What are the writers of The Archers trying to achieve with the Freddie Pargetter story?
‘I’m not here to rehabilitate,’ says Pamela, who teaches creative writing to prisoners in Northern Ireland. She doesn’t think of…
When haddocks flirt, they sound like a motorbike revving up
Flies buzzing, strange rustling, crunching sounds, and then the most chilling screech you’ll have heard all week. Vultures were feeding…
Radio 4 treats its radio listeners as second-best in favour of those who listen to podcasts
How very odd of Radio 4 not only to release The Ratline as a podcast before broadcasting it on the…
A week of extraordinarily direct and honest radio on the World Service
The most inspiring voice on radio this week belongs to Hetty Werkendam, or rather to her 15-year-old self as she…
Angela Carter was a master of radio drama
The writer Angela Carter (born in 1940) grew up listening to the wireless, her love of stories, magic and the…
What it was like to be a black lawyer in the deep south in the 60s
To have been a black lawyer in the deep south of America in the early 1960s would have taken a…
Podcasts still have a long way to go to challenge the best of conventional radio
Here’s a thought. Matthew Bannister, former Radio 1 controller turned presenter of programmes such as Outlook on the World Service…
The power of Sue MacGregor’s The Reunion
The return of Sue MacGregor’s long-running Radio 4 series The Reunion (produced by Eve Streeter) is a welcome reminder of…
Another side of John Humphrys
‘What can you tell me just now,’ asks Audrey Gillan. She’s talking to Tara, who’s been sleeping rough on Fournier…
Robert Redford turns his hand to radio
Much ado is being made of the latest listening figures, which have suggested that the percentage of those aged between…
Radio 4 brings back the dead
If proof were needed that radio will survive the onslaught of the new (or rather now not-so-new) digital technologies, albeit…
Why the scream of the elephant is much more chilling than the roar of a lion
Raw, earthy, ear-piercing. It’s hard to decide which was more terrifying and unsettling: the roar of the elephants in Living…
The marketisation of BBC radio is a recipe for creative disaster
There’s been a lot of fuss and many column inches written about levels of pay at the BBC, as revealed…
A warning to those who argue that we live in a visual society
‘Can one person really grasp the significance of what another person has been through?’ asks Dr Rita Charon in this…
The dumbing down of the Reith Lectures
It’s been a heavyweight week on Radio 4 with the start of the annual series of Reith Lectures and a…
The excitement of emigrating on your own as a child
There was one of those moments late on Sunday night when a voice is so arresting (either through tone, timbre,…
Rod Liddle is wrong: if anything we still hear too much from male presenters on Radio 4
I don’t know which day Rod Liddle travelled down from the northeast and found nothing but women’s voices cluttering up…
Why is Today losing its audience? Because it doesn’t care about its listeners
Headlines announcing that Radio 4’s flagship Today programme is losing its audience while Radio 3’s Breakfast has put on numbers…
Only Radio 4 would allow Ian McKellan and Joanna Lumley to play Mr and Mrs God
One sphere that podcasts have so far not much penetrated is drama. Audible.co.uk is itching to develop its own brand…
Podcasts often have no real interest in those who might be listening
‘Do you ever imagine your audience?’ was a question thrown at James Ward, creator and presenter of The Boring Talks…
How hospices make you think differently about life
The timing of the Today programme’s series about hospices could not have been more apt, coming as it did so…
Why can’t podcasts be more like Radio 4?
Now here’s a series that would make a brilliant podcast but is also classic Radio 4 — they don’t have…
Benjamin Zephaniah once found the leg of a man in the back of a Ford Cortina
‘For me rhyming was normal,’ said Benjamin Zephaniah, reading from his autobiography on Radio 4. Back in the 1960s, on…
All the world’s a stage
How to stage Shakespeare on air and bring the text to life without the benefit of set, costumes, choreography and…
Why be so frightened of Enoch Powell’s speech now?
It was a provocative decision by the producers of Archive on 4, 50 Years On: Rivers of Blood (Nathan Gower…
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