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2015-02-27T12:33:56+00:00

Editor's Note: This episode of Bookclub is available to listen online or for .

To someone of my generation - and a boy, to boot - it’s not surprising that someone who writes in the spirit of John Buchan and H. Rider Haggard has sold more than 120 million books. I did ask, rhetorically, at our recording with the veteran novelist Wilbur Smith whether there comes a stage when even a publisher stops counting…but I suppose that’s not allowed.

The point is that he knows how to write an adventure story, and for those of us who were taken into dreamland by King Solomon’s Mines or by the adventures of Richard Hannay, or indeed by R.L. Stevenson and Jules Verne, the success of Smith’s stories - sagas, I suppose - is easy to explain.

But explaining why people want to read them isn’t the same as explaining how they’re written.

The art of story-telling - putting together a page-turner - is, I suspect, a skill that some people just develop naturally.

But the truth is that it is rare. We all know books that purport to spin a great yarn that simply don’t work, usually because they’re formulaic and the language is stale. Keeping a spring in your prose and turning every plot corner in style is a skill that is in short supply.

I asked Smith for the secret of a good story, and his answer was, I think, the perfect one: ‘You have to make the people believe in your characters, it’s just a matter of faith. Your characters have to act in a certain way, to be believable, and you have to generate an interest in your readers for them to follow the story - for it to be important for them that these people survive.’

That is part of the secret of his style, but there is also the setting - the Africa that he came to love as a boy. It was wild, dangerous and mysterious.

Our book this month is When the Lion Feeds, the first of his novels dealing with the Courtney family (published in 1964) and reflecting the excitements of his own youth. He was about 30 when he wrote the story of the twins Sean and Garrick, the first a lion-hearted adventurer and his brother a more thoughtful, emotional soul.

Smith says he identifies more easily with Garrick - ‘I was at boarding school and I know the top dogs are hard to compete with. I wasn’t top dog. I was third team rugby, not first, I didn’t get colours.’ But Sean’s appetite for the wildness of Africa in the era of the Zulu wars in the 1870s and 80s was a reflection of Wilbur’s own, when his father - a bushman, he calls him - introduced him to the sounds and smells of the open places, and the creatures of the forests and the veld. His boyhood gave him an enduring love of the continent - all its peoples and their customs, the incomers and the native.

This month’s group of readers were naturally interested in how his views had altered in the half century through which southern Africa has changed so radically. He was born in Broken Hill in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in 1933 and his world was unrecognisable to a contemporary generation. He acknowledged that he would certainly have written quite differently a generation later - that’s inevitable - but the guts of the story would have been the same.

He was always interested in the relationship between the colonisers and the colonised, and said that the relationships between his parents and grandparents and the indigenous people around them was a close and fascinating one. He doesn’t think that human nature has changed with the age of time - ‘I have learnt in my life there are good people and bad people and the good ones outnumber the bad.’

In a way, it’s his motto. He likes stories that pit goodies against baddies - on the land, in the mines, in the scramble for wealth on the trading floor - and in the 37 books that followed this one he’s demonstrated that he understands instinctively how to draw his readers into his own enthusiasms.

That’s the mark of a born storyteller, and although he trained to become an ant it’s hard to imagine him finding the excitements the he loves in the mysterious world of double-entry bookkeeping.

I hope you enjoy our conversation about When the Lion Feeds.

Next month, we’ll turn to a quite different kind of novel - The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds, a poetic story about the poet John Clare and his incarceration in an Essex asylum in the early Victorian era. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and if you don’t know it, you have a treat in store.

Happy reading

Jim

Jim Naughtie presents Bookclub on BBC Radio 4

2014-06-22T05:00:43+00:00

Tweet of the Day, the early morning favourite that has established itself firmly in the daily routine of many Radio 4 listeners, is to fly the nest and venture beyond Britain’s shores as world traveller Michael Palin becomes part of the presenting team.

From September this year, the Tweet of the Day team will begin scouring the globe for the most interesting, distinctive and downright peculiar birdsong to bring back to Radio 4 listeners.

David Attenborough will launch the new series with the blue bird-of-paradise, a native of New Guinea. He comments: “When you first hear the call of the blue bird-of-paradise, it utters a sound so un-bird like you could be forgiven for thinking it came from some form of electronic device hidden nearby in the New Guinea forests.” Also featured by Sir David will be the hyacinth macaw, the largest flying parrot species in the world and native to central and eastern South America.

The Blue Bird of Paradise - archive audio from BBC Natural History Unit

Michael Palin, whose globetrotting has been documented in such television series as Around the World in Eighty Days, Pole to Pole and Full Circle, will present the final 20 episodes of the series early next year.

Michael Palin says: “On my journeys round the world I'm as fascinated by the natural life as I am by the people I meet. Early morning birdsong is often the first thing to alert me to the fact that I'm somewhere new and different.”

For the benefit of those who have not yet been roused by the early morning Tweets: each episode lasts a minute and a half, and features the song of a particular bird followed by insights into that bird’s behaviour and habits, as well as its literary and folklore associations. The series tells the birds’ stories through science, social history, culture, literature, music and just pure rarity.

The award winning series is currently being repeated but in case you aren't awake at 6am, Tweet of the Day is available to listen online or as a podcast.

Listen to: David Attenborough - My Life in Sound

2014-03-31T07:00:09+00:00

Editor's Note: Kate Humble presents Tweet of the Day in April. Kate Humble has worked on many BBC Nature programmes including Wild Shepherdess, Lambing Live and Springwatch.

Spring is coming and the mornings are getting noisier. It is as if nature is celebrating, with the rest of us, the lengthening and warming of the days. Our gardens, woodlands, parks and farms have been largely quiet throughout the winter, apart from, perhaps, the occasional plucky robin, or the mournful call of rooks.

Rook

But now birds are thinking about finding territories and mates and to do that they sing - or in the case of the Great Spotted Woodpecker, drum. The woods around us are full of them. The rat-a-tat of Spring at the door. This is a time of year to revel in the song of the blackbird, or the returning migrant chiff chaffs calling their name; to listen for the uplifting call of the curlew or the lapwing, which always reminds me of the Soup Dragon in the Clangers, but maybe that's just me...

Lapwing

I hope you enjoy April's Tweets of the Day as much as I enjoyed recording them. And if Tweet of the Day is the thing that brightens your morning, that April is a month when you can listen to birdsong live too, every morning, as the sun comes up. Like Tweet of the Day, it's worth waking up early for.

Listen to: Tweet of the Day

See photos of April's birds

More about the Tweet of the Day presenters and sound recordists

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites.

2014-02-10T09:36:33+00:00

Editor's Note: John Aitchison presents Tweet of the Day from 10 to 28 February. John Aitchison is a wildlife cameraman and photographer. He has worked on many BBC Nature programmes including Big Cat Diary, Springwatch and Yellowstone.

John Aitchison

Birds bring the world to life. I love the way they can appear anywhere, at any time, rewilding even the most man-made settings. Often it's their calls which first draw my attention to them: the strident song of a garden wren, the festive tinkle of waxwings in a car park, wild visitors from the north around Christmas time. Bird sounds define the UK's wildest places too: the whistles of wigeon drifting across a saltmarsh pool in Norfolk or a flock of chough calling their own name above a pale Hebridean beach.

Wigeon

At home I often hear the high-pitched calls of white-fronted geese flying over the house while we are having breakfast. The geese are flying between their roost and finding their own breakfast in the fields. They have come from Greenland to spend the winter in Scotland, an extraordinary flight which fills me with amazement and delight each time they re-appear in the autumn. Recording these geese for Tweet of the Day was especially satisfying because my teenage son Rowan helped me. His generation are the ones who will decide whether there will be enough wild places in our country for inspiring birds like these.

Waxwing

John Aitchison

Listen to Tweet of the Day

See photos of February's birds

More about the Tweet of the Day presenters and sound recordists

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites.

2013-11-13T18:06:51+00:00

Listen to Tweet of the Day - The Common Crane from Thursday 14 November

Tweet of the Day - Recording the Common Crane chick

At one time Common Cranes were abundant in British wetlands across the country but by the beginning of the 17th century they had ceased to breed in Britain - persecuted by hunters, and prey to the drainage of wetlands for agriculture. So, the Common Crane is the subject of a re-introduction project to bring them back to the West Country and in particular, the Somerset Levels and Moors.

One of the chicks

The rearing of Common Crane chicks is being undertaken by the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust at Slimbridge. This is the third year of the project, which began in 2010 with the aim of releasing one hundred birds over five years. It is hoped that by 2025 there will be 20 breeding pairs on the Somerset Levels and Moors.

The Tweet of the Day team meet those who care for the chicks and walk the bio-secure compound twice a day for 15-20 minutes encouraging them to forage for food. Crane chicks have to put on no more than 10% of their total weight every day in the first thirty days of their lives. The growth plates at the end of their long leg bones are stimulated by walking so the birds need lots of exercise in order for their legs to grow properly. With too much food and insufficient exercise their legs can bow and collapse under them.

Tweet of the Day - The crane suits

Anyone who has any with these birds has to de-humanise themselves by putting on a ‘crane suit’. It’s light grey in colour, the same colour as the plumage on the adult birds, with an attached cotton helmet and black visor through which to view the world as a crane. It’s hot too. Every crane project member also holds a metre long ‘puppet’ stick with a coloured plaster cast moulding of an adult crane’s head at the end of it. This model has a small spoon attached to the end of it where the food is scattered on the ground to encourage the chicks to forage.

Sound Recordist Gary Moore with the crane's head microphone

We're happy to be recording their delicate sounds for Tweet of the Day listeners. Sound-recordist Gary Moore, has the excellent idea of taping a tiny microphone to the model head so he can get some very close up sound from the chicks. He also puts another microphone at ground level so he can record the general atmosphere around them. There are two calls we can distinguish, the call to attract the attention of the parent which is high pitched and insistent and says "feed me" and the soft purring "content" call which says "I'm happy".

As we creep mysteriously about lifting our feet higher and extending our stride as well as slowing down every particular movement, the sense of a sci-fi world fades away and turns into a magical experience. Being human doesn’t count here, humans have become invisible. Our noises, actions, language and preoccupations have given way to another, simpler, and largely silent existence. Just for a moment I sense what it feels like to be a crane and the peace of it overwhelms me.

Listen to Tweet of the Day - the Common Crane from Thursday 14 November

Tweet of the Day - Full details

Tweet of the Day - Presenters and Recordists

See photos of all the birds featured in November (images courtesy of the RSPB)

BBC Nature

2013-04-24T07:33:04+00:00

Tweet of the Day

The Natural History Unit Radio Office is always alive with a strange twittering; a buzz about birds, especially at this time of year when spring finally heaves itself out from under the blanket of winter and our feathered friends begin to sing to mark their territories and attract a mate. It starts with our resident species, birds like the Great Tit bellowing out “teacher, ,teacher, teacher,… “ the Blackbird (arguably the best songster in town) and the robin. Then we wait with eager anticipation (especially this year) for the migrant birds like the Chiffchaff, Willow Warbler and Blackcap and before you know it, there’s a babble of song it seems from every wood, hedge, tree and roof top aerial and the air is filled with sound.

Even though many of us wouldn’t describe ourselves as keen birdwatchers, twitchers or ornithologists, who doesn’t enjoy hearing birds in their garden? But don’t you often wish you knew who was singing? For centuries birds have been inspiring writers and musicians from Beethoven to Britten, Vivaldi to Vaughan Williams. After all, birds are composers; they were making music long before us.

So given that there are well over 500 species listed as British birds, our Natural History Radio team struck on the idea of a series which featured a different call or song on every day of the week, and Radio 4’s ‘Tweet of the Day’ was born.

In the first of a new series, David Attenborough introduces the cuckoo.

Brett Westwood, producer, presenter and naturalist extraordinaire set about the task of allocating our British birds, first to months in which we’re most likely hear them and then each bird to a day. Meanwhile I hauled bag after bag of recordings from the Natural History Unit sound library up several flights of stairs to my ‘eyrie’ office and listened to over 1000 recordings to see which we might use. Amongst them were wonderful old recordings by one of the pioneers of wildlife recording, Ludwig Koch, but there were also gaps … lots and lots of gaps! So we recruited a team of superb wildlife sound recordists; Gary Moore, Geoff Sample and Chris Watson and set them the task of capturing sounds for the series, (as well as raiding their own archives!).

David Attenborough presents the song and story of the nightingale.

Then Brett started writing the scripts. We wanted the programmes to be short – like a snatch of song - a tweet – just 90 seconds; opening with the song or call followed by a story about the bird. And there’s no shortage of stories; everything from fascinating ornithological facts to fanciful folklore, and from astounding feats of endurance to tales of theft and fraud.

David Attenborough presents the sound and story of the storm petrel.

Sir David Attenborough agreed to narrate the first month and everyone swung into action; microphones to the ready, the recordings began. We’re making this series as I write; the whole team is involved with the programmes and website, blogging and tweeting. So far from a mild twittering in the office, there’s a great orchestra of sound; as we capture the calls and songs of more than 260 British birds!
Tweet of the Day - full details
Tweet of the Day - presenters and recordists
BBC Nature
All imagery has been provided by the RSPB

2013-03-20T14:40:43+00:00

In search of the New York Bee Man - listen to the Radio 4 afternoon docu-drama, The Manhattan Bee Testimonials, from 27 March 2013.

NY Walk sign covered in bees

To be honest, as a documentary maker going to another country to record stories, it's normally pretty scary. Will the contributors give you what you want? Will the story 'work'? It's even more scary when you're making a programme about someone who may not exist.

Mark is a Brooklyn chef where the bee-man has long been used as a story to scare children.

I first heard about the Manhattan Bee Man from the writer, Sebastian Baczkiewicz who found out about him from Tom Waits. According to the story, this guy lives with 250,000 bees in his apartment and is completely oblivious to the discomfort. I too was perplexed. And yet when you tell the anecdote to New Yorkers, they find it believable, hilarious and all too often, familiar.

Manhattan - New York

Our brief was to go there and find him, or at least, find people who have heard of him and record them. Their voices would appear in the programme, and their testimonies would inform the arc of the narrative, or something… Our lovely exec, Polly Thomas told us to follow our hunches, which led us to Hell's Kitchen, a psychic's parlour, a record shop, a poetry church, a farmers market, the oldest brothel on the island, Otto's Shrunken Head, Stuyvesant Town, the Double Down Saloon, and lots of other places you'll hear in this piece. We also paid a visit to Beth Israel hospital.

Cooper, a musician lives in Harlem, where he claims to know the Bee-man's family.

This is the story of the search for the Manhattan Bee Man. It's also about Alphabet City, and the truly amazing people who live and have lived there. Enjoy.

We visited Central Park to find anyone who had heard of the mysterious bee man.

Listen to The Manhattan Bee Testimonials
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites.

2009-09-09T10:58:01+00:00

Here's a lovely thing. A colleague pointed out that the producers of the excellent Last Chance to See TV series with Stephen Fry have dug out the original Douglas Adams radio series from 1989 and put all the episodes on their web site to listen to. A real treat.

Episode 1 of Last Chance to See, created by Mark Carwardine, who also created the original radio series, was on BBC 2 Sunday and, thanks to 'series catch-up', you've got two months to watch it.

The Last Chance to See radio programmes are here.

The picture shows Douglas Adams (left) and Mark Carwardine in a publicity shot for the radio programme that I found in the BBC's picture library, Elvis.

2009-08-29T08:01:37+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00m8p76
At five years old Fergus is beginning to feel like a male, he spent the previous years looking like his mother, distinctly female. He's as tall as a man's waist and testosterone has deepened his voice and developed his brain in a way to give him a greater repertoire of noises. When sexually aroused he can now turn his wings and tail inside out in a big puff of white feathers and inflate a balloon in his neck and erect whiskers near his beak in a display that can be seen by females ffrom over a mile. Fergus is a Great Bustard (Otis tarda) extinct in Britain for 177 years, but no longer.
The down draft from Chinook helicopters make the grass swirl like a turbulent green sea. Soldiers run out of the back door and nearby tanks have cut deep tracks through the grassland plain. The odd boom of heavy guns provides the final military touch to this scene on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, the home of the Great Bustard in southern England. This area of chalk downland is "...pretty much as it was..." says Dave Waters, founder of the Great Bustard Group"...thanks to it being a military training ground..." and the first site chosen by the group for the licenced re-introduction of Great Bustards since their extinction in Britain in the mid 1800s.
Fergus will never be released in the wild. He and another older male live in captivity at the Hawk Conservancy Trust on public view as ambassadors of the species. Fergus was hand reared in Russia where there are still wild populations and he was brought back to the UK by Waters. It was this spring he entered sexually maturity for the first time and was screened off from his companion, the older male, who made short shrift of Fergus when Fergus wanted to show him how good a puff ball he can do.
Great Bustards are fabulous looking birds. Arguably the largest flying bird in the world, they have a wing span of two-plus metres and by getting airborne at twelve kilograms in weight they are certainly up there with Mute Swans and the Wandering Albatross. There have been some reports of Great Bustards getting in later life to over twenty kilograms, but at that weight they would be flightless. The closest relative, albeit a distant one, are the cranes, not turkeys as many people think. Their extraordinary display is a visual one, they want to look as conspicuous as possible on the vast grassy plains of Southern and Eastern Europe, where sound on its own is less effective to attract females.
They lek. Lekking is a relatively rare behaviour in the animal world, which has evolved in a few species of mammals, birds and fish - it's basically a marketplace for males to show off their wares. The Great Bustard lives on open ground, and in the breeding season the males exploit every little rise around, and tirelessly puff themselves, directing their glam costume over and above the grasslands. Females drop in and egg them on by their very presence - they are there to shop for genes. It's often the case that the all the females will choose only a few of the males. That's the free market for you. After mating, the males have nothing whatsoever to do with either the female or the chicks. The single chick reared by the female, often from a clutch or two or three eggs will stay with her for about a year, and like her mother, will wander around feeding on seeds and arthropods.
2009 is the first year that Great Bustards have been born in the wild. Lionel Kelleway, presenter of The Living World, saw the chick and mother who presumably incubated the egg, living free on Salisbury Plain. The chick, he said, "...looks like an ostrich." They spotted the head and neck of the mother periscoping above the sea of grass looking "like the Loch Ness Monster" retorted Dave Waters.
Eleven years since the formation of the Great Bustard Project we now have this spectacularly large bird living wild again and what's more, they are breeding. Tentative beginnings - but the county bird of Wiltshire is back and who knows, before long, under their own steam may get back to their other historic strongholds of Yorkshire and East Anglia - But surely it doesn't need to be a military exclusion zone so we can all go and see them.
But Fergus will be there, probably for the next twenty years, to drop in and see.
Julian Hector is Editor of Radio in the BBC Natural History Unit

You can hear Lionel Kelleway's encounter with Fergus and the Salisbury Plain Great Bustards on The Living World tomorrow morning at 0635 or, of course, listen again afterwards.

The Living World archive is one of the wonders of the Radio 4 web site.

Radio 4's Best of Natural History Radio podcast includes The Living World.

Some pictures taken for the programme by Mary Colwell.

2009-07-21T15:07:40+00:00

And finally, photographs of the White City vandal, the urban fox that trashed the offices of Crossing Continents and The Report, waiting in the RSPCA's special cage, to be taken away and released. Released 'nearby' I'm told. Does that sound wise to you? Given this fox's demonstrated resourcefulness shouldn't the creature have been taken to Exeter or Aberdeen?
Two more pics, taken by James Daniel, an engineer.

2009-07-21T12:46:27+00:00

Jennifer Clarke, interactive producer and fox watcher, emailed me this morning:

The fox was seen by a security guard last night still wandering free. Actually the Money Box area was unscathed - the fox seemed to take out its frustration on the Crossing Continents/The Report areas!

An hour or so later she wrote again: "The fox was apparently caught last night - unharmed" and went on:

The RSPCA supplied a cage which was left somewhere tempting. One of our engineers spotted the fox hiding behind a filing cabinet late last night and managed to get it into the cage. It was then released some distance away from the building.

Jennifer's so far been unable to confirm the rumour that the fox was carrying a staff in the name B. Brush.

I'll be honest, the picture doesn't show the Radio 4 fox (not, so far, caught on camera). It's by Eddie Gunn and it's used under licence.
The RSPCA has an urban fox FAQ and an information sheet to (PDF).
There are hundreds of photos of other urban foxes on flickr.

2009-07-20T15:41:42+00:00

Jennifer Clarke (of this parish) and Hugh Levinson from the department that makes Moneybox and Analysis sent me these pics taken in their office on the first floor of BBC White City, the big, grey fortress on Wood Lane (and home to the Director General). A fox gained entry (nobody saw it but it had been spotted in another office earlier) and essentially trashed the place - with a special emphasis on paperwork. Some kind of protest?