.

PPS A snippet to report from a cab journey. The Polish driver told me that as a young man in Poland he avidly listened to the BBC World Service, and what a difference it made to his life. He wrote seven letters addressed to ‘BBC, Bush House, London’ and every one was answered! “But now it is gone”, he said ruefully.

Bush House

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2014-03-13T15:23:45+00:00

Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed the Trinity. As always the programme is available to listen to online or to and keep

Hello

The idea of the Trinity is quite extraordinary. Outside physics it must be the best pursued conundrum in and about the universe. So easy to mock. Yet, again and again, we have to come back to the reality of the intellectual parameters of earlier times. These people were every bit as clever as we are and in some cases much, much cleverer. But they could only operate in the world that was given to them. They were given the Old and the New Testament in the Western world, and what ingenuity and convolutions and speculations and complications and riddles they saw in that or made of that. But the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost – three in one and one in three – is probably the most beguiling of all. I hope the programme in some way illuminated it.

The number 3, as I tried mildly to introduce, has a powerful connotation. Conception is three in one and one in three. Pythagoras said the number 3 was perfect because it had a beginning, a middle and an end. There were the three Furies. There was the three-headed Cerberus … oh dear, I’m drifting into irreverence and starting to think of The Three Stooges and The Three Musketeers.

So move on to glorious, sunny days in London and up in the Lake District, where I’ve been for the Words by the Water literary festival. Wonderful to listen to Pat Barker and so many others in the lovely little theatre by the lake. To walk by the shores of the lake, with the wind lapping the overfull Derwentwater so hard that it was like being on a seashore (where does the word ‘lapping’ come from?).

Back in London in St James’s Park the cherry blossom is fiercely out now, while up on Hampstead Heath there were congregations (if that is the right word) on Wednesday morning of numerous Muslim men in semicircles around a teacher, or at least spokesman, who was instructing them or debating with them because often two or three people were speaking at the same time. It’s the first time I’ve seen these open air religious groups (if they indeed were religious and not political) on Hampstead Heath. A place made for it.

Went across to York to talk to Kate Atkinson, and walked through York late at night and early in the morning and wondered how anyone born there could ever bear to leave it. It’s such a convincingly medieval city which has not lost itself, even from Roman times, but still operates as a contemporary city.

Enough of treats. Back to London, but what’s waiting? Sunshine? Something’s wrong with the world, surely? It’s only March.

Ukrainians are demonstrating outside 10 Downing Street. The pavements around Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament have ceased to be useful as crocodiles (of the schoolchild variety) no longer inhabit London. They’ve been replaced by mass movement which shifts lone rangers on to the road.

After the programme I’ll be going to Westminster Abbey where Sir David Frost is being memorialised with full honours. Clichés are often useful. A nicer man than David you could never meet.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

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2014-03-07T17:24:06+00:00

Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed Spartacus. As always the programme is available to listen to online or to and keep

Hello,

As we were doing Spartacus this morning, Tom Morris, the producer, was spotting tweets coming in, many of which said “I’m Spartacus”. For those of you who don’t know, this was a scene towards the end of Stanley Kubrick’s film when all Kirk Douglas’s gladiatorial comrades adopted his name to protect him, and I suppose to put themselves in the same boat. Anyway, it seems to have caught on with tweeters UK. Pity we hadn’t time to mention the ballet by Khachaturian.

I think this is going to be a bits and pieces (who wrote that song?) newsletter.

Mary Beard told me after the programme that Crassus (he who said that no man can count himself rich unless he can afford a private army), the one who finally defeated Spartacus, had taken on the Parthians and himself been defeated. His head was severed and later used as a prop in a performance of The Bacchae at the Parthian court. A story like that is what I think, perhaps many of us think, classical historians are for.

The business of gladiators being killed in the arena and a great flurry of thumbs down going on seems to be ill-founded. Put simply, gladiators were very expensive. They were an investment. Their owners did not like them to be killed and therefore, of course, as privileged, rich and wealthy owners do, they fixed things so that they got what they wanted. So in the end gladiators were as much for show as for dead meat.

There was a discussion about whether Spartacus’s wife could possibly have spent time with him in the gladiatorial school, i.e. lived with him. She certainly seems to have been there when he was bought as a gladiator in the first place.

Curious how we seem to like men fighting each other or lions, bare-topped, shouted on by crowds. But it wasn’t long ago that much the same thing happened around these parts, is it? Crowds at hangings, crowds at bear fights, crowds at executions, women knitting as the guillotine fell. How much would it take for it to come back">Facebook

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2014-02-28T17:22:28+00:00

Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed the eye. As always the programme is available to listen to online or to and keep.

We were told that children learn to see by touch. So they begin by holding objects before they see and can discern objects. The blind child who regained his sight could not distinguish shapes and objects. For instance, he couldn’t distinguish between a dog and a cat until he picked up the cat and found that it was furry. On the other hand, the experiments are still going on with totally blind people. The evidence so far has come from children who were blinded by cataracts and had a tiny bit of sight or had gone blind. What happens with people who have been blind from birth">Facebook

2014-02-21T13:14:59+00:00

Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed Social Darwinism. As always the programme is available to listen to online or to and keep.

Hello,

It’s a pity we didn’t have time to go into the application of eugenics in Communist countries. Adam Kuper at least flagged up China, but there’s an awful lot to be said about Russia. Perhaps another programme? And perhaps in that next programme we can talk about the submerged but persistent hints of eugenic solutions around the “civilised” world today. I have a feeling that some people still are of the opinion that the best route for the weak is to send them to the wall. But there is no theory of any conviction or dignity whatsoever to it.
Been doing as much walking as possible on Hampstead Heath. Once in a high storm which really did have a go to topple me, which was what I deserved for being so stupid as to go out on a day like that. But often surprisingly balmy and stunningly lovely. I do like the Hampstead Heath vigilantes – those who make it half their lifetime’s study and activity to keep it at its best and make sure that any changes are for the better. There is a mighty controversy going on about the idea of banking up the sides of the men’s swimming pool.

Went to see an old film by my friend Christopher Miles the other day – The Clandestine Marriage by George Colman. 18th century farce. It’s curious how those silly, artificial plots drag you in. Will this nobleman marry the penniless, beautiful daughter or the not-so-beautiful, grasping daughter? And who is going to tell the nouveau riche landowner that his prize sale (i.e. daughter) is pregnant by a mere person who works inside the Big House? But it was real fun.
Now off to lunch on St Pancras station with a friend of mine whom I met in my first week at university, and he’s now resident in Africa so I will get all the gossip from Togo. Then hopping on a train to Leicester to talk to Rob Coles, whose recent book on Orwell got deservedly first-rate reviews. I think I finally get back to London at 11.10pm.
But St Pancras is now such an extraordinary place from the sad, even seedy, almost deserted, about to be demolished, once-it-was-so-wonderful-and-Betjeman-loved-it station I from about forty years ago, when I used to train up to Derby to see the late Phillip Whitehead. London is being transformed in a quite extraordinary way. Where will it end">Facebook

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2014-02-14T12:45:49+00:00

Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed Chivalry. As always the programme is available to listen to online or to and keep.

Hello,
I was walking down to the House of Lords a couple of days ago and above that grand building – officially the Palace of Westminster – there curved a double rainbow. I can’t think when last I saw a double rainbow, if ever. And, of course, up pops Wordsworth: “My heart leaps up when I behold/A rainbow in the sky:/So was it when my life began;/So is it now I am a man;/So be it when I shall grow old,/Or let me die!” And so into a very powerful debate across the spectrum on immigration.
London ought to be a washout but it isn’t. People stoically bend their heads into the howling winds. Water sluices everywhere, but people still make every effort to get into work, despite rather powerful obstacles – only one of them, the Tube strike – being put in their way. The sky is playing peculiar tricks which would have driven Constable mad. Heavy, very laden rain clouds outpouring their matter, and then, literally a few minutes later, as blue as a Provencal summer day and quite warm with it.
After the programme one of the contributors listened intently to her mobile and announced: “My Pilates teacher thought it was very good”.
Laura Ashe pointed out that the constant injunctions to the chivalric knights not to rape women meant, in her view, that raping women was what they got up to too often, which is why the injunction was repeated so often.
I was keen to bring in the idea that these great codes might be taken notice of more in the breach than the observance. It was not only the Black Prince who killed prisoners, and Henry V, but the great warrior of them all in the 13th century, King Edward III, who raised the dragon’s flag which signalled that all prisoners should be killed.
I think it was Matthew Strickland who pointed out that although courtly love tended to be extramarital, and the general pattern seems to have been that you loved somebody who was already married (see Arthurian legends), nevertheless an adulterous relationship in the 11th century could lead to quite a nasty conclusion. Philip of Flanders, for instance, caught a man who was at his wife, and after the man was beaten he was suspended over a privy until the smell drugged him to death. Another adulterer was impaled rather nastily, even beyond the dreams of The Wolf of Wall Street.
By the way, the word ‘chivalry’ comes from the French word ‘chevalier’ (meaning knight) and ‘chevalerie’ (knightly behaviour) and ‘cheval’, of course, means a horse. Which brings us to the hackney cab. In another of my rare outings with the hackney, I this time came across a man who had relatives in the Thames Valley, and he put forward the proposition that instead of giving 13 billion pounds to persons overseas, we should give it to persons in the Thames Valley, the Somerset Levels and everywhere else beaten by storms – as the good ship Britain is rocked with a fury which would have led the Old Testament prophets to accuse the whole nation of having committed terrible sins, to have such retribution visited on them.
Best wishes
Melvyn Bragg

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2014-02-07T17:42:12+00:00

Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed The Phoenicians. As always the programme is available to listen to online or to and keep.

Hello
Here are some notes from the talk after the programme. One of our contributors said that he should have been giving a lecture in his university. Instead he’d asked his students to listen to In Our Time and to discuss it with him as soon as he got back.

While on air we had a message from Damascus. From Damascus!
In Tudor and Renaissance times, when people in this country did not want to think they were French in origin (unlike the colonising force which came across in 1066 and steadily for a couple of centuries afterwards), they decided that they would be Phoenicians instead. The Cornish were particularly keen to be Phoenicians. They said the Phoenicians had come up to the Scilly Isles and then into Cornwall itself, and they had been responsible for Stonehenge and cinnamon in fruit buns, among much else.
The Welsh also wanted to be Phoenicians. The evidence they put forward was the Welsh moustache. They said that living in Wales the Phoenicians had lost their red or ruddy skins, and gone Welsh white. But to maintain their distinction they grew a particular sort of moustache. Later on, to retrieve some colour, they painted themselves blue. This was called woad. But there were certain Welsh persons convinced that this was a return to the Phoenician.
The Irish, too, decided to be Phoenician because they didn’t want to be British. We find it in several Irish writers, Friel and Heaney included, that they sympathised with the Carthaginians, because the Carthaginians were anti-Roman which stood for being anti-British.
The Phoenicians have had a high old time since they slipped out of history. A very early film made in Spain in 1914, Cabiria, concerned a little blonde girl who was stolen by Phoenician pirates and taken to Carthage to be sacrificed. She was rescued by a Roman soldier and his black slave/servant and huge adventures ensued.
In fact, it seems that because we know so little, if anything, about the Phoenicians since about the 2nd century BC, we can make up whatever we want.
It is significant that Aeneas, on his way from burning Troy to founding Rome, stopped at Carthage, which as a result was the subject of the best book in Virgil’s epic. The story of Dido and Aeneas, and her sacrifice as he sails off to found a new empire, still resonates.
End of notes.
I found it impossible to go for a walk, partly because it was sluicing down and I was not dressed for such a downpour. In Cumberland it would have been bracing. As the sage said, “There is no such thing as bad weather, only inadequate clothing”. And I had back-to-back-to-back meetings. I try to pack them into one day so that the rest of the time can be free to get on with work.
Met with Tom Morris, the producer, to talk about the next batch of programmes. We have three in prospect and need another half-dozen. Tom is so well-prepared that meetings like this are the quickest and most decisive I think I’ve ever had in my career. ed by Gwyneth Williams, Controller of Radio 4, who was very pleased to tell us (and we were very pleased to hear) that our audience figures – as measured by an organisation called RAJAR – went up by a quarter of a million in the last three months. These things go up and down, but up is always good. We talked a little about the five programmes that we’re going to do on Magna Carta at the beginning of next year. Gwyneth departed with the RAJAR cake she’d bought for her office. Tom and I had a biscuit with our coffee.
I walked from building to building to those meetings and there was a general sense of trudge everywhere. The Tube strike bit in. Masses of people were heads into the rain up the pavements. Umbrellas threatened to poke out all eyes. There was almost a sense of refugees. Nothing of course like the Somerset Levels. I can’t think of those two words without ing that that was where Alfred the Great retreated when England was threatened by the Danes to become Danish, and would have been, had Alfred not gathered his strength and a force in the Somerset Levels where he evaded all attempts to capture him, and came back and defeated the Danes and Christianised them and that is why we’re English today.
Then crawled back home through traffic which probably set new standards for congestion.
Nevertheless … a message from Damascus! Think about that.
Best wishes
Melvyn Bragg

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