BBC Radio 4

Art is often best experienced on the radio

6 April 2019 9:00 am

At its best audio can be a much more visual medium than the screen. Making Art with Frances Morris (produced…

Radio dial

Listening to plays in a foreign language is a weirdly engaging experience

30 March 2019 9:00 am

As the ravens circle around Broadcasting House in London’s West End, presaging difficult times ahead for BBC Radio, with less…

Is the increasing secularisation of funerals a good thing?

23 March 2019 9:00 am

‘You’re thinking these girls all wrong,’ Miss Mai tells Enid in Winsome Pinnock’s play Leave Taking, adapted from the recent…

Scala Radio is a real threat to Radio 2

16 March 2019 9:00 am

It’s not surprising given the way that electronic communication has taken over so much of our daily business, minimising human…

A great example of how Radio 4 is using new technologies to enhance audio

9 March 2019 9:00 am

‘It’s too familiar, too obvious,’ says Cathy FitzGerald at the beginning of her new interactive series for Radio 4, Moving…

Alan Johnson and Michael Portillo on This Week

Alan Johnson’s diary: I’m not sure I’d have had the guts to join a new party

2 March 2019 9:00 am

The separation between ‘members’ and ‘strangers’ always struck me as being one of the most archaic aspects of the House…

I always come away more confused after listening to Moral Maze

2 March 2019 9:00 am

Is it me or are we now faced (or perhaps I should say fazed?) much more often by stories in…

Two members of the Glasgow Humane Society on the River Clyde. Photo: Jeff J Mitchell / Getty Images

The story of the River Clyde

16 February 2019 9:00 am

It sounds like something out of Dickens or a novel by Thackeray, a classic case of high-minded Victorian philanthropy, but…

The man who never cried

9 February 2019 9:00 am

It was odd listening to Jim Al-Khalili being interviewed on Radio 4 on Tuesday morning rather than the other way…

A blast of restorative air: comedian Mark Steel. Photo: In Pictures Ltd./ Corbis/ Getty Images

The attempt to bring back topicality to Ambridge has been far too effective

2 February 2019 9:00 am

It’s becoming clear that the travails afflicting all the major players in The Archers, Radio 4’s flagship drama, are intended…

It will take a few weeks, if not months, to know whether Zoë Ball will become as much of a favourite as Terry Wogan. Photo: BBC / Sarah Jeynes

Zoë Ball has the voice and warmth but not so much the chat

19 January 2019 9:00 am

Whether by accident or design, Zoë Ball took over the coveted early-morning slot on Radio 2 this week just as…

Neil MacGregor shows German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron a model of the new Humboldt Forum. Photo: Carsten Koall / Getty Images

Neil MacGregor’s intense, impassioned new radio programme is shamelessly anti-Brexit

12 January 2019 9:00 am

I suspect that whether or not you admire Neil MacGregor’s latest series for Radio 4, As Others See Us (produced…

Serial's Sarah Koenig

How did the BBC’s podcast Unexpected Fluids ever get made?

5 January 2019 9:00 am

You may have noticed the flood of podcasts that’s been pouring out of the BBC since the launch of its…

Apollo 8 on its launch pad in December 1968. Photo: AP / REX / Shutterstock

Remembering the 1968 Apollo mission – when the world was reaching to the future rather than drawing in

15 December 2018 9:00 am

Take yourself back to (or try to imagine) Christmas 1968; a year full of disturbances, dashed hopes and extreme violence…

It’s Christmas. You don’t want Götterdämmerung. You want a waltz-operetta

15 December 2018 9:00 am

Grade: A– 1898: two Parisiennes and a housemaid secretly invite each other’s partners to the Paris Opera ball and… c’mon,…

British poet Salena Godden presenter of Mrs Death Misses Death on Radio 4. [Photo: Roberto Ricciuti / Getty Images]

Listening to people talking about death can be strangely consoling

8 December 2018 9:00 am

‘Without death,’ says Salena Godden, ‘life would be a never-ending conveyor belt of sensation.’ For her death is what gives…

The story of the cook who spent 10 years preparing food for those on death row

1 December 2018 9:00 am

You don’t need headphones to appreciate, and catch on to, the unique selling point of radio: its immediacy, its directness,…

Michelle Obama during the 2008 Democrat primaries. Photo: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

Is Michelle Obama a secret Archers fan?

24 November 2018 9:00 am

I wonder what Michelle Obama, the former First Lady who remade that role in her own image, would make of…

Michelle Obama during the 2008 Democrat primaries. Photo: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

When the first world war ended, many soldiers were left with ‘a terrible empty feeling’

10 November 2018 9:00 am

‘It was so unreal,’ said one of the first world war veterans about the long-awaited Armistice. It was the most…

The Somme battlefield today. Photo: Peter Macdiarmid / Getty Images

Why has BBC Radio been replaced by ‘BBC Sounds’?

3 November 2018 9:00 am

You may have noticed that BBC iPlayer (for radio programmes) has been replaced this week with the new BBC Sounds…

The Maze Prison in 2006. Photo: REX/ Shutterstock

What are the writers of The Archers trying to achieve with the Freddie Pargetter story?

27 October 2018 9:00 am

‘I’m not here to rehabilitate,’ says Pamela, who teaches creative writing to prisoners in Northern Ireland. She doesn’t think of…

Radio 4 treats its radio listeners as second-best in favour of those who listen to podcasts

13 October 2018 9:00 am

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

6 October 2018 9:00 am

The most inspiring voice on radio this week belongs to Hetty Werkendam, or rather to her 15-year-old self as she…

It’s as I suspected – my defects can’t be cured

22 September 2018 9:00 am

I’ve just finished making a one-hour documentary about character for Radio 4 that’s due to be broadcast on Saturday at…

Ralph Abernathy (seated centre) and C.B. King (seated left) sit on a wagon as 300 protesters march to Atlanta. Photo: Getty/Bettmann

What it was like to be a black lawyer in the deep south in the 60s

8 September 2018 9:00 am

To have been a black lawyer in the deep south of America in the early 1960s would have taken a…