Melvyn Bragg
Avoids the breathless hype of so many podcasts: Finding Mr Fox reviewed
We are all surely familiar with those stories of naive young Brits who travel abroad and are persuaded by a…
The rise of vampirism in Silicon Valley
The Immortals, which begins on Radio 4 this week, is not for the faint-hearted. While it professes to be about…
The joy of wigs
I thought, or anyway hoped, that once I’d finished the chemotherapy I would spring back to vitality. Seven weeks on…
Why In Our Time remains the best thing on radio
In Our Time is the best thing on Radio 4, possibly the best thing on the radio full stop. It…
How to survive a heatwave
Provence-Alpes-Côte D’Azur A burning ball appears over the brow of the hill at seven o’clock every morning and then…
Are the Dead Ringers audience told to laugh?
Nine on a Thursday morning is University Hour for those of us who don’t commute to an office every day.…
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…
In praise of braindead filth
Melvyn Bragg on TV: The Box That Changed The World (BBC2, Saturday) was just what you would have expected of…
Lucy Worsley reveals - yet again - that there’s more to the WI than jam and Jerusalem
Some revelations, it seems, are capable of being endlessly repeated while still remaining revelations. Think of all the books, articles…
Dennis Potter: one of the last great masters of vituperation
‘Genuine invective is an almost lost art in our wild satirical age,’ Dennis Potter complained in New Society in 1966.…
The pleasures and perils of podcast listening
No phrase is better calculated to tense the neck muscles of a regular podcast listener than ‘We have something special…
You can’t force low-income people to go to an art gallery or the theatre if they don’t want to
I went last week to see the justly praised production of Wagner’s The Mastersingers at English National Opera, and I…
