The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4. Followed by Weather.
An extraordinary oral history of Russian Women's experiences in the Second World War.
In the late 1970s, Svetlana Alexievich realised that she had grown up surrounded by women who had fought in the Second World War, but whose voices were absent from official narratives. She said out to write her first book to document their stories.
Travelling thousands of miles, Svetlana spent years interviewing hundreds of Soviet women - captains, tank drivers, snipers, pilots, nurses and doctors - who had experienced the war on the front lines, on the home front and in occupied territories. As it brings to light their most harrowing memories, this symphony of voices reveals a different side of war, a new range of feelings, smells and colours.
Read by Sarah Badel, Teresa Gallagher and Jane Whittenshaw.
Written by Svetlana Alexievich.
Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Abridged by Sara Davies
Producer: Celia de Wolff
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.
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Spiritual reflection to start the day from the Festival City of Edinburgh with The Rev Lezley Stewart of Greyfriars Kirk.
iPM is the news programme that starts with its listeners. Email ipm@bbc.co.uk. Twitter: @BBCiPM. Presented by Luke Jones and Eddie Mair.
The latest news headlines. Including the weather and a look at the papers.
Helen Mark swaps her anorak for a frock as she visits the summer festival at Glyndebourne to discover how its famous gardens inspire singers, artists and opera-goers. Set within the South Downs National Park, the gardens and surrounding landscape have become an integral part of the experience of going to the opera at Glyndebourne. Garden adviser John Hoyland and the garden team give Helen a tour and share how each distinctive themed area is created and maintained. As the audience begins to arrive for the evening performance, Helen talks to conductor William Christie and singers Danielle de Niese and Joelle Harvey about the unique way music and setting come together at Glyndebourne. She also meets Executive Chairman Gus Christie who introduces her to a recent addition to the local landscape, Glyndebourne's controversial wind turbine, and explains why he's passionate about reducing their carbon emissions.
Producer: Sophie Anton.
Tom Heap hosts a panel debate about the price of food, in front of an audience at Countryfile Live. Does the price we pay for our food reflect its true cost? Is the drive to produce cheaper food compromising quality and leading more food waste and lower animal welfare standards? Is it really possibly to have both quality and affordability? And how can we make sure farmers get paid a fair price for the food they produce?
On the panel: Andrew Blenkiron, vice chairman of Assured Food Standards - the scheme which runs the Red Tractor logo; Professor Tim Lang from the Centre for Food Policy in London; Kathleen Kerridge, a journalist who writes about the difficulty of bringing up a family on a decent diet and a tight budget; and David Main, professor of animal welfare at the University of Bristol.
Presented by Tom Heap and produced by Emma Campbell.
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News and current affairs. Including Sports Desk, Weather and Thought for the Day.
Good morning from Blenheim, where to the sounds of the xxxx brass band, we join Countryfile Live for an early harvest festival of things rural.
We're joined by John Craven, who's been reporting country matters from mad cow disease to morris dancing for nearly thirty years.
His co-presenter James Wong, ethnobiologist and man who knows his anise from his edamame joins us too...
....from the Blenheim Palace staff, social historian Antonia Keaney is here to talk parks and gardens, blue blood and green backs, kind hearts and coronets...
....and marriage guidance is available from Rabbi Jonathan Romaine, whose new book revisits hijacked weddings, catastrophic funerals, and the various triumphs and disasters that attend the human condition.
All these, plus Inheritance Tracks from actor Miranda Richardson; and whiskered men in tweed shouting "get off my land" at JP Devlin to come.
Presenters: Aasmah Mir & the Rev Richard Coles
Producer: Maire Devine
Editor: Eleanor Garland.
Jay Rayner and his culinary panel are at the National Space Centre in Leicester. Professor Barry Smith, Nisha Katona, Andi Oliver and Tim Anderson answer the audience questions.
The panellists sample the delights of space food, tucking into the same tins of Truffled Beef Stew and Bacon Sarnies that astronauts dine on amongst the stars.
Dan Kendall, the Space Centre's Curator, brings some food stuffs from the very first manned space visits, including some snacks that made it back half-eaten from Apollo 16.
The panel also delves into the culinary landscape of Leicester as they offer up practical advice on spicy dishes and chomp their way through a lot of weird and wonderful crisp flavours.
Producer: Darby Dorras
Assistant Producer: Laurence Bassett
Food consultant: Anna Colquhoun
A Somethin' Else production for BBC Radio 4.
Do you like cocoa? You are in good company: in South and Central America people have been enjoying the fruit of the cacao tree - the source of cocoa, chocolate and much else besides - for thousands of years. Ancient empires fought battles for the control of the best trees and cacao beans were used as currency. Some scholars have argued that the earliest evidence of cacao cultivation in South America can be traced to 3,500 BC and now plant genetics is giving us new insights into the complex history of this remarkable plant in Latin America.
Bridget Kendall is joined by archaeologist Cameron McNeil, chef and food historian Maricel Presilla and geneticist and cacao researcher Juan Carlos Motamayor.
Photo: A cropped cocoa pod lies over dried cacao beans (Getty Images).
Strange and sinister things often happen before Kenyan elections, but recent events have left the country in shock. Kate Aide introduces correspondents' tales and analysis:
In Nairobi, Alistair Leithead analyses the fallout from the murder and torture of the Kenyan election commission's head of technology.
In Italy, Bob Walker walks the Francigena pilgrim trail amidst apocalyptic scenes caused by the wildfires that are sweeping parts of the country.
In Romania, Linda Pressly enters the world of online pornography as she explores the country's growing live webcamming industry.
In Venezuela, political turmoil continues and Vladimir Hernandez wonders what still drives so many people to risk their lives and join the ongoing street protests.
And in Germany, Rob Crossan visits the town that Elvis Pressley once called home. Bad Nauheim is preparing to remember 'The King' 40 years after his death.
Producer: Joe Kent.
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.
The current State Pension system - guarantees anyone with requisite NI contributions a pension of £150ish a week (in real terms. It is protected by the "triple lock" and guarantees a minimum income on reaching State retirement age. But....it's not enough to live on - it's only it's only remotely enough for those with no housing costs and no-one believes the triple lock is affordable for much longer. How much can we rely on the State to fund a retirement.
Presenter:Paul Lewis
Producer: Ben Carter
Editor: Andrew Smith.
This week, the Professor of Ignorance John Lloyd and his curator, the brilliant Romesh Ranganathan welcome:
The comedian, artist, performance poet, musician, radio DJ, author, musical actor and former Museum of Curiosity Curator, Phill Jupitus
Criminologist, broadcaster, writer and award-winning documentary film-maker, Roger Graef;
and
The novelist, Michelin-starred restaurateur and food columnist who is also Chancellor of Queen Margaret University as well as judge on The Great British Bake Off, Prue Leith.
This week, the Museum's Guest Committee offer as exhibits the world's first celebrity chef, a newspaper headline calling for longer sentences and one evening in Chelmsford Odeon on Sunday July 26th 1981.
The show was researched by Anne Miller of QI and Mike Turner.
The production coordinator was Tamara Shilham.
The producers were Richard Turner and James Harkin.
It was a BBC Studios Production.
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Ritual Shah presents political debate from the Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House, London with a panel including, the Labour MP Stella Creasy; the Conservative MP Nigel Evans; news editor at the Institute of Economic Affairs Kate Andrews; and the journalist and author Owen Jones.
Listeners have their say on the issues discussed on Any Questions?
Love Henry James: Roderick Hudson
adapted by Lavinia Murray
Rowland Mallet - a wealthy Bostonian bachelor is patron to a young sculptor, Roderick Hudson. He's taken him from the US to Rome to study and develop his art.
Although engaged to Mary, in the US, Roderick has fallen head over heels for beautiful socialite Christina Light, and it's causing mayhem.
Roderick does all he can to steer him back to Mary, though he's in love with Mary himself. Obsession, love & desire intermingle as old and new worlds collide.
Produced and directed by Pauline Harris
Written in 1875 this was one of Henry James's early novels, his second.
Janice Forsyth lifts the curtain on Radio 4's new theatre series at the Edinburgh Festival.
Opening Night gives listeners a backstage pass to some of the most innovative, challenging and provocative productions around. The series will broadcast from a new town or city each month, looking at the best in theatre, play-writing and live performance talent and will ask how the theatre is helping to capture and curate modern Britain.
Janice Forsyth launches the new series in the heart of the biggest arts festival in the world - Edinburgh. We'll be plunged into the most exciting offerings from both the International Festival and the Fringe, with highlights including behind-the-scenes recordings of 'Meet Me at Dawn' the visceral new work from Zinnie Harris and 'Adam' from director Cora Bissett, about a young trans man who ventures from Egypt to Scotland in search of acceptance and happiness.
We'll also be hearing from International Festival director Fergus Linehan and Jackie Wylie; the artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland, as well capturing some of the more surprising new voices at the Fringe.
Producer: Victoria McArthur.
Melanin Millennials is a podcast duo produced and presented by Imrie Morgan and Satia Sa Dias. They discuss their experiences of being young black women in the UK and the importance of their very honest conversations.
With the recent 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act and events such as Pride all aiming to give the LGBT community a platform, we ask if bisexuals are being fully represented. Journalist and author Nichi Hodgson, the presenter of a new documentary 'Being Bisexual' and Sali Owen a Bi activist and campaigner on bisexual rights discuss.
The Grammy award winning jazz singer, Dianne Reeves, talks about her double tribute to Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie in the centenary year of their births for the BBC Proms.
A recent report says mesh implants, used to treat stress urinary incontinence and pelvic organ prolapse, are safe but some women say they have been left with permanent pain and serious complications. We hear from Kath Sansom who leads the 'Sling the Mesh' campaign and from Dr Mark Slack a consultant gynaecologist. Plus How do you do an effective pelvic floor exercise.' Elaine Miller who's a physiotherapist and this week is combining her expertise in the pelvic floor with stand up comedy explains all.
We discuss how the gender pay gap impacts women's pensions. Ruth Alexander from Radio 4's Money Box explains why women are retiring on 40 per cent less than men and steps you might be able to take to bridge that gap.
The author Kathy Lette talks about trials, tribulations and hilarity of raising a child on the autistic spectrum.
Presented; Jenni Murray
Producer: Rabeka Nurmahomed
Editor; Beverley Purcell.
Full coverage of the day's news.
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The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.
Sara Cox and Christopher Eccleston are joined by Gary Numan, Norman Jay, Dermot Kavanagh and Alice Lowe for an eclectic mix of conversation, music and comedy. With music from Fantastic Negrito and The Ska Vengers.
Producer: Sukey Firth.
Series of profiles of people who are currently making headlines.
Danish/German co-production Land of Mine is a film about a group of German POWs who - once the Nazi occupation of Denmark ended - were made to clear mines on the coastal beaches
Mosquitoes, starring Olivia Coman and Olivia Williams, is the latest play by Lucy Kirkwood at The Dorfman at London's National's Theatre. It interweaves family relations, particle physics and sexting
Bernard MacLaverty's first novel for a decade and a half is Midwinter Break - a long-married couple escape to Amsterdam. Can it match the success of Grace Notes?
Matisse In The Studio is a new exhibition at at Lonodn's Royal Academy 'does what it says on the can' - it's a look at his work and the items which inspired it; from a flower vase or a chocolate pot to an African mask or weaving
Trust Me is a new BBC drama starring Jodie Whittaker (the next Dr Who) about a nurse who loses her job and decides to keep working by impersonating a doctor
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are David Aaronovitch, Helen Lewis and Deborah Bull. The producer is Oliver Jones.
On the 50th Anniversary of the ground breaking 1967 Sexual Offences Act, the campaigner Peter Tatchell takes a sceptical look at its impact on Britain's gay communities.
Although it was a major staging post in the long and tortuous fight for the decriminalisation of male homosexual behaviour in Britain, Peter argues that the years immediately after 1967 were far from friendly towards homosexuality and convictions of men for same-sex offences increased dramatically.
Peter goes on to examine discrimination against homosexual men in areas such as employment and housing in the 1970s, and revisits the fierce battles in the 1990s for reducing the age of consent for gay men from 21 to 16.
Drawing on extensive archive from the last fifty years, Peter chronicles the continuing struggle for equal rights for Britain's LGBT communities - a story that takes us right up to 2017.
Presenter: Peter Tatchell
Producer: Tim Mansel
Executive Producer: Samir Shah
A Juniper production for BBC Radio 4.
Henry James' masterpiece about desire and freedom dramatised by Linda Marshall Griffiths.
Arriving in England from her native America Isabel Archer immediately draws attention because of her intelligence, candour and independent spirit. Isabel is pursued by two suitors but determined to explore what the world has to offer she strives to have the freedom to determine her own future declaring she will never marry. Seeing her desire to break away from the conventions of her society and pursue her own course, her cousin Ralph does something extraordinary.
Directed by Nadia Molinari
The Portrait of a Lady is part of Love Henry James: a series of dramatisations and features celebrating Henry James and his unique insights on love. Love Henry James takes a thrilling, passionate, heart-breaking journey through his novels and his life. Henry James is an extraordinary storyteller. His characters and their inner lives are vividly portrayed. The stories are compelling and the stakes are high. He writes about transformation through travel where innocence opens up to experience.
Henry James unlocks the secrets of the human heart.
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4, followed by weather.
One of the less predictable arguments to result from Brexit concerns the rights and wrongs of chlorine-washed chickens. Perhaps chlorinated-chicken-gate made many people feel temporarily smug about UK standards of animal welfare, compared with those in other parts of the world. Yet, at the same time, the Advertising Standards Authority upheld a 'Go Vegan World' advert with the headline "Humane milk is a myth" - a claim which suggests we do have much further to go before we can feel morally-superior about our treatment of animals. Veganism is on the rise, driven by animal welfare, health and environmental concerns. According to the Vegan Society, sales of vegan food increased by 1,500% last year and there are now more than half a million vegans in the UK, up from 150,000 ten years ago. Is veganism the next step in the march towards a more morally-enlightened and humane society? Or is it just a city-dwellers' fad, detached from the realities of food production, global economics and evolutionary biology? Whether vegans, vegetarians or meat-eaters, can our food production and consumption ever be compatible with animal welfare? Even if the language of animal 'rights' is unhelpful, do humans have a moral duty to avoid cruelty of any kind to other living things? Or is that an impossible goal while we prioritise the interests of Homo sapiens over the welfare of all other animals? Some believe that a society which is caring towards animals is more likely to be caring towards people. Others say that our conditioning from early childhood to embrace cuddly, friendly, talking animals has made us much too sentimental. As long as basic welfare standards are met, shouldn't important human needs be served by animals - including cheap chlorinated chickens?
Producer: Dan Tierney.
(5/13)
Join Paul Gambaccini for another contest between music enthusiasts from around the UK, bidding for a place in the semi-finals of radio's most prestigious musical quiz. This week's competitors are from the London area and the South coast of England, and Paul's questions test their knowledge of the classics, jazz, stage musicals and more than sixty years of rock and pop music. The musical extracts include familiar favourites alongside plenty of music you've yet to discover.
Producer: Paul Bajoria.
The third edition of a new globe-trotting poetry series. Poet Helen Mort explores exciting voices from around the world. This week, she hears poems in Macedonian, Old Norse and Russian - and in translation. Reflecting on the phrase 'tracks of time', she discovers how memory and history play a part in the work of these three poets.
Helen travels to Berlin to meet the Macedonian poet Nikola Madzirov. Described as one of most powerful voices in contemporary European poetry, he writes with great lyrical depth, insight and originality. In his collection 'Remnants of Another Age', he reflects on the history of his Balkan homeland and on ideas of shelter and nomadism with a restless, timeless intelligence.
Heading up the North Sea coast to Aberdeen, we hear Scottish poet Ian Crockatt reading his fresh versions of the Old Norse verses of Rognvaldr, Earl of Orkney. The collection, 'Crimsoning the Eagle's Claw', is a treasure trove of vivid snapshots of the life of this twelfth century poet, lover, nobleman and sailor. Like meeting a Viking face-to-face.
Finally, Helen travels to Oxford to meet one of Russia's foremost contemporary poets, Maria Stepanova and her translator, Sasha Dugdale. Stepanova writes formally inventive and thoughtful poetry, teeming with references from her country's cultural memory and political history. Through her journalism and editorship of an independent, crowdfunded site, she is also an important liberal voice.
Producer: Caroline Hughes
A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4.
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4. Followed by Weather.
A retired bicycle repairman is slowly inveigled into helping the son of a former friend deal with a difficult loss. A new short story by Linda Cracknell that captures the awkwardness of two men from different generations skirting around the subject of grief.
Read by Paul Young
Written by Linda Cracknell
Produced by Kirsteen Cameron.
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This week's Bells on Sunday, comes from the church of St Mary Magdalene, Ditcheat in Somerset.
Ditcheat was one of the last great medieval towers to be completed in the county and there were five bells here until 1825, when a sixth was added. All the old bells were scrapped in 1913 and replaced by a new ring of eight which are renowned for their magnificent tone. We hear them now ringing Oxford Bob Triples.
The latest national and international news.
Theologian Dr Jane Williams examines the nature and extent of human freedom.
Recalling her childhood in an Indian boarding school, Jane remembers her unhappiness as a rebellious pupil in a life controlled by bells. She explains that she saw herself "as standing in the great company of revolutionaries, demanding my freedom from the school authorities."
Her rebellion never occurred, but Jane's search for freedom continued.
In this programme, she journeys through the theories of natural selection, psychotherapy and capitalism - along with the poetry of Frost, Cummings and Milton - and discovers that "there is no place of perfect, unconstrained freedom, in which we have entirely what we want. But that does not make us automata: we do have choices about what we will serve."
Jane notes that even Jesus had to make choices. "In choosing to be the Son of God, in every action, Jesus lays aside other choices, but that does not make him less free. On the contrary, it makes him exactly who he is."
Music from Mozart, Elgar, and Prokofiev accompany her journey which culminates in John Donne's climatic poem, Batter my Heart three person'd God, which reveals that freedom is, "paradoxically, only to found in being overpowered by something worth all other kinds of choice."
Presenter: Jane Williams
Producer: Michael Wakelin
A TBI Media production for BBC Radio 4.
Ruth Sanderson meets the farmers who know a thing or two about Northern Ireland's the food of the gods- champ.
Producer: Beatrice Fenton.
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Sunday morning religious news and current affairs programme.
David Walliams makes the Radio 4 Appeal on behalf of Kidscape.
Registered Charity Number 326864
To Give:
- Freephone 0800 404 8144
- Freepost BBC Radio 4 Appeal. (That's the whole address. Please do not write anything else on the front of the envelope). Mark the back of the envelope 'Kidscape'.
- Cheques should be made payable to 'Kidscape'.
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From the Keswick Convention 2017 which takes responding to God with gratitude as its theme. The speaker in the Convention tent is Alistair Begg, a Scot who is Senior Pastor at Parkside Church in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Bible teacher on Truth For Life, heard on the radio and online around the world. Leaders: Peter Maiden and Alison Risbridger. Music leader: Colin Webster. Producer: Ben Collingwood.
Adam Gopnik reflects on why musical theatre makes its makers miserable. He should know - he's just finished an eight week run of a musical he wrote.
He concludes that while films, for example, have a "natural author" in the shape of the director, a musical doesn't and "a seven-person creative team of equals", he says can never be harmonious.
But there's a lot of fun to be had along the way....
Producer: Adele Armstrong.
Nadia Archer of the RSPB recalls volunteering in Manchester on a peregrine watch at the Arndale Centre for Tweet of the Day, where the call of the wild could bring relaxation to a busy city centre.
Tweet of the Day has captivated the Radio 4 audience with its daily 90 seconds of birdsong. But what of the listener to this avian chorus? In this new series of Tweet of the Day, we bring to the airwaves the conversational voices of those who listen to and are inspired by birds. Building on the previous series, a more informal approach to learning alongside a renewed emphasis on encounter with nature and reflection in our relationship with the natural world.
Producer Tom Bonnett.
The Sunday morning magazine programme including a review of the newspapers. Presented by Paddy O'Connell.
Anisha is drawn in, and there is a knot to unravel at the Dower House.
Kirsty Young's castaway is Dr. Kevin Fong. He is a consultant anaesthetist at University College Hospital London, and an expert on space medicine. He is a senior lecturer in Physiology at UCL and the co-director of the Centre for Aviation, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine.
Born to parents who had come to the UK from Mauritius, he grew up in London. His parents put great emphasis on education - which they had both missed out on in their youth.
Kevin's first degree was in astrophysics and he went on to study medicine.
He has combined his love of space with medicine and has spent time working at the Johnson Space Centre in the US.
He has been a consultant anaesthetist since 2010, but has kept pursuing his interests in extreme environments from space to altitude and depth. He has made many television documentaries about his field of interest and gave the 2015 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.
Producer: Sarah Taylor.
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Back for a second week at the New Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham, regulars Barry Cryer and Tim Brooke-Taylor are joined on the panel by Jeremy Hardy and Jan Ravens with Jack Dee in the chair. Piano accompaniment is provided by Colin Sell. Producer - Jon Naismith. It is a BBC Studios production.
"Poverty rather than wealth gives the good things of life their true significance. Home-made bread rubbed with garlic and sprinkled with olive oil, shared - with a flask of wine - between working people, can be more convivial than any feast." So writes Patience Gray in the introduction to her 1986 award winning book 'Honey From A Weed: Fasting & Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, The Cyclades and Apulia'.
To some, Patience's name evokes a masterpiece, one of the most evocative and imaginative food books written in modern times. To others, her name will mean very little; Patience Gray, by her own admission, kept a low profile, living and writing for most of her working life among rural people in Italy, Greece and Catalonia.
Patience, who died in 2005, would have been 100 in 2017. So Sheila Dillon looks back on Patience Gray's life through food with the help of Adam Federman, author of a new biography 'Fasting and Feasting: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray' and food writers Jojo Tulloh and Louise Gray. They hear from the Food Programme archives. From two visits to Patience's home in Puglia recorded by Derek Cooper and Simon Parkes.
Presented by Sheila Dillon
Produced in Bristol by Clare Salisbury.
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Global news and analysis.
The financial crisis following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 led to a swathe of reform, and banks and the City now operate under much stricter compliance regulations.
Has this structural change filtered down to the street below, and brought about significant change to the culture of lavish wining and dining for which the worlds of high finance and insurance became renowned?
Geraint Anderson, once a highly rewarded high flyer in the City himself, meets old contacts in old haunts, and tries to find out if the changes are only skin deep or whether they go deeper.
Producer: Chris Ledgard.
As part of GQT's 70th anniversary celebrations, the team visit gardeners at the four points of the UK compass to explore the incredible variety of climate and environment in this country - something that makes gardening here so endlessly fascinating.
This week it's East v West as Eric Robson is joined by Bob Flowerdew, Anne Swithinbank and Neil Porteous in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, with a wet climate to the very west of the UK, while Peter Gibbs, Christine Walkden, Matthew Wilson and Bunny Guinness set up camp some 400 miles east in Lowestoft, Suffolk, where life is markedly drier.
Both panels answer questions from local residents and explore how garden can thrive in these contrasting extremes.
Produced by Dan Cocker, Hannah Newton and Darby Dorras
Assistant Producer: Laurence Bassett
A Somethin' Else production for BBC Radio 4.
Fi Glover presents conversations about challenging deafness, stammering, and gender stereotypes in the construction industry in the Omnibus edition of the series that proves it's surprising what you hear when you listen.
The Listening Project is a Radio 4 initiative that offers a snapshot of contemporary Britain in which people across the UK volunteer to have a conversation with someone close to them about a subject they've never discussed intimately before. The conversations are being gathered across the UK by teams of producers from local and national radio stations who facilitate each encounter. Every conversation - they're not BBC interviews, and that's an important difference - lasts up to an hour, and is then edited to extract the key moment of connection between the participants. Most of the unedited conversations are being archived by the British Library and used to build up a collection of voices capturing a unique portrait of the UK in the second decade of the millennium. You can learn more about The Listening Project by visiting bbc.co.uk/listeningproject
Producer: Marya Burgess.
Henry James' masterpiece about desire and freedom, dramatised by Linda Marshall Griffiths.
Isabel's unexpected inheritance means that she is free to make her own choice about her destiny. She travels to Italy with her aunt Mrs Touchett and there she becomes close to Madame Merle who introduces her to Gilbert Osmond, a man of no social standing or wealth, a widower with a young daughter. Isabel is inexplicably drawn to him despite the warnings from her cousin Ralph and her aunt.
Directed by Nadia Molinari
The Portrait of a Lady is part of Love Henry James: a series of dramatisations and features celebrating Henry James and his unique insights on love. Love Henry James takes a thrilling, passionate, heart-breaking journey through his novels and his life. Henry James is an extraordinary storyteller. His characters and their inner lives are vividly portrayed. Henry James unlocks the secrets of the human heart.
Ann Patchett discusses her novel Bel Canto, which was awarded both the Orange Prize for Fiction and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Bel Canto is set in an unspecified Latin American country, where insurgents have stormed the vice-president's mansion during a diplomatic party, believing that they will capture the President himself. Unfortunately for the guerrillas, he has stayed home to watch his favourite soap opera, and they are left with a miscellaneous collection of hostages from various nations.
Celebrated soprano Roxane Coss is among those taken hostage and she strikes up a friendship with the opera-mad president of a Japanese electronics company who has long worshipped her from afar.
The novel is based on events in Peru in 1996 when a guerrilla group entered the Japanese ambassador's residence and seized nearly 600 hostages and demanded the release of a number of political prisoners. The resulting siege lasted four months.
In Bookclub Ann Patchett discusses the unlikely comedy in Bel Canto and how she wrote it just before 9/11, which she describes as a lifetime ago.
Presented by James Naughtie and including a group of invited readers.
Presenter : James Naughtie
Interviewed guest : Ann Patchett
Producer : Dymphna Flynn
September's Bookclub choice : The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe (1992).
The fourth edition of this new globe-trotting poetry series. Poet Helen Mort explores exciting voices from around the world. This week, she hears poems in Somali, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese and Polish - and in translation.
Reflecting on the phrase "Close Encounters", she explores how the very stuff of being human - relationships, identity, empathy - play a part in the work of these four distinct poets.
Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf is fast emerging as one of the most outstanding Somali-language poets writing today. Her bold and striking poems are translated by British poet Clare Pollard. They join Helen to talk about the place of poetry in Somali culture and their translation partnership, which came about through the Poetry Translation Centre. With poems from her collection The Sea Migrations.
Helen then travels to Paris to meet the Syrian poet Maram al-Masri and hear poems from her collection Barefoot Souls, which imagines the lives of women who have experienced domestic violence, and from Liberty Walks Naked, al-Masri's response to recent events in Syria.
There's deadpan humour from Angelica Freitas, a brilliantly wry voice from Brazil. She takes a novel approach to exploring female identity in her poem A Woman Goes, and a bittersweet reflection on being alone in I Sleep With Myself.
We also hear a lost poem from the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. It's one of a small number of previously unpublished poems recently discovered among his papers and published in the collection Then Come Back.
Finally, one of the brightest stars in Polish literature - a poet, translator and novelist, Jacek Dehnel. His is an eclectic sort of empathy, with poems about the death of a world-famous musician and a lurid museum exhibit. And we hear his Polish translation of a very famous Philip Larkin poem.
Readers: Raghad Chaar and Alejandro de Mesa
Producer: Caroline Hughes
A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4.
Since the Grenfell Tower fire in June, the architectural dream of Le Corbusier's 'streets in the sky' has, in many minds, become a living nightmare. Every high rise building in the country, and each of their residents, has become embroiled in the Grenfell story. As this debate with its practical and policy considerations continues, High Rise offers a radio meditation on the experience of tower block life.
What has come of that vision of airy existence above the bustle of the streets, with open horizons and light-filled apartments? What future can tower blocks now have in the provision of social and private housing? Who will want to live in them and, more to the point, what happens to the current residents?
In a mosaic of interviews gathered around the country, we hear from Rita in Margate's famous Arlington House, a block her father helped build. "It gleamed like a diamond back then," she says. Nicole, who lives in Cables Wynd House in Leith, featured in the film of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, shares the horror she experienced as a teenager living locked in the sky. We visit Rochdale where residents have mounted a campaign to stop the proposed demolition of their iconic Seven Sisters tower blocks.
In London, Bill speaks of his long, happy years on the notorious Pepys Estate in Deptford. Across the city, JP Ajunonwu, a resident in the iconic Trellick Tower, describes the night of the fire in neighbouring Grenfell Tower. Francesca and her young daughter visit what, until that night, she'd anticipated as being her wonderful new home on the 13th floor of a high rise.
And architectural writer Shumi Bose, who grew up in a tower block in Kolkata, outlines the dreams of the architects and urban planners who designed our modern cityscapes.
Produced by Rebecca Lloyd-Evans and Alan Hall
A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4.
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The latest weather forecast.
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.
On this week's Pick of the Week Sheila McClennon asks what Home means and what would you be willing to suffer in order to stay there?
We hear about a family in Aleppo and from those forced to move after the Partition of India.
There are women behaving badly - Henry James's Daisy Miller, and unconventionally - fighting on the Soviet Front Line in World War Two.
David Sedaris gets a sinking feeling in a New York lift, Ian McMillan explains why he's the Earliest of the Early Birds, and there are not only vampire bats - but zombie caterpillars as well.
Produced in Salford by Cecile Wright.
Jill makes an announcement, and Brian is in full voice.
The world of sport is in crisis. England's king of cricket sleaze Dave Podmore has lost his mojo. Has Brexit robbed Pod of his trademark salty wisdom? They didn't put this on the side of that bus.
Written by Christopher Douglas, Andrew Nickolds and Nick Newman
Produced by Jon Harvey
Executive Producer: Richard Wilson
A Hat Trick production for BBC Radio 4.
As part of their final Media Degree assessment at NUC in Northern Ireland, three final year university students - Natalie Driver, JJ Collins and Vic Grant - decide to make a podcast about a cold case which happened in Colecastle fourteen years ago. On Saturday April 26th 2003, Toby Ellis was minding his four month old nephew, Derek Ellis. He nipped into his local newsagents and left the pram outside on the street. He claimed he left the child for no longer than two minutes. During this time, the baby was abducted and six days later the infant's body was discovered buried in a nearby wooded area, Mountfort. Cause of death, a blow to the head. No one was ever charged with the murder and the case has remained on-going.
The first episode of Hiding Out is a podcast hosted by one of the students, Natalie; she reveals she is currently in hiding fearing for her safety. Having published their first podcast on The Murder at Colecastle, her fellow student Vic had received a call from someone who had heard the podcast claiming they had new evidence about the day the child was abducted. Vic and JJ met with the source. That was 3 days ago and no one has seen or heard from either Vic or JJ since... The only contact Natalie has received is a text sent from her classmate JJ's phone which reads "We're watching you. Stop this now." Natalie knows their disappearance is clearly linked to digging into the murder of Derek Ellis. If she finds them, she may finally find the truth of what happened in Colecastle. Natalie's nightly podcasts of 'Hiding Out' are attracting more and more interest - #whereisnatalie and #findvicandjj are rife with speculation. Are these three students actually in danger? Or - as their media lecturer believes - is this all an elaborate media hoax?
Gerard Stembridge ..... Writer
Gemma McMullan ..... Series Producer & Director.
Roger Bolton asks if Radio 5 Live was right to interview a controversial columnist, discusses BBC plans to reinvent audio, and finds out how to relax a Prom.
Kevin Myers was the subject of enormous public backlash after he published a column in the Irish edition of the Sunday Times that many saw as anti-semitic. So should Radio 5 Live have invited him onto Emma Barnett's 5 Live daily for an interview? He apologised, and tried to explain his position, but Feedback listeners are split on whether the interview was well judged and sufficiently robust.
Radio 4's Partition Voices coincides with the 70th anniversary of the partition of India, bringing the history to life with often heartbreaking stories from people who experienced it first hand and are now in the UK. The presenter, Kavita Puri, discusses why these stories are only now being heard.
In the annual plan published a few weeks ago, the BBC unveiled ambitious plans to "reinvent and grow audio". But with impressive audience figures released on Thursday, radio seems to be so far so good - so what changes are on the horizon? And what does "reinventing audio" actually mean? Roger finds out by speaking with Andrew Caspari, the BBC's acting controller of Radio and Music, Multiplatform.
Finally, this year's Proms have brought a very different kind of performance to the Royal Albert Hall - the first ever "relaxed prom", designed for children and adults with autism, sensory and communication impairments and learning disabilities. Feedback finds out more about the creation of this unique event - and what the audience made of the experience.
A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4.
Matthew Bannister on
The actor Robert Hardy, best known for his roles in All Creatures Great and Small and the Harry Potter films and for playing Winston Churchill.
David Jones who wrote the Daedalus column in New Scientist magazine and came up with an endless stream of inventive and challenging experiments.
Jeanne Moreau the iconic French actress who was actually half English.
Mark Wilkinson - the furniture designer once described as 'the Mozart of the kitchen cabinet'
And Sam Shepard, the actor and playwright whose work redefined the landscape of the American West.
Tower blocks are under intense scrutiny. So what's the best way to run them? Matthew Gwyther visits Manchester and discovers this is not just about architecture. These blocks are also complex communities of people. So what's the future now for this key sector in our housing and commerce?
Producer: Chris Bowlby
Editor: Penny Murphy.
Weekly political discussion and analysis with MPs, experts and commentators.
True stories told live in in the USA: Adam Gopnik introduces stories with a science flavour from the Lincoln Center in New York City.
The Moth is an acclaimed not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling based in the USA. Since 1997, it has celebrated both the raconteur and the storytelling novice, who has lived through something extraordinary and yearns to share it. Originally formed by the writer George Dawes Green as an intimate gathering of friends on a porch in Georgia (where moths would flutter in through a hole in the screen), and then recreated in a New York City living room, The Moth quickly grew to produce immensely popular events at theatres and clubs around New York City and later around the USA, the UK and other parts of the world.
The Moth has presented more than 15,000 stories, told live and without notes, to standing-room-only crowds worldwide. The Moth podcast is downloaded over 27 million times a year.
Featuring true stories told live on stage without scripts, from the humorous to the heart-breaking.
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Jay Allison and Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and is distributed by the Public Radio Exchange.
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4. Followed by Weather.
Terry Christian was the infamous presenter of C4's The Word, and he's a voracious reader - a book a week. He chooses Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, his partly autobiographical novel of a Midwestern childhood which brings back memories of the sheer happiness of the summer holidays.
Dr Kevin Fong is a consultant anaesthetist who's an expert in space medicine, and also a TV presenter. His choice is The Humans, an extraordinary book by Matt Haig, which raises questions about alien life, and our life.
Presenter Harriett Gilbert chooses Howards End is On The Landing by Susan Hill, about reading the books you already have in the house but have never opened. It inspires true confessions of classic authors never read..
Producer Beth O'Dea.
The latest shipping forecast.
The latest shipping forecast.
The latest news from BBC Radio 4.
Spiritual reflection to start the day from the Festival City of Edinburgh with The Rev Lezley Stewart of Greyfriars Kirk.
The latest news about food, farming and the countryside.
The latest weather forecast for farmers.
In the first of five Tweet of the Days this week, the BBC's security correspondent Frank Gardner recalls listening to great northern divers on television programme by Ludwig Koch, as a boy.
Tweet of the Day has captivated the Radio 4 audience with its daily 90 seconds of birdsong. But what of the listener to this avian chorus? In this new series of Tweet of the Day, we bring to the airwaves the conversational voices of those who listen to and are inspired by birds. Building on the previous series, a more informal approach to learning alongside a renewed emphasis on encounter with nature and reflection in our relationship with the natural world.
Producer Tom Bonnett.
News and current affairs. Includes Sports Desk, Weather and Thought for the Day.
First-hand accounts of the turmoil and violence in the immediate weeks after India's partition. On the 70th anniversary of partition, Kavita Puri hears remarkable testimonies from both British Asians and the Colonial British. The division of the Indian subcontinent into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan resulted in one of the largest forced migrations the world has ever seen. Over 10 million people sought refuge in one or other of the new dominions. Unspeakable violence accompanied the displacement, claiming up to a million lives, while tens of thousands of women suffered rape and abduction. Many of those who experienced the chaos have kept their silence ever since, such was their trauma. Yet those taking part in this series speak with remarkable clarity about the tumultuous events, whose legacy endures to this day within Britain's South Asian communities.
Programme 2 hears about the weeks immediately after partition took place. British India had been divided along religious lines and millions now found themselves on the wrong side of the border. Muslims moved to Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs in the opposite direction. We hear eyewitness accounts of painful goodbyes, separations, and epic journeys; of ambushed trains crossing the new border, filled with corpses; of how the fertile plains of the Punjab became killing fields; the shocking ordeal of women, who risked kidnapping and sexual violence; as well as stories of courage and humanity during this turbulent time.
Producer: Mike Gallagher, Tim Smith, Ant Adeane
Academic Consultants:-
Dr Joya Chatterji, Professor of South Asian History, University of Cambridge
Dr Andrew Whitehead, Honorary Professor, University of Nottingham
Radio 4's Partition Voices recordings will be archived in full in the British Library Sound Archive.
A legacy from his uncle gives 13 year old Thomas Gainsborough the means to leave Sudbury and travel to London where the arts and crafts are flourishing. He studies engraving with Gravelot and finds work decorating the entertainment kiosks in Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.
Reader: Julian Rhind-Tutt
Abridged by Libby Spurrier
Directed by Kate McAll
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.
Programme that offers a female perspective on the world.
Meera Syal stars as Family Liaison Officer Jackie Hartwell. For the tenth series, Scott Cherry's intimate drama once again focusses on family crises and what it must be like to lose a loved one. The role of the family liaison officer is always both to support the victim and keep a watchful eye out for clues. Many suspicious deaths are the result of family troubles.
In this series, In this series Karla's husband seems to be the victim of a deliberately set fire, while one of Jackie's previous cases, involving the death of a young prostitute, refuses to go away. With a lack of progress on the case, the victim's father tries to hunt down the killer himself.
Written by Scott Cherry
Produced and Directed by Clive Brill
A Brill production for BBC Radio 4.
Neil Francis loves the outdoors. There's nowhere else he'd rather be than stretched out in a field gazing at the sky, with his dog Bouncer by his side. From his front room he can see the hills that he used to play in as a child. But for now, he can't get up them.
25 years ago, an accident left Neil paralysed from the chest down and since then he's had to rely on 24hr care at home. His wheelchair gives him some freedom but it can only take him so far. Uneven paths, muddy fields and steep hills are out of bounds and being trapped in the same position day after day, for over two decades, is taking its toll. His spine is curving and he endures debilitating seizures.
Neil needs to find a way out of pain and back into the landscape that he loves. He discovers there's a wheelchair that could help him, but it costs a lot of money - too much money. It doesn't look like he can get it. But then, enter two guardian angels....
Presenter Grace Dent. Producer Nicola Humphries.
Further information
SSAFA - The Armed Forces Charity
www.ssafa.org.uk
Southern Spinal Injuries Trust
www.ssit.org.
Journalist and comedy writer David Quantick has met and interviewed hundreds of people. What were his first impressions, how have they changed and does it all matter?
In this second programme (of four), there are stories about David Bowie, Fidel Castro and his dad, among others.
Producer: Steve Doherty
A Giddy Goat production for BBC Radio 4.
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.
On this day in 1917, the dramatist Basil Hood died, having suffered from nervous exhaustion, and Captain Lumley returns to Folkestone a more fragile man.
Written by Katie Hims
Directed by Allegra McIlroy
Editor: Jessica Dromgoole.
News and discussion of consumer affairs.
The latest weather forecast.
Analysis of news and current affairs.
A story of modern art through the written word. A new five-part series exploring the art and politics of the artist's manifesto - from the Futurists to Fluxus, from Dada to the present.
When Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto in 1848, their rallying cry set the tone and the rhetoric of movements and revolutions to follow - in art as well as politics. Artists adopted the form, with spectacular results.
The artist's manifesto is where art and politics meet. They gave rise, and political purpose, to some of the great avant-garde art movements of the 20th century. But they also took politics into new realms of possibility, transformation and imagination. Simultaneously apocalyptic and utopian, artists' manifestos demanded new worlds, proclaimed new communities and upset the order of things.
Over five programmes, artists, historians, authors, architects and cultural critics explore how the manifesto became a creative call-to-arms and ask whether, in this new age of discontent, it still has a place in the world today. From Futurism, Dada and the Surrealists - via the neo-avant garde movements of the 1960s, Situationism, Fluxus and Auto-Destructive art - to the present, including Gilbert and George and the Stuckists, the International Necronautical Society, Black Dada and Grayson Perry's Red Alan manifesto.
Contributors include Grayson Perry, Gilbert and George, Miele Laderman Ukeles, Tom McCarthy, Hannah Higgins, Gustav Metzger, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Charles Jencks.
Readings by Harriet Walter
Produced by Simon Hollis and Jo Wheeler
A Brook Lapping production for BBC Radio 4.
Written by Emily Steel and inspired by real life experiences.
Baby Frank is just hours old when his breathing becomes difficult and he's whisked from his mother's arms. The situation is critical. Hours turn into days as the doctors try to make him better. Whilst they wait Frank's parents tell make-believe stories of their baby son and his pal Bear, as they desperately long for a happy ending.
A truthful and emotional drama about motherhood, hope and endless love.
Directed by Helen Perry
A BBC Cymru Wales Production.
Eve Myles is best known for playing Gwen Cooper in Torchwood, alongside her roles in Broadchurch, Belonging and Frankie.
(6/13)
There must be something musical in the water in West Yorkshire, because that's where all three of today's Counterpoint competitors hail from. Paul Gambaccini is in Salford for the latest contest, putting them through their paces on every aspect of music from Wagner and Verdi to Bruce Springsteen and Bowie.
As always, they'll be tested on the range of their general musical knowledge, as well as having to select an unseen musical special subject on which to answer their own individual questions - with no prior warning of the categories.
Producer: Paul Bajoria.
In the slums of Wakaliga, Uganda, a group of self-taught filmmakers run one of the world's most unlikely movie studios. Known as Wakaliwood they have released fifty-two feature films in ten years, with kit built from scrap metal and old car jacks.
Despite this, their distinctive brand of kung fu action has found a global audience far beyond Kampala, with trailers going viral on YouTube and festivals around the world putting on sold-out screenings.
Filmmaker Isis Thompson travels to Uganda to experience life on the set of the latest Wakaliwood production, and find out how the tiny studio's unexpected success is changing the fortunes of its cast and crew.
Photo of Wakaliwood action scene by Tess Williams
Presenter: Isis Thompson
Producer: Olivia Humphreys
A Somethin' Else production for BBC Radio 4.
The Mind V The Brain.
It's one of the hardest problems in neuroscience. How do the chemical processes and electric signals produced by our brains, result in the complex and varied experiences and sense of self, that we might describe as our mind? Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined on stage by comedian Katy Brand, and neuroscientists Professor Uta Frith, and Professor Sophie Scott to ask whether the mind is simply a product of the biology of our brain, or is there more to it than that? Can you have a brain without a mind, and is the mind simply an unexpected consequence, an emergent property, of our highly evolved and sophisticated brain. They'll also be tackling the question of free will, and whether we really have any, and if you could, in theory simulate a fully working brain, with all its signals and complexity, would a mind naturally emerge?
Producer: Alexandra Feachem.
Eddie Mair with interviews, context and analysis.
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.
Just A Minute is 50 years old this year! Nicholas Parsons has been hosting since day one, and kicks off the first episode of the new series with a cracking line-up: Paul Merton, Gyles Brandreth, Andy Hamilton and Sue Perkins.
Hayley Sterling blows the whistle and it was produced by Victoria Lloyd.
Just A Minute is a BBC Studios production.
Alistair's mind is elsewhere, and Kirsty fears the worst.
Arts news, interviews and reviews.
In the modern Western world, we take free speech for granted. We presume it is our age-old inheritance. But it's not. In this three-part series, historian Professor Fara Dabhoiwala explores how freedom of speech came into being, with extracts from key flashpoints in the past. This second programme focuses on sex.
After religion, sex has always been the greatest taboo. For most of our past, explicit writing about sex was extremely rare and almost none of it was in English, but in Latin, Greek, French, or Italian, which only the educated elite could read. And it was written out by hand, not printed or widely circulated.
But this began to change around 1700, when the first sexually explicit works in English began to be printed and sold in bookshops. Within a few decades, London was the centre of a clandestine but booming trade in what became known as pornography - a word that was only coined around 1800.
Fara Dabhoiwala explores the 18th-century explosion of free speech about sex, and its implications for our modern debates about pornography. The programme includes extracts from works we might still find shocking today - from the 17th century erotic text The School of Venus, to Fanny Hill -- and Ancient and Modern Pederasty, a work in favour of homosexual love that was so thoroughly suppressed that its contents can now only be reconstructed through court records.
Contributors include Professor Judith Hawley of Royal Holloway, University of London; Rae Langton, Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge; and Hal Gladfelder, Professor of Literature at Manchester University.
Fara Dabhoiwala is the author of The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution. He is a Senior Research Scholar at Princeton University and a life fellow of All Souls and Exeter College, Oxford. His current projects include a history of free speech and a history of global English.
Presented by Fara Dabhoiwala
Dramatic readings by Emily Bevan, Ewan Bailey, Jonathan Keeble and Oliver Soden
Academic Research by Sally Holloway
Produced by Elizabeth Burke
Executive Producer: Jo Coombs
A Loftus production for BBC Radio 4.
On December the 14th last year the BBC's Mike Thomson awoke to a desperate voicemail message. It came from a frightened mother of three in besieged East Aleppo. Head teacher, Om Modar, who had been in regular contact with Mike, was pleading for help. Syrian government forces were closing in on the rebel-held area and bombs were falling around the shelter she shared with dozens of petrified children. Her voice, crackling with fear, said: "Please, please help us get out of Aleppo by safe corridor.....we are terrified.....please help us." That was the last Mike heard from Om. Months of silence followed. Finally, he became convinced she was dead. Then out of the blue came a two-line text. It revealed the fate of Om Modar and led Mike to near the Syrian border.
Brett Westwood investigates our obsession with bats, at a Gothic mansion at night where bats swirl around him. From Dracula to Batman and Goth, bats have infiltrated our culture and our psyches, despite the persisting sense that they are in some way alien and unknowable. But they are in fact one of our most successful and social mammals, and those who work with them have a passion for them.
Contributors: Jeremy Deller, Christopher Frayling, Darren Mait, Daniel Flew, Will Brooker, Merlin Tuttle, The Neighbours are Bats performance project. Readings by Greta Scacchi. Location recording at National Trust Tyntesfield.
Producer: Beth O'Dea
Photograph of Lesser Horseshoe Bat courtesy of the Bat Conservation Trust, (c) John Black/www.bats.org.uk.
In-depth reporting and analysis from a global perspective.
Amanda Craig's state-of-the-nation novel, read by Amanda Lawrence.
Quentin and Lottie Bredin's marriage is over. They've also lost their jobs in the recession. As a result, they have been forced to rent out their London home (for an extortionate sum) and moved their family to Devon to live for a year in the hope that the house's value will rise enough to allow them to divorce and buy a flat each.
Lottie has fallen for life in Devon, especially now that she has found herself a good job working for a local architecture firm. But Quentin is less content. To distract him from his woes, he decides to investigate the gruesome murder of the former tenant of their temporary home, which ultimately leads to the revelation of some very dark secrets.
Lottie's son, Xan, has also found the move from London beneficial - it's given him the chance to stand on his own two feet (with his first job, working in a pie factory) and enough distance to deal with the disappointment of not getting into Cambridge. With renewed confidence, he re-writes his Personal Statement and applies to universities in London instead.
Reader: Amanda Lawrence
Writer: Amanda Craig
Abridger: Robin Brooks
Producer: Kirsteen Cameron.
Countertenor Christopher Robson reflects on his life in music - from playing in a Salvation Army band, via the stage of the Coliseum singing Handel, to working with Damon Albarn.
Christopher Robson found his voice by chance during a singing lesson as a teenager. Up to that point he had proved himself a musical child, playing cornet in a Salvation Army band and singing during services, sometimes reluctantly and often with his brother Nigel. But from the moment he discovered falsetto - the ability to soar above the usual range of the male voice - his ambitions led in a different direction. What followed resembles, at times, the life of a rock star rather than an opera singer.
In this intimate portrait, recorded at the London Coliseum, Christopher looks back on his rocky route into the music business, roles in iconic productions, such as Nicholas Hytner's Xerxes, his life in Germany and collaborating with Damon Albarn on his opera Dr Dee.
Produced by Alan Hall
A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4.
Josie Long hears stories of bearing witness - from glimpsing the moment a parent changes to escaping a violent storm.
Witness
Featuring Lois Gibson
Produced by Andrea Rangecroft
Tornado
Featuring David Walker, Lindsay Martindale and Tobey Walker
Produced by Ibby Caputo
Music SFX from theming, digifishmusic, wjoojoo, davethetech, fridobeck, InspectorJ and Robinhood76
Scaffold
Featuring Mark Thomas
Produced by Sarah Cuddon
Series Producer: Eleanor McDowall
A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4.
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4. Followed by Weather.
The latest shipping forecast.
The latest shipping forecast.
The latest news from BBC Radio 4.
Spiritual reflection to start the day from the Festival City of Edinburgh with The Rev Lezley Stewart of Greyfriars Kirk.
The latest news about food, farming and the countryside.
In the second of his Tweet of the Day's BBC's security correspondent Frank Gardner recalls the song of a golden oriole in a Bahrain date grove.
Tweet of the Day has captivated the Radio 4 audience with its daily 90 seconds of birdsong. But what of the listener to this avian chorus? In this new series of Tweet of the Day, we bring to the airwaves the conversational voices of those who listen to and are inspired by birds. Building on the previous series, a more informal approach to learning alongside a renewed emphasis on encounter with nature and reflection in our relationship with the natural world.
Producer Tom Bonnett.
News and current affairs. Including Sports Desk, Weather and Thought for the Day.
Jan Morris records her thoughts on the United States of America. Illustrated with her very personal choice of American music, the ninety-year-old author looks back over a lifetime of writing about, visiting and living in the USA and shares with us what she believes was good and great about the Republic. It's an affectionate, tender and sometimes, she admits, sentimental tribute to a country and people she admires. Tinged with nostalgia, this also sounds like Jan Morris's 'letter to America'. She hopes, indeed believes, that the qualities and values that made America great, in her view, should and will endure, despite its current period of upheaval and uncertainty.
Why are we drawn to hope? Bettany Hughes visits a Buddhist Temple, The Palace of Westminster and the UK's largest food bank to find out why we're hard-wired to hope for the best.
With Classicist Paul Cartledge, Buddhist teacher and author of The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down Haemin Sunim, Conservative MP for Spelthorne Kwasi Kwarteng, and Michael Nixon and Brian Edden from the Newcastle West End Foodbank.
Producer: Dixi Stewart.
After his apprenticeship in London, Gainsborough returns to Suffolk. Now grown up, he is married to a woman with a private income. A confident and accomplished artist, he begins to attract important portrait commissions.
Reader: Julian Rhind-Tutt
Abridged by Libby Spurrier
Directed by Kate McAll
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.
Programme that offers a female perspective on the world.
Meera Syal stars as Family Liaison Officer Jackie Hartwell. For the tenth series, Scott Cherry's intimate drama once again focusses on family crises and what it must be like to lose a loved one. The role of the family liaison officer is always both to support the victim and keep a watchful eye out for clues. Many suspicious deaths are the result of family troubles.
In this series, In this series Karla's husband seems to be the victim of a deliberately set fire, while one of Jackie's previous cases, involving the death of a young prostitute, refuses to go away. With a lack of progress on the case, the victim's father tries to hunt down the killer himself.
Written by Scott Cherry
Produced and Directed by Clive Brill
A Brill production for BBC Radio 4.
We know the cuckoo for its song and think of it as the harbinger of spring. But we also know it as a rascally bird that abandons its young to the care of unwitting foster parents. Such a double life has ensured that the cuckoo has had a substantial place in the culture of all the countries across Europe and Asia where it comes to breed. In addition, observers, natural historians and scientists have long puzzled over the bird's secretive behaviour and habits - how do they do what they do, where do they go when they are not here, why are we losing them in England? Brett Westwood in the company of various field workers who have spent lifetimes trying to figure out cuckoos explores the rich and tangled life of the bird. With Nick Davies, Jenny York, Mark Cocker, and Chris Hewson and readings by Anton Lesser and a gone-cuckoo song by Hanna Tuulikki. Producer: Tim Dee.
Highlights from Front Row's Queer Icons project, presented by Alan Carr.
With guests including Mary Portas, Olly Alexander, Christine and the Queens, Paris Lees, Maggi Hambling, Rebecca Root, A.Dot, Stella Duffy and the Oscar-winning writer of Moonlight, Tarell Alvin McCraney.
Celebrating LGBTQ culture from the poetry of Sappho to the songs of Frank Ocean, we've asked guests to champion a piece of LGBTQ artwork that is special to them - one that has significance in their lives.
Will Young picks the Joan Armatrading song that inspired him to come out; Christine and the Queens talks about Jean Genet's Our Lady Of The Flowers; and Sir Antony Sher reveals his regrets about not being out publicly when he starred in Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy.
For the full interviews head to Front Row's Queer Icons website - just click on the links below - where you can hear Queer Icons from Neil MacGregor, Asifa Lahore, Colm Toibin, Tony Kushner, Emma Donoghue, Nicholas Hytner and many more.
Presenter: Alan Carr
Readers: Lorelei King and Simon Russell Beale
Producer: Timothy Prosser.
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.
On this day in 1917, at the Conference of Modern Churchmen, Canon Glazebrook described socialism as sharing Christian virtues, while in Folkestone, Alice Macknade feels less than charitable.
Written by Katie Hims
Directed by Allegra McIlroy
Editor: Jessica Dromgoole.
Consumer phone-in.
The latest weather forecast.
Analysis of news and current affairs.
A story of modern art through the written word. A new five-part series exploring the art and politics of the artist's manifesto - from the Futurists to Fluxus, from Dada to the present.
When Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto in 1848, their rallying cry set the tone and the rhetoric of movements and revolutions to follow - in art as well as politics. Artists adopted the form, with spectacular results.
The artist's manifesto is where art and politics meet. They gave rise, and political purpose, to some of the great avant-garde art movements of the 20th century. But they also took politics into new realms of possibility, transformation and imagination. Simultaneously apocalyptic and utopian, artists' manifestos demanded new worlds, proclaimed new communities and upset the order of things.
Over five programmes, artists, historians, authors, architects and cultural critics explore how the manifesto became a creative call-to-arms and ask whether, in this new age of discontent, it still has a place in the world today. From Futurism, Dada and the Surrealists - via the neo-avant garde movements of the 1960s, Situationism, Fluxus and Auto-Destructive art - to the present, including Gilbert and George and the Stuckists, the International Necronautical Society, Black Dada and Grayson Perry's Red Alan manifesto.
Contributors include Grayson Perry, Gilbert and George, Miele Laderman Ukeles, Tom McCarthy, Hannah Higgins, Gustav Metzger, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Charles Jencks.
Readings by Harriet Walter
Produced by Simon Hollis and Jo Wheeler
A Brook Lapping production for BBC Radio 4.
Set in August 1968, against a backdrop of worldwide popular protest, Simon and Bruce - two 16 year-old teenagers from Manchester - travel to the fabled Soviet Pioneer Camp of Artek in Russia. They're off for a week of sun, sea and international solidarity, but will their political summer be too hot to handle?
MAY THERE ALWAYS BE SUNSHINE
by Alan Pollock
Producer/Director: David Ian Neville.
Can a Shaman cure writer's block? David Greig goes on a very personal quest in an attempt to find out.
David Greig is one of our most respected and successful playwrights. He's also the Artistic Director of the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh.
But he is suffering from writer's block; he is 'exhausted, like a mined out mine'. He's tried many a cure, without success, and now he wants to visit a Shaman to see if there is a solution to be found somewhere in the spirit world.
As quests go, it's slightly odd, sometimes light-hearted but serious in parts...
Producer: Karen Gregor.
Award winning political interviewers Alice Thomson and Rachel Sylvester take leading figures from politics, business and the arts back to their childhood towns and cities.
The actress Frances Barber, whose work ranges from the RSC to Doctor Who, Inspector Morse and Silk, grew up on a Wolverhampton estate. Her father ran a betting shop and her mother was a school dinner lady. She was one of six children, and the only one to go to grammar school and university.
Frances explores the Wolverhampton of her childhood, where Enoch Powell was her MP, and discusses how her own left wing and pro-European views were shaped by her upbringing and the place where she grew up.
Producer: Chris Ledgard.
Stephen Fry nominates his hero P.G Wodehouse, a writer who he says simply cheers him up like no one else. Fry wrote to his hero when he was a schoolboy and his most treasured possession is a signed photograph which reads: "To Stephen Fry, All the best, P. G. Wodehouse."
P.G Wodehouse was a self-made man, he began as a bank clerk, married a chorus girl and was interned by the Nazis. He wrote some of the most entertaining novels, stories, plays and lyrics of the twentieth century and created enduring characters; the most popular being Reginald Jeeves and Bertie Wooster.
Stephen Fry makes the case for why P.G Wodehouse is a great life. To help him he is joined by Dr Sophie Ratcliffe Associate Professor in English, University of Oxford and author of 'PG Wodehouse - A life in Letters'.
The presenter is Matthew Parris and the producer is Perminder Khatkar.
Eddie Mair with interviews, context and analysis.
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.
The globetrotting, trash-picking, aisle-rolling storyteller is back with more words of wit and wisdom. The series ends with an essay about the wilder end of his fashion sense, The Perfect Fit, and a lively audience question and answer session.
With sardonic wit and incisive social critiques, David Sedaris has become one of America's pre-eminent humour writers. The great skill with which he slices through cultural euphemisms and political correctness proves that he is a master of satire and one of the most observant writers addressing the human condition today.
David Sedaris's first book, Barrel Fever (1994), which included The SantaLand Diaries. was a critical and commercial success, as were his follow-up efforts, Naked (1997), Holidays on Ice (1997) and Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000). He became known for his bitingly funny recollections of his youth, family life and travels, making semi-celebrities out of his parents and siblings.
David Sedaris has been nominated for three Grammy Awards for Best Spoken Word and Best Comedy Album. A feature film adaptation of his story C.O.G. was released after a premier at the Sundance Film Festival (2013). He has been a contributor to BBC Radio 4 since 1996.
Producer: Steve Doherty
A Giddy Goat production for BBC Radio 4.
Oliver receives an invitation, and Shula starts to wonder.
Arts news, interviews and reviews.
What do Indian cows, Russian CD-ROMs and Italian refrigeration have in common? They're all symptoms of a massive problem with measuring greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, a problem that could be a bigger threat to the Paris climate agreement than President Donald Trump.
BBC Environment Correspondent Matt McGrath investigates the Cinderella world of carbon accounting and uncovers serious flaws in the way that countries measure and report their emissions. There are huge uncertainties - plus or minus 100% for some greenhouse gases - and gaping holes in the reporting of some of the world's biggest polluters. Potent warming gases that are supposed to be banned are still appearing in the atmosphere and there's evidence of blatant cheating in some national greenhouse gas reporting.
These big gaps in the Book of Carbon, Matt discovers, could unravel the Paris deal from within. If greenhouse gases can't be measured accurately, reported honestly and verified independently, then many fear that trust will rapidly evaporate and the Paris goal to limit the rise in global temperatures to well below two degrees Celsius this century will fail.
Producer: Fiona Hill.
News, views and information for people who are blind or partially sighted.
Dr Mark Porter presents a series that aims to demystify perplexing health issues.
In-depth reporting and analysis from a global perspective.
Amanda Craig's state-of-the-nation novel, read by Amanda Lawrence.
Quentin and Lottie Bredin's marriage is over. They've also lost their jobs in the recession. As a result, they have been forced to rent out their London home (for an extortionate sum) and moved their family to Devon to live for a year in the hope that their house's value will rise enough to allow them to divorce and buy a flat each.
Lottie has fallen for life in Devon, especially now that she has found herself a good job working for a local architect. But Quentin is less content. To distract him from his woes, he digs deeper into the gruesome murder of the former tenant of their temporary home, and makes several shocking discoveries.
Reader: Amanda Lawrence
Writer: Amanda Craig
Abridger: Robin Brooks
Producer: Kirsteen Cameron.
We seem to be living in a world of polarised opinions giving rise to increasingly angry exchanges on television, print and of course social media. Aleks Krotoski asks how online anger works and is it a symptom or the cause of the problem.
An enormous Chinese study demonstrated that angry content is the most shared across the web while US researchers have asserted that while we might not be any angrier than in the past we encounter much more angering content than ever before and that anger lingers priming us for the net encounter.
Aleks makes the comparison with another increasingly congested space that of our roads; an environment where similar mechanisms of anonymity and depersonalisation are at play. She concludes by discussing the social role of anger and why so many groups have begun to rely on it to get their way.
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4. Followed by Weather.
The latest shipping forecast.
The latest shipping forecast.
The latest news from BBC Radio 4.
Spiritual reflection to start the day from the Festival City of Edinburgh with The Rev Lezley Stewart of Greyfriars Kirk.
The latest news about food, farming and the countryside.
High up in the rain-forests of Papua New Guinea the BBC's Frank Gardner recalls hearing the King of Saxony Bird of Paradise for Tweet of the Day.
Tweet of the Day has captivated the Radio 4 audience with its daily 90 seconds of birdsong. But what of the listener to this avian chorus? In this new series of Tweet of the Day, we bring to the airwaves the conversational voices of those who listen to and are inspired by birds. Building on the previous series, a more informal approach to learning alongside a renewed emphasis on encounter with nature and reflection in our relationship with the natural world.
Producer Tom Bonnett.
Morning news and current affairs. Including Sports Desk, Weather and Thought for the Day.
Val McDermid presents the second of two programmes charting the history of same-sex relationships in Britain.
"I know who I am, but I have to keep it to myself."
"I find I'm living a lie all day long."
"I've known girls who've taken their own lives because the woman they love has finished the affair."
The stories of gay men and women from the past century are deeply sad, and moving testimony to the way persecution has dogged the lives of homosexual men and women - and continues to blight them, even in the days of equal marriage.
In this radio history, novelist Val McDermid, herself in a long-term lesbian partnership, explores the story of same-sex love. From the molly-houses of 18th century London, where men met to enjoy same-sex company, dancing and drinking in relative safety, to the moment in 1967 when consenting men in private might have a sexual relationship without fear of the Police knocking at the door.
In this concluding episode, Val traces the story of same-sex relationships from the height of Victorian persecution, through the trials of playwright Oscar Wilde and novelist Radclyffe Hall, to the relative sexual freedom enjoyed by gay men and women during the interwar period when the recent birth of psychoanalysis brought renewed attention to people's emotional and sexual make-up.
Yet after the two world wars, homosexual men found themselves again pursued by police in a renewed crackdown. And even when Sir John Wolfenden issued his celebrated report that led to the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, the terms in which he discussed same-sex relationships were, to say the least, judgemental. "I don't think any of us who signed this report want to be thought of as approving or condoning in a moral sense homosexual behaviour," he told the BBC, "The churches don't - they say it's sin."
And yet, at Edinburgh's Gay Pride parade, Val McDermid is delighted to meet a group of homosexual Episcopalians celebrating the newly-granted permission to marry their partners in church. From shame to Pride in a mere half century.
Producer: Simon Elmes
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.
Gainsborough moves to Bath where having your portrait painted was the favourite pastime of many visitors to the city. Always keen to make money where he can, he also takes full advantage of the flourishing buy-to-let market.
Reader: Julian Rhind-Tutt
Abridged by Libby Spurrier
Directed by Kate McAll
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.
Programme that offers a female perspective on the world.
Meera Syal stars as Family Liaison Officer Jackie Hartwell. For the tenth series, Scott Cherry's intimate drama once again focusses on family crises and what it must be like to lose a loved one. The role of the family liaison officer is always both to support the victim and keep a watchful eye out for clues. Many suspicious deaths are the result of family troubles.
In this series, In this series Karla's husband seems to be the victim of a deliberately set fire, while one of Jackie's previous cases, involving the death of a young prostitute, refuses to go away. With a lack of progress on the case, the victim's father tries to hunt down the killer himself.
Written by Scott Cherry
Produced and Directed by Clive Brill
A Brill production for BBC Radio 4.
The balancing act of motivating their pupils while playing pranks on their fellow staff. Enter the art room at your peril... Introduced by Fi Glover. Another conversation in the series that proves it's surprising what you hear when you listen.
Producer: Marya Burgess.
Stephen K Amos investigates the incredible true story of Ras Prince Monolulu, the first black man ever to appear on British TV screens.
Standing tall in his billowing robes, lions paws swing from his neck and ostrich feathers adorn his hair. He shouts his catch phrase to an eager crowd, "I gotta 'Orse, I gotta 'Orse to beat the favourite." His smile is wide, his eyes full of spark and secrets, and the crowd is captivated.
Monolulu made his fame on the race courses of England in the 1920s but soon became a national treasure enchanting the nation until his death in the 1960s. But today his story has fallen through the cracks of history. There's no blue plaque and no museum. So who was this man? Where did he come from? What drove him to fame and how did he charm the nation for over forty years?
Comedian Stephen K Amos sets out to discover the incredible truth behind this mystical character, meeting people who remember the Prince and the vigilant detectives striving to get to the bottom of his story. The tale takes us from Ethiopia to Honolulu, from Germany to Soho.
Lifting the gossamer webs of Monolulu's carefully woven stories, Stephen reveals the truth of this man and finds than it's even stranger than fiction. It's a story of invented exotic identities and the struggle for survival.
Producer: Claire Crofton
A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4.
A second series of the sitcom about three women who meet during cancer treatment and start going to salsa class together to maintain their friendship. As they adjust to life after cancer they realise that they've all changed. This second series begins as Jill has left her husband and son to live at her new boyfriends' parent's house, Camille is planning a huge life change and Chippy has a new live-in wannabe step-father in the shape of Gordon from their salsa class.
In the third episode one of the women gets some devastating news and Chippy's lie comes back to haunt her.
The series is not about cancer, but about life after cancer, how you cope the changes in your outlook, your desires and your expectations. It's also about how other people cope with the change in you.
Chippy ..... Sharon Rooney
Jill ..... Natasha Little
Terri ..... Camille Coduri
Marco ..... Derek Elroy
Tim ..... Matt Houlihan
Gordon ..... Andrew Obeney
Georgie ..... Emily Chase
Elaine ..... Ayesha Antoine
Joel ..... Joe Johnsey
Consultant 1 ..... Chris Pavlo
Consultant 2 ..... Ayesha Antoine
Written by Kay Stonham
Produced and directed by Alison Vernon-Smith.
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.
On this day in 1917, The Times described German coverage of Passchendaele as 'press hysterics', and in Folkestone, Reverend Winwood soothes Alec Poole.
Written by Katie Hims
Directed by Allegra McIlroy
Editor: Jessica Dromgoole.
Consumer affairs programme.
The latest weather forecast.
Analysis of news and current affairs.
A story of modern art through the written word. A new five-part series exploring the art and politics of the artist's manifesto - from the Futurists to Fluxus, from Dada to the present.
When Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto in 1848, their rallying cry set the tone and the rhetoric of movements and revolutions to follow - in art as well as politics. Artists adopted the form, with spectacular results.
The artist's manifesto is where art and politics meet. They gave rise, and political purpose, to some of the great avant-garde art movements of the 20th century. But they also took politics into new realms of possibility, transformation and imagination. Simultaneously apocalyptic and utopian, artists' manifestos demanded new worlds, proclaimed new communities and upset the order of things.
Over five programmes, artists, historians, authors, architects and cultural critics explore how the manifesto became a creative call-to-arms and ask whether, in this new age of discontent, it still has a place in the world today. From Futurism, Dada and the Surrealists - via the neo-avant garde movements of the 1960s, Situationism, Fluxus and Auto-Destructive art - to the present, including Gilbert and George and the Stuckists, the International Necronautical Society, Black Dada and Grayson Perry's Red Alan manifesto.
Contributors include Grayson Perry, Gilbert and George, Miele Laderman Ukeles, Tom McCarthy, Hannah Higgins, Gustav Metzger, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Charles Jencks.
Readings by Harriet Walter
Produced by Simon Hollis and Jo Wheeler
A Brook Lapping production for BBC Radio 4.
3. Sin
The third of four plays marking the centenary of the great American playwright, Arthur Miller.
Arthur Miller's play 'The Crucible' opened in New York City in January 1953. The reviews were mixed. The parallels with Senator McCarthy's witch hunt for Communists with the House Un-American Activities Committee were obvious. Few realised, however, that it also portrayed Miller's dying marriage to his first wife and college sweetheart, Mary Slattery. One of Marilyn Monroe's New Year resolutions of 1955 was to improve her acting by taking lessons. She moved to New York later that year to study with Lee Strasberg. Four years after she and Arthur had first met on the West Coast, they began to see each other again, in secret. The secret wouldn't be kept for long. By Jonathan Holloway.
Producer for LA Theatre Works: Susan Loewenberg
Associate Producers: Anna Lyse Erikson and Myke D Wysekopf
Sound by Mark Holden, Wes Dewberry, and Catherine Robinson
A BBC/Cymru Wales and LA Theatre Works Co-Production, directed by Kate McAll
LA Theatre Works is a non-profit audio drama company based in Los Angeles that records classic and contemporary plays. They have been collaborating with the BBC for nearly thirty years, beginning with a production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible that starred Richard Dreyfuss and Stacey Keach.
Do words like movie, elevator or cookie raise your linguistic hackles? Do you hate hearing someone ask if they can 'get' a coffee? Lexicographer Susie Dent - more usually found in the Dictionary Corner of Channel 4's Countdown - explores the history of how Americanisms have entered British English and argues that perhaps we should learn to love these transatlantic imports.
We hear from the Queen's English Society about why they believe British English should be protected and John Humphrys tells us about the Americanisms he particularly dislikes. Linguist Dr Lynne Murphy reveals that dislike of Americanisms goes back to Dr Johnson and Michael Proffitt, the Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, tells Susie about some of the unexpected words which started life in America.
There's another surprise when Susie travels to Stratford upon Avon, where Dr Nick Walton from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust shows that some of the most disliked Americanisms first appear in Shakespeare's plays. There's an actor's perspective from Tamsin Greig, who's recently appeared in Twelfth Night at the National Theatre, and the singer Marty Wilde remembers teenagers' enthusiasm for all things American in the 1950s and their elders' despair at this assault on the English language.
Susie concludes with an exhortation to all of us to throw off our British linguistic reserve and to Americanize - even if only a little bit. She encourages us to embrace the verve of American vocabulary and to recognize that many of our American bugbears actually came from Britain in the first place.
Presenter: Susie Dent
Producer: Louise Adamson
Executive Producer: Samir Shah
A Juniper production for BBC Radio 4.
Topical programme about the fast-changing media world.
Eddie Mair with interviews, context and analysis.
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.
Chain Reaction is Radio 4's long running hostless chat show where last week's interviewee becomes this week's interviewer.
In the fourth episode of the series one half of comedy double-act Vic & Bob, Vic Reeves, talks to three-time BAFTA Award winning actress Olivia Colman.
Producer ... Arnab Chanda.
Justin finds an ally, and Phoebe's head is turned.
Arts news, interviews and reviews.
Combative, provocative and engaging debate chaired by Michael Buerk. With Matthew Taylor, Claire Fox, Anne McElvoy and Mona Siddiqui.
Syrian qanun virtuoso Maya Youssef explains why - to her - music is "the opposite of death" in this powerful and poignant talk.
"I played a concert in a refugee centre in Aalborg, Denmark," she says, "and afterwards a ten-year old child approached me and said, 'Your music brought back the memory of beautiful days in Syria and the smell of lemon and jasmine.' Another woman added, 'I haven't felt happy like this for a long time'. I felt joy and grief at the same time hearing this."
Recorded in front of a live audience at the WOMAD world music and arts festival in Wiltshire.
Producer: Richard Knight.
Impressionist Rory Bremner explores the role of the human voice in forensic phonetics.
Forensic phonetics - or voice identification - has long been used in legal proceedings to help determine if the voice on a recording is that of the defendant. But with the electronic age enabling the recording and storage of more data than ever before, its role in criminal investigations is changing rapidly and the race is on to "fingerprint the human voice".
Rory Bremner looks at some of the new research in this growing area of forensics - its applications in the fields of law enforcement and counterterrorism, and why there is such resistance to it in the UK, where we still prefer to rely on the human voice analyst than on an automated system. He hears about high profile cases involving speaker identification - including Michael Stone's conviction for the murder and Lin and Megan Russell and the conviction of John Humble as the hoax caller claiming to be the Yorkshire Ripper.
Rory also talks to Francis Nolan, Professor of Phonetics, about how the way we think of people as having "a voice" oversimplifies matters. Compared to a fingerprint pattern, which is always a constant, physical characteristic, the voice is the product of two mechanisms which vary considerably - the speech organs and language. Fingerprints are identified through literal analysis; voices are identified through comparative voiceprints. Your voice as your password is now becoming an everyday reality rather than a SciFi cliche. But can it really be said that every voice is unique, as some have claimed?
The development of increasingly sophisticated automated speaker recognition systems is now bringing the prospect of a "voiceprint" enticingly close. But how accurate are these systems? Can they differentiate between 'real' Trump and Rory's impression of Trump...?
Contributors:
Professor Peter French
Professor Hugh McLachlan
Dr Helen Fraser
Dr Kirsty McDougall
Professor Francis Nolan
Erica Thomson
A Terrier production for BBC Radio 4.
In-depth reporting and analysis from a global perspective.
Amanda Craig's state-of-the-nation novel, read by Amanda Lawrence.
Quentin and Lottie Bredin's marriage is over. They've also lost their jobs in the recession. As a result, they have been forced to rent out their London house (for an extortionate sum) and moved their family to Devon to live for a year in the hope that their home's value will rise enough to allow them to divorce and buy a flat each.
But Lottie has fallen for life in Devon, especially now that she has found herself a good job working for a local architect. Quentin is less content. To distract him from his woes, including his father's terminal illness, he investigates the gruesome murder of Oliver Randall, the former tenant of their temporary home, which leads him to uncover some very dark secrets.
Reader: Amanda Lawrence
Writer: Amanda Craig
Abridger: Robin Brooks
Producer: Kirsteen Cameron.
Comedy drama by Pete Jackson, set in Alcoholics Anonymous and inspired by his own road to recovery. Starring Sue Johnston, John Hannah, Eddie Marsan, Rebecca Front, Paul Kaye and Julia Deakin.
The programme follows the lives of five very different recovering alcoholics. Set entirely at their weekly meetings, we hear them get to know each other, learn to hate each other, argue, moan, laugh, fall apart, fall in love and, most importantly, tell their stories.
There are funny stories, sad stories, stories of small victories and milestones, stories of loss, stories of hope, and stories that you really shouldn't laugh at - but still do. Along with the storyteller.
In the fifth episode, Danno (Paul Kaye) deals with the death of his father after returning from his memorial service - in the pub down the road.
Writer Pete Jackson is a recovering alcoholic and has spent time with Alcoholics Anonymous. It was there he found, as many people do, support from the unlikeliest group of disparate souls, all banded together due to one common bond. As well as offering the support he needed throughout a difficult time, AA also offered a weekly, sometimes daily, dose of hilarity, upset, heartbreak and friendship.
Written and created by Pete Jackson
Produced and Directed by Ben Worsfield
A Lucky Giant production for BBC Radio 4.
Critically-acclaimed comedian Kieran Hodgson is joined by John Sessions and Colin Hoult, in the second of a new series of comedy intros to the great composers. Can self-described 'music educator and inspiration' Ralph Lewis, the man behind 'In the Bedroom with Brahms' and 'Eating 5 A Day The Elgar Way'persuade self-confessed 'enemy of culture' Paul, that Mahle's worth a listen, and not just a load of old cowbells.
Written and starring Kieran Hodgson
With Colin Hoult and John Sessions
Producer: Sam Ward
A BBC Studios Production.
Technology has always allowed us to push the boundaries of what's real and not real. From filters on our holiday snaps to recreating life in a laboratory.
Is it any wonder then that amidst all this 21st century noise we're searching for an authentic voice?
But what authenticity actually is can be difficult to define, particularly in the digital sphere where filters, artifice and simulation are part of the fabric of how we engage on social media.
From Aristotle to Frankenstein, to politicians tweeting from the bathroom, Aleks Krotoski goes in search of the authentic, taking a look at the drivers behind our preoccupation with allowing others to see 'the real self'.
Contributors include: science writer Philip Ball, Stephen Lussier of DeBeers, sociologist Ruth Penfold-Mounce, author Professor Andrew Potter, Dr Suzy Jagger and Instagrammer Stina Sanders.
Producer: Caitlin Smith.
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4. Followed by Weather.
The latest shipping forecast.
The latest shipping forecast.
The latest news from BBC Radio 4.
Spiritual reflection to start the day from the Festival City of Edinburgh with The Rev Lezley Stewart of Greyfriars Kirk.
The latest news about food, farming and the countryside.
High in the cloud forest of Costa Rica, Frank Gardner recalls for Tweet of the Day, a bird he has heard but never seen, the three wattled bell bird.
Tweet of the Day has captivated the Radio 4 audience with its daily 90 seconds of birdsong. But what of the listener to this avian chorus? In this new series of Tweet of the Day, we bring to the airwaves the conversational voices of those who listen to and are inspired by birds. Building on the previous series, a more informal approach to learning alongside a renewed emphasis on encounter with nature and reflection in our relationship with the natural world.
Producer Tom Bonnett.
Morning news and current affairs. Including Sports Desk, Weather and Thought for the Day.
In this series, the historian Peter Hennessy asks senior politicians to reflect on their life and times. Each week, he invites his guest to explore their early formative influences, their experiences and their impressions of people they've known.
In the first programme of this run, Peter Hennessy's guest is Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister, who gave his name to an era following a rapid rise to power and his energetic leadership at home and abroad during ten years in Downing Street. Like other leaders whose personality creates an aura and whose name creates an 'ism', few people are neutral about Tony Blair and his legacy.
In the interview Blair reflects on his early enthusiasm for acting, 'the performance element' in his character, and the experiences that shaped his political and religious beliefs. Recalling his journey from youthful far-left politics to mainstream Labour and his dramatic path to power, he tells of his dealings with Gordon Brown.
On his premiership, Blair recalls battles against Whitehall's resistance to reform and reflects ruefully on his relations with the media. The conversation explores two of the most momentous issues during his premiership - negotiating the Northern Ireland peace agreement and the controversial decision to go to war in Iraq. On politics today, Blair re-affirms his interest in re-making the centre-left in British politics and shaping a policy agenda to address the challenge of globalisation.
Producer: Rob Shepherd.
Programme that offers a female perspective on the world.
Meera Syal stars as Family Liaison Officer Jackie Hartwell. For the tenth series, Scott Cherry's intimate drama once again focusses on family crises and what it must be like to lose a loved one. The role of the family liaison officer is always both to support the victim and keep a watchful eye out for clues. Many suspicious deaths are the result of family troubles.
In this series, In this series Karla's husband seems to be the victim of a deliberately set fire, while one of Jackie's previous cases, involving the death of a young prostitute, refuses to go away. With a lack of progress on the case, the victim's father tries to hunt down the killer himself.
Written by Scott Cherry
Produced and Directed by Clive Brill
A Brill production for BBC Radio 4.
Reports from around the world.
Join Natalie Haynes and guests for half an hour of comedy and the Classics from the BBC Radio Theatre in London.
Natalie is a reformed comedian who is a little bit obsessive about Ancient Greece and Rome.
Today she stands up in the name of the Roman lawyer, politician and orator Cicero. Maybe we'd all love him a bit more if Shakespeare had had a nicer Latin teacher. Expect a lot of gossip from a thousand years ago.
With special guests lawyer Mark Stephens and Professor Llewelyn Morgan.
Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery.
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.
On this day in 1917, the Labour party voted to send delegates to the Stockholm peace conference, and in Folkestone Sylvia Graham hosts wounded soldiers.
Written by Katie Hims
Directed by Allegra McIlroy
Editor: Jessica Dromgoole.
Consumer affairs programme.
The latest weather forecast.
Analysis of news and current affairs.
A story of modern art through the written word. A new five-part series exploring the art and politics of the artist's manifesto - from the Futurists to Fluxus, from Dada to the present.
When Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto in 1848, their rallying cry set the tone and the rhetoric of movements and revolutions to follow - in art as well as politics. Artists adopted the form, with spectacular results.
The artist's manifesto is where art and politics meet. They gave rise, and political purpose, to some of the great avant-garde art movements of the 20th century. But they also took politics into new realms of possibility, transformation and imagination. Simultaneously apocalyptic and utopian, artists' manifestos demanded new worlds, proclaimed new communities and upset the order of things.
Over five programmes, artists, historians, authors, architects and cultural critics explore how the manifesto became a creative call-to-arms and ask whether, in this new age of discontent, it still has a place in the world today. From Futurism, Dada and the Surrealists - via the neo-avant garde movements of the 1960s, Situationism, Fluxus and Auto-Destructive art - to the present, including Gilbert and George and the Stuckists, the International Necronautical Society, Black Dada and Grayson Perry's Red Alan manifesto.
Contributors include Grayson Perry, Gilbert and George, Miele Laderman Ukeles, Tom McCarthy, Hannah Higgins, Gustav Metzger, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Charles Jencks.
Readings by Harriet Walter
Produced by Simon Hollis and Jo Wheeler
A Brook Lapping production for BBC Radio 4.
Greta Scacchi and Nicholas Murchie head the cast in Hugh Costello's political thriller of secrets and lies.
Twice a year thousands of confidential state files are released to the press and public- files that detail the workings of the British government of thirty years ago. If you want to know how Margaret Thatcher reacted to Islamic terror in Lebanon or how the Cabinet responded to the AIDS crisis then these are the documents you're waiting for. But some of those files will be disfigured by a black marker pen- they'll be Redacted. Secrets too sensitive, even thirty years on, will remain in the shadows.
Jonathan is a 'sensitivity reviewer', the senior civil servant with the marker pen. It's normally a pretty dreary job, but just occasionally a long-forgotten document sparks his interest. When Jonathan spots his wife's name at the bottom of an urgent memo to the Prime Minister it lands him with the toughest moral dilemma of his life.
Eliza Carthy is one of England's finest folk performers. In this episode of Open Country Eliza explores her hometown of Robin Hood's Bay on the North Yorkshire coast. Famed for shipwrecks, smugglers and fossils Eliza uncovers the true history of the place she calls home through those who know it's history and secrets best.
Antonia Quirke talks to Lambert Wilson, the star of a new bio-pic of Jacques Cousteau, The Odyssey, and finds out how he revolutionised cinema technology.
Adam Rutherford explores the science that is changing our world.
Eddie Mair with interviews, context and analysis.
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.
Mark Steel's In Town - Shrewsbury
"Floreat Salopia - May Shrewsbury Flourish"
Mark Steel returns to Radio 4 for a sixth series of the award winning show that travels around the country, researching the history, heritage and culture of six towns that have nothing in common but their uniqueness, and performs a bespoke evening of comedy for the local residents.
In the third programme, Mark visits the Shropshire Town of Shrewsbury, birthplace of Charles Darwin and home to the oldest building in the world to house a McDonalds.
Mark finds Shrewsbury to be a beautiful place with an identity crisis. Once in Wales, but now in England, Shrewsbury is a peaceful town with a bloody history. As one local points out, "We killed Owain Glyndwr outside WH Smith".
An Idyllic setting in a loop of the river Severn, with its beautiful public gardens designed by Percy Thrower, patrolled daily by a Croatian nightclub bouncer.
Voted the politest town in Britain, the locals have very little to complain about. Apart from the disagreements over the buildings... and the statues... and the one-way system... and most of all, how to pronounce the name of the place.
Written and performed by ... Mark Steel
Additional material by ... Pete Sinclair
Production co-ordinator ... Hayley Sterling
Producer ... Carl Cooper
It was a BBC Radio Comedy Production.
Lily helps in an emergency, and Kenton is called upon.
Arts news, interviews and reviews.
Series looking at important issues in the news. Presented by David Aaronovitch.
What role can the community play in rejuvenating their local economy? Globalisation often results in a big geographical divide between where profits are made and where they are spent. Anu Anand visits two communities trying to reverse that trend and keep investment, jobs and profits close to hand. In Frome, in Somerset, she meets local property developers who are keeping rents low and chain stores at bay in a bid to allow local independent retailers to thrive. And in rural Lancashire she spends time with villagers building their own broadband network and investing in local energy projects. What impact might these initiatives have long-term and could other communities follow suit?
Producer: Rosamund Jones.
In-depth reporting and analysis from a global perspective.
Amanda Craig's state-of-the-nation novel, read by Amanda Lawrence.
Quentin and Lottie Bredin's marriage is over. They've also lost their jobs in the recession. As a result, they have been forced to rent out their London home (for an extortionate sum) and moved their family to Devon to live for a year in the hope that their house's value will rise enough to allow them to divorce and buy a flat each.
Lottie's job working for a local architect has brought her new confidence (financially, as well as personally). Quentin, though, is floundering. He's been badly affected by the death of his father, with whom he had a vexatious relationship.
Lottie's son Xan is preparing to leave for university, his Devonian 'year out' has helped him come to terms with his initial rejection from Cambridge. He's struck up an unlikely friendship with Dawn, the troubled daughter of the family's cleaner, but when he tries to help her he puts his life in danger by unwittingly revealing the identity of Oliver Randall's murderer.
Reader: Amanda Lawrence
Writer: Amanda Craig
Abridger: Robin Brooks
Producer: Kirsteen Cameron.
The accomplished writer and broadcaster reflects on his comical life-long search for useful male role models in films, novels and real-life. Peter grew up surrounded by his mum and five sisters - although, as the eldest, he wasn't spoiled. Honestly.
In this programme, he goes mooching around the streets of his Belfast childhood, recalling torturous inquisitions from local lads about religion, and he takes the audience at The Queens Film Theatre in Belfast on a journey into the power of George Best, men in towelling trunks, polite gunmen at the front door, and the all-conquering laughter of girls.
Peter's joined by some expert and inexpert witnesses to answer questions on gender, parenting and Darth Vader.
The programme was recorded as part of the Belfast Film Festival and Peter was joined on stage by one of Britain's foremost experts on psychosexual medicine, Dr Ian Walsh; cinema historian and documentary director, Brian Henry Martin; and Good Vibrations record label owner and local legend, Terri Hooley.
The programme includes a vivid reading by the presenter's mother of an excerpt from WF Marshall's Ulster-Scots dialect classic about the cost of romantic indecision, Me and Me Da.
A Giddy Goat production for BBC Radio 4.
Geoff Lean was in a coma for a month, during this time he could hear and feel everything but it wasn't until he woke up from the coma that he realised he had also unconsciously absorbed visual information through his eyes.
Aleks investigates Blindsight, one of the most curious phenomenon's in cognitive neuroscience and helps to explain how Geoff was able to see without seeing. Milena Cunning went into hospital a sighted person but when she awoke from a coma her world was completely black. A stroke had destroyed the part of the brain that allowed her to see, she later discovered that she had Blindsight. A condition which results in a loss of visual experience yet allows information unconsciously to reach the brain. It suggests there is a great deal that we are doing independently of consciousness awareness. We are able to automatically perform without conscious sight or thought. This is highlighted when we become familiar with a piece of technology it becomes automatic, we need little conscious input to use it.
Aleks discovers we are able to steer our way through the world on auto pilot especially if we are performing a habit, an automatic behaviour stored in our unconscious. We all experience a form of Blindsight, like driving and having a conversation , our attention is on the conversation, so we are not conscious of actually driving. Our automatic use of the technology, the car, is stored in our unconscious mind.
Professor Nillie Lavie from UCL says that what Blindsight shows us about our ability to unconsciously see coupled with how we are presented with information online influences not only how much we are subliminally influenced in a digital world but the type of information we unconsciously pick up on and absorb.
Produced by Kate Bissell.
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4. Followed by Weather.
Gainsborough continues to hone his painterly skills In his studio he works by candlelight to create mood, and paints on a loose flapping canvas, like a sail. For his landscapes he creates elaborate models using broccoli.
But the costs of running an artist's studio are high and he is always anxious about money.
Reader: Julian Rhind-Tutt
Abridged by Libby Spurrier
Directed by Kate McAll
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.
The latest shipping forecast.
The latest shipping forecast.
The latest news from BBC Radio 4.
Spiritual reflection to start the day from the Festival City of Edinburgh with The Rev Lezley Stewart of Greyfriars Kirk.
The latest news about food, farming and the countryside.
In the final of his Tweet of the Day's for this week, the BBC's Frank Gardner remembers watching White Throated Kingfishers chasing a Eurasian kingfisher in Israel.
Tweet of the Day has captivated the Radio 4 audience with its daily 90 seconds of birdsong. But what of the listener to this avian chorus? In this new series of Tweet of the Day, we bring to the airwaves the conversational voices of those who listen to and are inspired by birds. Building on the previous series, a more informal approach to learning alongside a renewed emphasis on encounter with nature and reflection in our relationship with the natural world.
Producer Tom Bonnett.
Morning news and current affairs. Including Sports Desk, Weather and Thought for the Day.
For his final years Thomas Gainsborough returns to London where he paints over 100 portraits and 30 landscapes. Knowing that he's dying, he summons his old rival Joshua Reynolds and, on his deathbed, his wife Margaret makes a surprising revelation.
Reader: Julian Rhind-Tutt
Abridged by Libby Spurrier
Directed by Kate McAll
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.
Programme that offers a female perspective on the world.
Meera Syal stars as Family Liaison Officer Jackie Hartwell. For the tenth series, Scott Cherry's intimate drama once again focusses on family crises and what it must be like to lose a loved one. The role of the family liaison officer is always both to support the victim and keep a watchful eye out for clues. Many suspicious deaths are the result of family troubles.
In this series, In this series Karla's husband seems to be the victim of a deliberately set fire, while one of Jackie's previous cases, involving the death of a young prostitute, refuses to go away. With a lack of progress on the case, the victim's father tries to hunt down the killer himself.
Written by Scott Cherry
Produced and Directed by Clive Brill
A Brill production for BBC Radio 4.
The birth of modern, independent India and Pakistan was violent and chaotic. It also left an enduring legacy of disputed territory - and resentment - which help to explain some of the most pressing security challenges facing the world today.
Yet Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the man who was asked by the British government to draw the line of partition between the two countries, had never visited the region and was given just six weeks to determine the frontiers. The last Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, also had clear ideas on where he thought the line should run - as did Jinnah, Pakistan's founder, and Nehru, Gandhi's protégé and India's first prime minister.
So how and why was this former Fellow of All Souls and wartime luminary of the Department of Information chosen for such a sensitive and complicated task? How did he go about the work? And could - and should - the results of his labours have been different, allowing for the circumstances of time?
Jannat Jalil tells the story of the man who drew the line - and with what consequences.
To Hull and Back is the eagerly anticipated sitcom from BBC New Comedy Award winner Lucy Beaumont.
Sophie still lives at home with her mum in Hull. They make a living doing car boot sales at the weekend. Except they don't really make a living because her mum can't bear to get rid of any of their junk. Plus, they don't have a car. As their house gets more cluttered, Sophie feels more trapped.
"My Casa Is Your Casa"
A call from Auntie Pamela who lives abroad gets Sophie fired up about the life she could be living, a life of hot tubs and wood fired lobster. Her mother tries go compete with her sister, Pamela, but ends up filling the back yard with bubbles and sleeping downstairs on a lilo.
Writer ... Lucy Beaumont
Producer ... Carl Cooper
This is a BBC Radio Comedy Production.
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.
On this day in 1917, Labour leader Arthur Henderson resigned from the Cabinet under pressure from the press, and in Folkestone, Jessie Moore directs her powers of persuasion at Dennis Monk.
Written by Katie Hims
Directed by Allegra McIlroy
Editor: Jessica Dromgoole.
Consumer news and issues.
The latest weather forecast.
Analysis of news and current affairs.
A story of modern art through the written word. A new five-part series exploring the art and politics of the artist's manifesto - from the Futurists to Fluxus, from Dada to the present.
When Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto in 1848, their rallying cry set the tone and the rhetoric of movements and revolutions to follow - in art as well as politics. Artists adopted the form, with spectacular results.
The artist's manifesto is where art and politics meet. They gave rise, and political purpose, to some of the great avant-garde art movements of the 20th century. But they also took politics into new realms of possibility, transformation and imagination. Simultaneously apocalyptic and utopian, artists' manifestos demanded new worlds, proclaimed new communities and upset the order of things.
Over five programmes, artists, historians, authors, architects and cultural critics explore how the manifesto became a creative call-to-arms and ask whether, in this new age of discontent, it still has a place in the world today. From Futurism, Dada and the Surrealists - via the neo-avant garde movements of the 1960s, Situationism, Fluxus and Auto-Destructive art - to the present, including Gilbert and George and the Stuckists, the International Necronautical Society, Black Dada and Grayson Perry's Red Alan manifesto.
Contributors include Grayson Perry, Gilbert and George, Miele Laderman Ukeles, Tom McCarthy, Hannah Higgins, Gustav Metzger, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Charles Jencks.
Readings by Harriet Walter
Produced by Simon Hollis and Jo Wheeler
A Brook Lapping production for BBC Radio 4.
by Nick Warburton
Directed by Sally Avens
Richard and Clare have inherited a house on a clifftop in Breck Howe but the sea is eroding the land.
Their tenant John Hector is intent on stopping them all from being evicted, but when Clare suggest they need a voice on the council the result is anything but the democratic process she imagined. Comedy as North meets South in a definite clash of cultures.
As part of GQT's 70th anniversary celebrations, the team visit gardeners at the four points of the UK compass to explore the incredible variety of climate and environment in this country - something that makes gardening here so endlessly fascinating.
For this second programme, it's North v South with Eric Robson, James Wong, Pippa Greenwood and Bob Flowerdew exploring the subtropical climes of Tresco Abbey Garden in The Isles of Scilly, while Peter Gibbs, Matthew Wilson, Matt Biggs and Anne Swithinbank visit one of the coldest spots in the UK - Lerwick on The Shetland Islands.
James Wong and Matt Biggs venture out to see how gardeners are making the most of hot and cold conditions respectively, and the two panels take questions from audiences some 733 miles apart.
Produced by Dan Cocker, Hannah Newton and Darby Dorras
Assistant Producer: Laurence Bassett
A Somethin' Else production for BBC Radio 4.
A new original short story by the acclaimed Irish novelist John Boyne (The Heart's Invisible Furies, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas) specially commissioned for BBC Radio 4. Read by the Irish actor Peter McDonald (Moone Boy, The Stag)
Awarded the Hennessy Literary 'Hall of Fame' Award for his body of work, the New York Times number 1 Bestselling author has multiple Irish Book Awards including Children's Book of the Year, People's Choice Book of the Year and Short Story of the Year. He has also been awarded a number of international literary awards, including the Que Leer Award for Novel of the Year in Spain and the Gustav Heinemann Peace Prize in Germany.
Writer ..... John Boyne
Reader ..... Peter McDonald
Producer ..... Michael Shannon.
Obituary series, analysing and celebrating the life stories of people who have recently died.
Radio 4's forum for audience comment.
Grandchildren can keep you busy in retirement. Or you can go and live with former colleagues among the discarded vaulting horses and whistles. Introduced by Fi Glover. Another conversation in the series that proves it's surprising what you hear when you listen.
Producer: Marya Burgess.
Eddie Mair with interviews, context and analysis.
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.
This week, the Professor of Ignorance John Lloyd and his curator, the brilliant Romesh Ranganathan welcome:
The internationally acclaimed conductor, actor, writer, comedian and broadcaster Rainer Hersch
The doctor, Antarctic explorer, and prospective Martian astronaut Beth Healey
and
The painter, author and textile, ceramics & costume designer Kaffe Fassett.
This week, the Museum's Guest Committee offer as exhibits a vast home-made architectural folly, a wind instrument that takes you back to school and a station the size of a football pitch that weighs absolutely nothing and moves at 18,000 mph.
The show was researched by Anne Miller of QI and Mike Turner.
The production coordinator was Tamara Shilham.
The producers were Richard Turner and James Harkin.
It was a BBC Studios Production.
Lexi takes control, and could there be mutiny in the Bridge Farm dairy?
News, reviews and interviews from the worlds of art, literature, film and music.
Ritula Shah presents political debate from the Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House, London with a panel including the journalist and author David Goodhart and the Shadow Minister for Fire Services Chris Williamson MP.
A reflection on a topical issue.
The second omnibus of Season 11, Broken and Mad, set in the week, in 1917, when many in Folkestone heard the explosions of an air raid on Dover, and watched 40 British planes encircle enemy aircraft over the channel.
Cast
Howard Argent ..... Gunnar Cauthery
Alice Macknade ..... Claire-Louise Cordwell
Alec Poole ..... Tom Stuart
Sylvia Graham ..... Joanna David
Dennis Monk ..... Sam Swann
Ulysses Pilchard ..... Khalid Abdalla
Phyllis Marshall ..... Christine Absalom
Esme Macknade ..... Katie Angelou
Norman Harris ..... Sean Baker
Isabel Graham ..... Keely Beresford
Gabriel Graham ..... Michael Bertenshaw
Juliet Cavendish ..... Lizzie Bourne
Mrs Grimes ..... Amelda Brown
Mr Williams ..... Charlie Clements
Solly Joseph ..... Stephen Critchlow
Bill Macknade ..... Ben Crowe
Silas Morrow ..... Shaun Dooley
Chairman ..... Emilio Doorgasingh
Oscar Hendrickx ..... Pierre Elliott
Hilary Pearce ..... Craige Els
Mr O'Hare ..... Tom Forrister
Jessie Moore ..... Lucy Hutchinson
Victor Lumley ..... Joel MacCormack
Kitty Lumley ..... Ami Metcalf
Ralph Winwood ..... Nicholas Murchie
Olive Hargreaves ..... Rhiannon Neads
Horace Woods ..... Luke Newberry
Marieke Argent ..... Olivia Ross
Adeline Lumley ..... Helen Schlesinger
Dorothea Winwood ..... Rachel Shelley
Mr Grand ..... David Sturzaker
Ivy Layton ..... Lizzy Watts
Charles Summer ..... Rufus Wright
Mathieu Argent ..... Bea White
Written by Katie Hims
Directed by Allegra McIlroy
Editor: Jessica Dromgoole
Sound: Martha Littlehailes
Composer: Matthew Strachan
Consultant Historian: Maggie Andrews.
In-depth reporting and analysis from a global perspective.
Amanda Craig's state-of-the-nation novel, read by Amanda Lawrence.
Quentin and Lottie Bredin's marriage is over. They've also lost their jobs in the recession. As a result, they have been forced to rent out their London home (for an extortionate sum) and moved their family to Devon to live for a year in the hope that their house's value will rise enough to allow them to divorce and buy a flat each.
Lottie's job working for a local architect has brought her new confidence (financially, as well as personally). Quentin, though, is floundering. He's been badly affected by the death of his father, with whom he had a vexatious relationship.
Lottie's son Xan is preparing to leave for university, his Devonian 'year out' has helped him come to terms with his initial rejection from Cambridge. He's struck up an unlikely friendship with Dawn, the troubled daughter of the family's cleaner, but when he tries to help her he puts his life in danger by unwittingly revealing the identity of Oliver Randall's murderer.
Reader: Amanda Lawrence
Writer: Amanda Craig
Abridger: Robin Brooks
Producer: Kirsteen Cameron.
There is an old joke that talking to yourself is first sign of madness but we now know its an essential mental tool . So how much of what we do online is that same inner speech?
Memories of privies and rubbish collection on Derry's close-knit Fountain Estate before and after the War. Introduced by Fi Glover. Another conversation in the series that proves it's surprising what you hear when you listen.
Producer: Marya Burgess.