The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4. Followed by Weather.
Military Migrants and the British Army. From Fiji to Ghana, the British military recruits soldiers to fight Britain's wars. Since 1998 overseas recruitment has been stepped up in response to labour shortages and diversity programmes. The sociologist, Vron Ware, talks to Laurie Taylor about her new book 'Military Migrants: Fighting for Your Country'. She argues that this new category of soldier inhabits a contradictory situation - on the one hand, praised as a 'hero' but on the other, stigmatised as an 'immigrant' and 'foreigner'. They're joined by the sociologist, Les Back. Also, Deborah Butler discusses her research on trainee female jockeys in the horse racing world.
A third of sprouts grown in the UK will be harvested in the Christmas fortnight. Charlotte Smith meets the team harvesting tonnes of the festive favourite on a Yorkshire farm.
This programme is presented by Charlotte Smith and produced in Birmingham by Angela Frain.
Morning news and current affairs with John Humphrys and Evan Davis. Including Sports Desk; Weather; Thought for the Day.
In a special recording of Start the Week, Andrew Marr explores the power of the human voice. From the emotional intensity of the tenor Rolando Villazón, singing Rodolfo in La Boheme, to the art of writing for the voice with the composer Mark-Anthony Turnage. Mary King trains the voice, and the neuro-psychiatrist Michael Trimble examines our reactions to it.
A beautifully nostalgic childhood memoir of Britain in the late 1890s, written by the eminent author Angela Thirkell.
She recalls in rich detail, and with a delightful sense of humour, the three houses which were seminal to her youth.
The first is The Grange in North End Lane, Fulham, which was home to her grandfather, the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. She recalls that every Sunday her grandparents kept open house for their friends and that, given the chance, she would slip away from the august gathering to explore her grandfather's studio: "Sinister people called models lived there who had trays taken up to them at lunch and tea-time".
Read by Sian Thomas.
Tracey Thorn, of Everything But The Girl, plays songs from her new Christmas album and talks about what makes the perfect festive hit. Chef Diana Henry creates a delicious last minute gift. All you need is a jar, some fruit and quite a lot of booze. Presented by Jane Garvey.
Charles Dance leads the cast as the urbane Storyteller in dramatisations of five classic tales by Roald Dahl. Bizarre and amusing by turns, these black comedies are justly famous for their surprise endings.
The stories show Dahl at the height of his powers as a writer of adult fiction. They are stylishly plotted, vividly characterised and made unforgettable by their breezy cynicism, presenting as they do, a hilariously bleak view of family life. Their satisfying conclusions invariably leave bullies, schemers, adulterers and frauds soundly punished.
In Taste, whenever Mike Schofield and Richard Pratt dine together, they play a little game. If Pratt, a conceited wine buff, can identify a rare vintage in a blind tasting, he wins a case of the wine in question. When Schofield boasts that he has acquired a wine whose obscurity renders it unguessable, Pratt suggests they increase their stakes. If he fails to identify it, he forfeits both his houses but, if he succeeds, he wins the hand of Schofield's delectable daughter in marriage. Despite the girl's protests, Schofield agrees to the wager.
It's been a good five years since the series created by Christopher Matthew and the late Alan Coren was last broadcast - but last Christmas Terry Waite revealed that he had been a huge fan of the programme in which the two would would hop on a bus to see where it takes them - geographically, historically and conversationally. So much of a fan that Terry even suggested that, were the opportunity ever to occur, he would be delighted to take Alan's place for another outing of the programme.
What the original series of Freedom Pass managed to do was to introduce the idea of two sixty-year-old men engaged upon journeys of discovery not merely of the London bus system but also of themselves. Their aim was, in their own words, "to travel the bus routes together, rabbiting as we go. about the history inside us and outside us, about the people and events, the books and films, politics and wars, loves and hates, that are jolted out of our twin and joint memories by the places that the buses --- both intentionally and serendipitously --- take us past and to."
It struck Christopher that this same aim, philosophy even, would lend itself beautifully to a special one-off jaunt with Terry Waite. Given the extra meaning that the word 'Freedom' would bring to a bus journey with, as Christopher puts it, "this splendid man at my side", the two met at London Bridge Station and made their way by bus to Trafalgar Square. Their travels and their musings took them past St Paul's Cathedral, university life, Fleet Street and assisting in amputations.
Playfulness, soundscape and oddity above the rustling leaves of Blyton's Magic Faraway Tree.
In the centre of the Enchanted Wood is the Faraway Tree. Home to Moonface, Silky and Saucepan Man; its upper branches stretch into cloud-hosted dimensions of strange and magical lands.
In this two-part abridged adaptation of Enid Blyton's classic children's tale, BBC Radio 4 swoops voices from the world of entertainment into the mystical lands above.
Featuring Johnny Vegas as Moonface, Nigel Planer as Saucepan and Lucy Beaumont (Winner of the BBC's New Comedy Awards 2012) as Silky.
In this You and Yours travel special, we're uncovering overlooked or less accessible destinations from every part of the UK. They include a new ski resort in Scotland, a neglected gem in the north east of England, a yurt farm in the Cambrian mountains of Wales and next year's European City of Culture - Derry in Northern Ireland.
We also hear about the upsurge in package holidays from the world's biggest tour operator, why Derby is wowing wheelchair users and the once and hopefully future spiritual delights of Damascus.
And we'll also tell you where to look for bargains in the Boxing Day travel sales.
Shaun Ley presents national and international news. Listeners can share their views via email: wato@bbc.co.uk or on twitter: #wato.
When the Grimm brothers first published their Children's and Household Tales in 1812, in a scholarly effort to collate a national identity of the people, it was the beginning of an obsessive project of two intricately interwoven lifetimes.
To mark the bicentenary of the first edition, writer and mythographer Marina Warner explores the many compelling and often controversial aspects of the tales in a 10-part series, revealing new insights into the stories we think we know so well, and introducing us to the charms and challenges of those that we don't.
Alongside beautifully narrated extracts from the tales themselves, renowned academics and artists who work closely with the Grimms' rich heritage add to our understanding of these deceptively complex stories.
In the sixth episode, we learn how these tales which had been lovingly collected to preserve a sense of national identity, were adopted and retold by the Nazis for the purposes of their brutal propaganda machine.
The humour is stripped from The Boy Who Set Out to Learn Fear, Red Riding Hood's gallant rescuer is given a swastika armband, and the dark undercurrents to the morals we might once have innocently accepted become uncomfortably apparent. We also explore the tangled post-war effort to reclaim the Grimms' tales for a more positive purpose, featuring discussion of The Singing Ringing Tree, the East German film that thrilled the young and old of German and British audiences alike.
A joyous musical comedy from the multi-award-winning acapella group Barbershopera. A Spanish matador, inherits a barber shop in the sleepy Norfolk town of Shavingham.
Esteve Johnson, a flamboyant Spanish matador, arrives in the sleepy seaside town of Shavingham, Norfolk to claim his inheritance after his estranged barber father's sudden death. At first viewed with suspicion, Esteve wins over the locals, falls for beautiful town crier Vicky and starts a turf war with rival hairdresser Trevor Sorbet.
Recorded in front of an enthusiastic radio theatre audience and performed in pitch-perfect five-part harmony this is an upbeat, funny and fantastical play about family, loyalty, love and hairdressing. It is adapted from an award-winning live comedy musical (Best Lyrics Musical Theatre Matters Award) which sold out in Edinburgh, plus a 5 week London West End run and national tour.
"All of the performances are terrific - each perfectly blending sharp comic timing with effortless singing. The story is surprisingly touching. You'll find yourself caring about the characters despite, or even because of, the fact that they're so silly. If you're sick of plays with dismal subject matter, then this is the one to really cheer you up." (The Scotsman reviewing the live version of 'The Barber Of Shavingham')
The Barber of Shavingham was commissioned as part of Radio 4's 'New Directions' Innovation Strand.
For many people around the world, A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, live from the candlelit chapel of King's College, Cambridge, marks the beginning of Christmas. It is based around nine Bible readings which tell the story of the loving purposes of God. They are interspersed with carols old and new, sung by the world famous chapel choir who also lead the congregation in traditional Christmas hymns.
Ding, dong, ding (arr. Woodward)
Fourth lesson: Isaiah 11 vv 1-3a, 4a, 6-9 read by a Representative of the City of Cambridge
Ring out, wild bells (Carl Vine - first performance, commissioned by King's College)
Brian Cox and Robin Ince get into the Christmas spirit as they look at the science of Christmas behaviour with actor and writer Mark Gatiss, geneticist Steve Jones, psychologist Richard Wiseman and emeritus Dean of Guildford Cathedral Victor Stock.
In celebration of its 40th Anniversary this year, Radio 4's perennial antidote to panel games presents a specially extended Christmas edition of the show. Programme regulars Barry Cryer, Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor are joined on the panel by Stephen Fry, with Jack Dee as the programme's reluctant chairman. Regular listeners will know to expect inspired nonsense, pointless revelry and Colin Sell at the piano. Producer - Jon Naismith.
At Neil's request, Neil and Ruth go through Ed's accounts. His money management is in a mess with no real budgeting or forward planning. Neil asks Ruth not to let on to proud Ed that they've had this meeting. But Ruth does want to speak to David, who is also concerned. Ed clearly needs decent dairy management software. Ruth has told Neil she'll show Ed how they run their budget, although finding the right moment to approach Ed with an offer of help may be tricky.
At Lower Loxley, David and Elizabeth discuss the gargantuan amounts of food for tomorrow and share a joke about Christmases past.
Vicky's delighted when Mike returns home. He's free now for 36 whole hours! Noticing all the sewing work Vicky's been doing for the show, Mike says she should take things easier. They cosy up as Mike says how lovely Vicky has made the place look. Then they enjoy a romantic dance together before Mike treats himself to a beer. Vicky looks ahead to next Christmas, and despite a slightly warning tone from Mike he joins her. He tells Vicky how amazing she is, with enough belief to get them both to where they are now.
Mark Lawson unwraps interviews with arts headline makers of 2012, in the second of two programmes.
Writer E L James reflects on a year in which she became a global publishing phenomenon, with her best-selling trilogy which began with Fifty Shades of Grey.
Mark looks back at the Olympic Opening Ceremony, with director Danny Boyle and designer Thomas Heatherwick, who created the highly original cauldron for the Olympic flame.
Singer Emeli Sandé remembers how nervous she felt moments before performing at the Opening Ceremony, and discusses a year in which she has become one of the UK's most high-profile musicians.
Broadcaster and writer Clare Balding considers her role as a presenter at the Olympic and Paralympic games, and reveals how she allowed her mother three chances to veto content in her best-selling memoir, published this year.
Writer Lolita Chakrabarti and actor Adrian Lester talk about their collaboration on the acclaimed play Red Velvet, based on the life of Ira Aldridge, an African-American actor whose arrival on the 19th century London stage provoked debate and dissent.
In this programme, music presenter Shaun Keaveny meets fellow sufferers and scientists to find out why songs get stuck in our head. He asks songwriter Guy Garvey from Elbow how to write a catchy tune and discovers the Holy Grail of musicians everywhere - the 'earworm formula'.
For the past three years on his 6 Music breakfast show, Shaun has been asking listeners to send in their earworms. When psychologist Dr Lauren Stewart found out, she was fascinated by this strange mental phenomenon. Together they've compiled the largest study on earworms to date, with over 10,000 reports from people around the world.
Lauren and her team at Goldsmiths have found that some people are particularly susceptible to earworms. Plus they are starting to discover that certain songs are more 'earwormy' than others.
For decades, Poland has been a country of emigrants travelling to build new lives abroad, not least in the UK. But could things be about to change? Paul Henley travels to the country at the eastern edge of the EU, where the financial crisis has, so far, been avoided. He meets the migrants already making a life in Europe's least multicultural society, and explores the conditions that suggest Poland could be on the cusp of becoming a destination; home to a new wave of migrants.
This week Quentin Cooper looks at new research into the usefulness of I Q tests. The hundred year old measure of intelligence has often been derided for being culturally biased, sexist and unfairly divisive. Now the largest ever study of IQ tests examines asks what such tests really measure and how far they can provide a useful way to compare the abilities of different people.
We also look to Antarctica, a project to drill through the frozen surface of Lake Ellsworth has been suspended due to problems with a hot water powered drill. Scientists hope to resume drilling by Christmas day and obtain samples for their search for life forms that may have existed for millennia below the lakes frozen surface.
We talk to Alexander Kumar a doctor who has spent the past 9 months living in Antarctica as part of an European Space Agency project to look at the physiological and psychological impact of extreme cold and isolation - which ESA hopes will help inform future long distance space missions to other planets.
And we hear from children's presenters Dick and Dom about their new science series 'How Dangerous' which is being broadcast on 4 Extra starting on Christmas Eve.
Prime Minister David Cameron is going to give a big speech on the future of the UK in Europe in early 2013 - amid growing calls from his own party, for a referendum - in or out. In this special programme, Ritula Shah asks an international panel of MPs if the UK can prosper outside Europe and Europe can prosper without the UK?
Part adventure, part romance, and set in Cornwall, Daphne Du Maurier's novel tells the powerful love story between Lady Dona and the French pirate Aubery.
Lady Dona St Columb flees high society London for the family estate in Cornwall, only to discover that a stranger has been sleeping in her bed.
Michael Rosen returns for a new series with an investigation into the effects of alcohol on speech and voice quality. Michael talks to psychologists at the University of Liverpool and listens to some of the controlled experiments they're carrying out with undergraduates both sober and intoxicated. He looks at research into the perfect pub song, and beer writer Pete Brown talks about the quintessential hum of pub chat. And we visit the Royal College of Music to discuss voice care and the kinds of food and drink professional singers have to avoid in order to prolong their careers.
Radio 4 visits the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King in Liverpool for the first Mass of Christmas in the company of a congregation of nearly two thousand people. The Principal Celebrant is the Rt Revd Thomas Williams, Auxiliary Bishop of Liverpool, assisted by the Dean and Clergy of the Cathedral. The cathedral choir, directed by Christopher McElroy sings Haydn's St Nicholas Mass, carols and Christmas music with organ (Richard Lea) and brass to celebrate the birth of Jesus, the light of the world.
TUESDAY 25 DECEMBER 2012
TUE 00:48 Shipping Forecast (b01pf2x6)
The latest shipping forecast.
TUE 01:00 Selection of BBC World Service Programmes (b01pf2x8)
BBC Radio 4 joins the BBC World Service.
TUE 05:20 Shipping Forecast (b01pf2xb)
The latest shipping forecast.
TUE 05:30 News Briefing (b01pf2xd)
The latest news from BBC Radio 4.
TUE 05:43 Prayer for the Day (b01pfwh8)
A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day Archbishop Vincent Nichols.
TUE 05:45 Farming Today (b01pfwhb)
Highclere Castle is famous around the world as the location for the TV programme Downton Abbey. But when the cameras have left, it is business as usual for the 2,000 acre farm, woodland and grounds. In the special Christmas Day edition of Farming Today, Anna Hill meets the team who manage the estate.
This programme is presented by Anna Hill and produced in Birmingham by Sarah Swadling.
TUE 06:00 Food and Farming Awards (b01p0vfj)
BBC Food and Farming Awards 2012
Sheila Dillon and Valentine Warner present the 13th, annual, BBC Food & Farming Awards, featuring Angela Hartnett, Raymond Blanc, Paul Hollywood and Countryfile's Adam Henson.
Recorded at the BBC Good Food Show, inside the NEC, Birmingham, chefs, food writers and drinks experts announce the winners in nine different categories, from Best Street Food or Takeaway to Best Food Market.
The event was the climax of a six month search for the best of British food and drink and the event proved to be a rich mix of food stories are on offer. A perfect start to Christmas morning.
Producer: Dan Saladino.
TUE 07:00 HV Morton: Travelling into the Light (b01mqr4t)
As John McCarthy retraces one of the journeys of H.V. Morton he presents a revealing portrait of this influential travel writer.
Witty, erudite and engaging, H.V. Morton was Britain's first truly popular travel writer.
His success was assured when he covered the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1923. His book In Search of England, published four years later, launched a bestselling series and set a benchmark for all travel writers.
Using In Search of England as a reference, McCarthy recreates Morton's journey around Devon and explores the changes to the landscape over the past eighty years.
On his travels he uncovers two Mortons. The book's narrator is a welcoming, cheerful man who rolls along the roads of England in a two-seater car to compose his skilfully-crafted considerations; and then there's the writer Harry Morton, a more complex individual whose literary achievements mask a complicated private life.
McCarthy's journey, echoing the pages of chapter six of In Search of England, takes him around Dartmoor, Widecombe and finally Clovelly. As he absorbs the areas he visited himself as a child he reflects on the influence of Morton and brings into the light the darker corners of the life of this pioneering travel writer.
TUE 07:30 Eric Sykes - The Radio Years (b0088z58)
The late and much missed Eric Sykes, in conversation with Paul Jackson, reflects back on his radio years writing scripts for Frankie Howerd, Archie Andrews and the Goons.
Producer: Paul Kobrak.
TUE 08:00 The Kitchen Cabinet (b01pfwhd)
Series 3
Christmas Special
For this special Christmas edition of The Kitchen Cabinet, Jay Rayner and the team are with food-lovers in Hoxton, London.
On the panel and full of festive cheer is food historian Annie Gray; renowned Michelin Star chef Angela Hartnett; cook, writer, and co-founder of the Leon restaurant chain, Henry Dimbleby; and Glaswegian cook and expert on Catalan cooking, Rachel McCormack.
The team tackle Christmas eating, including talking about the best ways of cooking and carving a turkey, vegetarian options for Christmas dinner if not an obvious nut roast, and if it's possible to shoe-horn deep-frying into Christmas cooking.
They pit Henry's modern mince pies against Annie's Tudor version that contains meat, and take questions on exciting ways to use-up leftovers and the best ways to dress your festive vegetables.
Food Consultant: Anna Colquhoun.
Produced by Robert Abel and Peggy Sutton.
A Somethin' Else production for BBC Radio 4.
TUE 08:30 Ed Reardon's Week (b01pfwhg)
Ed Reardon at Christmas
It Started in August
Celebrate Christmas with Radio 4's favourite curmudgeonly author, Ed Reardon, and his faithful companion Elgar.
It's Christmas Day and where is Ed Reardon spending it? The scepticism of his writing class back in August about where Ed would be hanging his stocking, wasn't entirely misplaced, and receiving a Christmas card from one's girlfriend signed without a kiss and her surname added in brackets probably doesn't bode well. However, all is not lost as Ed's jocular round robin email to his family inviting himself to join their Christmas celebrations wasn't all in vain - there was at least one member of the family who didn't bounce it back. So, following assurances that his requirements would be minimal, his levels of merriment would be Dionysian and a small caveat about what he regards as permissible Christmas viewing Ed is encouraged to think that he won't be spending Christmas alone. Or he could be looking at a day with only Elgar, an Oxo cube and a cinnamon stick.
Written by Andrew Nickolds and Christopher Douglas
Produced by Dawn Ellis.
TUE 09:00 Christmas Service (b01pfwhj)
'A Right Royal Christmas' - Bishop Richard Chartres preaches from the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, Tower of London at the close of a remarkable Diamond Jubilee Year. Bishop Stephen Oliver and Chaplain to the Queen and Chaplain to HM Tower of London, The Revd Roger Hall MBE, are joined by members of the community who today live within the walls of the Tower in this joyful act of worship for Christmas morning which will draw parallels and contrasts between the Kingship of Jesus Christ and some of the Royal happenings for which the Tower of London is famous. The Choir of the Chapels Royal, HM Tower of London present a feast of lively and popular carols including the Christmas morning favourite 'I Saw Three Ships.' Music Director: Colm Carey with organist Andrew Arthur. Producer: Mark O'Brien.
TUE 09:45 Book of the Week (b01pfwhl)
Three Houses
Episode 2
The author Angela Thirkell recalls her home in Kensington Square in the late 1890s, popping in to visit her neighbour, Auntie Stella aka Mrs Patrick Campbell, and the tea-time visits from her adoring grandfather, the artist Edward Burne-Jones, who kept a pad of paper at her house to draw her enchanting pictures.
Read by Sian Thomas.
Abridged and produced by Jane Marshall
A Jane Marshall production for BBC Radio 4.
TUE 10:00 Woman's Hour (b01pfwhn)
Miranda Hart, Allegra McEvedy
Jenni Murray and Jane Garvey host an extended edition of Woman's Hour. Comedian Miranda Hart discusses her new series; Kirstie Allsopp, Anna Friel and Jessica Ennis share their Xmas plans and we hear about some unusual ways of spending the holiday, there are tips from the chefs Mary Berry, Monica Galetti and Allegra McEvedy and Susy Atkins mixes the perfect pre-lunch aperitif. Plus music from the Ruby Dolls and some special presents.
Producer Louise Corley.
TUE 10:45 15 Minute Drama (b01pfwhq)
A Little Twist of Dahl
The Way up to Heaven
A series of stories by Roald Dahl
Dramatised by Stephen Sheridan.
Episode 2: The Way Up To Heaven
Charles Dance leads the cast as the urbane Storyteller in dramatisations of five classic tales by Roald Dahl. Bizarre and amusing by turns, these black comedies are justly famous for their surprise endings.
The stories show Dahl at the height of his powers as a writer of adult fiction. They are stylishly plotted, vividly characterised and made unforgettable by their breezy cynicism, presenting as they do, a hilariously bleak view of family life. Their satisfying conclusions invariably leave bullies, schemers, adulterers and frauds soundly punished.
In The Way Up To Heaven, despite living in a New York mansion so vast that it requires its own elevator, the Fosters are not a happy couple. Mrs Foster has a pathological fear of being late and her husband deliberately torments her by doing everything as slowly as he can. When she accepts an invitation to visit France, he insists on taking her to the airport only to leave her waiting outside in the car. Nearly hysterical, she goes to see what's keeping him but, when she reaches the front door, she hears a particular sound and realises, if she's cunning, she need never be late again..
Produced and Directed by David Blount
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.
TUE 11:00 Woman's Hour (b01pfyfg)
Jenni Murray and Jane Garvey host an extended edition of Woman's Hour. Comedian Miranda Hart discusses her new series; Kirstie Allsopp, Anna Friel and Jessica Ennis share their Xmas plans and we hear about some unusual ways of spending the holiday, there are tips from the chefs Mary Berry, Monica Galetti and Allegra McEvedy and Susy Atkins mixes the perfect pre-lunch aperitif. Plus music from the Ruby Dolls and some special presents.
Producer Louise Corley.
TUE 11:30 Saving Species (b01pfwhs)
Series 3
British Overseas Territories
Howard Stableford is in the chair for this Christmas Day Saving Species. On this day our thoughts are about spending time at home with our family, so for this week's episode Howard is looking at the UK's extended family with a programme on conservation in some of the British Overseas Territories.
We report on the news that a rare and highly endangered frog from Monserrat and Dominica in the Caribbean has successfully bred in London Zoo. Ed Drewitt discusses with Dr Ian Stephen this last chance conservation effort to save the Mountain chicken frog threatened with the Chytrid fungus; a disease fatal to 2/3 of all amphibians.
From tropical seas to the windswept island of S Georgia where the largest rat eradication project in the world is about to happen. Team Rat set off in January to save the albatrosses and petrels that nest on the sub-Antarctic eden from being eaten by rodents.
Howard discusses the establishment of marine conservation areas around the overseas territories with Alistair Gammell of the PEW Foundation. Overseas Territories are not just the land itself, it includes the seas that surround them for 200 nautical miles and include some of the richest seas in the world. Howard then questions the DEFRA Minister for Biodiversity, Richard Benyon, what the UK plans to do to help protect the precious places that make up British Overseas Territories.
Presenter Howard Stableford
Producer Mary Colwell
Editor Julian Hector.
TUE 12:00 With Great Pleasure (b01pfwzw)
With Great Pleasure at Christmas
A festive edition of the programme which invites a celebrity to raid their memories in search of the pieces of writing and music which best sum up their lives. Fi Glover, one of the BBC's most cherished radio presenters, steps up with a wonderfully varied selection of readings, from a nursery rhyme to Aristotle by way of Alan Bennett and John Mortimer. She even includes a fully-practical recipe for a very special dessert.
The readers are Rosie Cavaliero and Mark Meadows, who are joined by poet Kate Fox, and the Exultate Singers provide the finishing celebratory touch.
Producer Christine Hall.
TUE 12:57 Weather (b01pf2xg)
The latest weather forecast.
TUE 13:00 News Briefing (b01pfwzy)
The latest news from BBC Radio 4.
TUE 13:15 Grease Was Our World (b01pth5g)
Grease has entertained audiences for over 40 years, first on stage from 1971 and then on film in 1978. Somewhere near you Danny, Sandy Rizzo and the Pink Ladies will be hand jiving their way through a pastiche 1950's that is a happy fantasy almost entirely detached from the Eisenhower years. But the true roots of Grease lie far away from the palm trees and sunlit corridors of Travolta's Rydell High.
Alan Dein searches for the real world of Grease in North West Chicago with creator Jim Jacobs. There he encounters a much earthier world of 1950's teenage America. Enter a universe of drag races, boy bikers, teen rumbles and the real Pink Ladies! Home to The Imperials, Goombahs, Ravens and The Outcasts. Most newly arrived from the inner city and chafing against conformity. Tough kids who created a new kind of life for themselves far removed from their immigrant parent desires. Now in their 70's they describe some of the adventures that helped provide the inspiration for Jim Jacobs and writing partner Warren Casey in creating their Sandy, Danny, Rizzo and Kenickie. But the Grease that opened with an amateur cast for what was supposed to be just a few weeks in February 1971 was radically different to the so many of us know.
Producer: Mark Burman.
TUE 13:45 Grimm Thoughts (b01pfx02)
Episode 7
When the Grimm brothers first published their Children's and Household Tales in 1812, in a scholarly effort to collate a national identity of the people, it was the beginning of an obsessive project of two intricately interwoven lifetimes.
To mark the bicentenary of the first edition, writer and mythographer Marina Warner explores the many compelling and often controversial aspects of the tales in a 10-part series, revealing new insights into the stories we think we know so well, and introducing us to the charms and challenges of those that we don't.
Alongside beautifully narrated extracts from the tales themselves, renowned academics and artists who work closely with the Grimm's rich heritage add to our understanding of these deceptively complex stories.
Oedipal struggle in Cinderella; oral fixation in Hansel and Gretel; Little Red Riding Hood and attachment complex! Writers, psychologists and therapists have read deeper meanings into the Grimms' fairy tales. They have long been the subject of Freudian and Jungian interpretations and continue to be used by therapists and self-help authors today. In today's seventh episode of the series, we put the tales on the couch and discuss with psychoanalyst Susie Orbach their primal capacity to take on the unreal form of a dream.
Producer: Kevin Dawson
A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4.
TUE 14:00 The Archers (b01pfv90)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:00 on Monday]
TUE 14:15 Drama (b01pfx04)
Rumpole
Rumpole and the Expert Witness
Written by by John Mortimer. Adapted for radio by Richard Stoneman.
Benedict Cumberbatch and Timothy West star in this new Rumpole story.
It's 1964. Rumpole is asked to defend a GP, Dr Ned Dacre, who is accused of murdering his wife, Sally. Dr Ned Dacre's father is also a GP, Dr Henry Dacre, and it is he who asks Rumpole to take on the case.
Dr Henry met Rumpole during the Penge Bungalow Murder trial and believes Rumpole's the man to get his son off this trumped-up charge. The plot thickens when the local pathologist, Pamela Gall, turns out to be an old flame of Dr Ned's. It seems that Pamela never forgave Dr Ned for dumping her and marrying Sally instead.
Director: Marilyn Imrie
A Catherine Bailey production for BBC Radio 4.
TUE 15:00 HM The Queen (b01pfxhv)
The Queen's Christmas message to the Commonwealth and the nation, followed by the national anthem.
TUE 15:05 News Briefing (b01pfxhx)
The latest news from BBC Radio 4.
TUE 15:15 Pick of the Year (b01pfxhz)
In the New Year, Senior Announcer Harriet Cass leaves Radio 4 but before her departure she chooses her favourite moments from BBC Radio in 2012.
Included in her choices are children's voices talking about trout and haircuts, disembodied voices in desperate morse code messages signalling Titanic's end, Yorkshire voices searching for the point where language and accent change, great orator's voices - such as Martin Luther King - and voices telling moving and heart-breaking stories.
Good Morning Scotland - BBC Radio Scotland
The Arse That Jack Built - Radio 4
Today: Leap For Change - Radio 4
The Ice Mountain - Radio 4
Titanic In Her Own Words - Radio 4
Ship of Dreams - Radio 4
Wireless Nights - Radio 4
Soul Music: Brothers in Arms - Radio 4
Today: Obama's Victory Speech - Radio 4
Andrew Peach Show - Radio Berkshire
Charlie and Alfie's Breakfast Show: Martin Luther King Archive - Radio Newcastle
PM: Leap For Change - Radio 4
Twelfth Night - Radio 3
Old Harry's Game - Radio 4
Shortcuts - Radio 4
In Tune: The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain - Radio 3
If there's something you'd like to suggest for next week's programme, please e-mail potw@bbc.co.uk.
TUE 16:00 Word of Mouth (b01pfxj1)
Michael Rosen meets linguists, historians, students and sequence dancers to find out why the giving and receiving of compliments can be a complex and dangerous business. He meets language students in Cheltenham and sequence dancers in North London, who each have very different responses to people saying nice things to them. He talks to a personal development tutor and an etiquette coach about the do's and dont's of positive feedback. And he talks to the Swansea linguist studying why people feel uncomfortable with compliments. The difficulty is not the compliment, it's the response. How do you reply positively and politely without sounding arrogant? Michael discovers that our tendency towards post-modern irony makes a sincere compliment a difficult manoeuvre to complete - so even if you can say something nice, it may still be best to say nothing at all.
Producer: John Byrne.
TUE 16:30 Great Lives (b01pfxj3)
Series 29
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Matthew Parris talks to writer, broadcaster and 6Music presenter Stuart Maconie about the life of Ralph Vaughan Williams.
The expert witness is Em Marshall-Luck, chairman of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society and founder-director of the English Music Festival.
Producer: Christine Hall
TUE 17:00 News Briefing (b01pfxj5)
The latest news from BBC Radio 4.
TUE 17:10 Eddie Goes Country (b01p2w7d)
PM presenter Eddie Mair has harboured a secret. But no more - it's a lifelong love of Country music. He wants to know why these three chord melodramas call him and many of his fellow Celts.
While, to the casual listener, Country is often regarded as a twang of twee tunes and lachrymose lyrics for the permanently melancholic, Eddie suggests that it is actually a 'complex state of mind'. He considers the accessible merits of the music and discovers the roots of Country.
Returning to Scotland, Eddie attends the Celtic Connections Music Festival in Glasgow. Here he compares notes, likes and dislikes with fellow broadcaster and Country aficionado Ricky Ross, along with singers Eleanor McEvoy and Dick Gaughan.
On hand to explain the 18th century Scots/Irish exodus to America and Canada is emigration historian Professor James Hunter. And providing a master class on the Celtic musical lineage detected in contemporary Country Music is musicologist Dr. Katherine Campbell from Edinburgh University.
And for the first time, Eddie will reveal where his musical devotion took root. It began on the Sabbath in a yellow Triumph PI. That almost sounds like the beginning of a Country song...
Producers: Jo Coombs and Stewart Henderson
A Loftus Audio production for BBC Radio 4.
TUE 17:40 Nabokov's Christmas (b01pfy5p)
by Vladimir Nabokov.
An intensely moving short story about a father mourning the death of his son. On Christmas Eve, a grieving father moves around the family home gathering together some of his son's effects. This leads him to discover things that he did not know about his beloved son and also to find something among his belongings that will renew his will to live.
Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899, the eldest son of an aristocratic family. Nabokov is arguably most famous for his 1955 novel LOLITA.
Read by Robert Glenister.
Produced by Gaynor Macfarlane.
TUE 17:54 Shipping Forecast (b01pfy5r)
The latest shipping forecast.
TUE 17:57 Weather (b01pjvps)
The latest weather forecast.
TUE 18:00 Six O'Clock News (b01pf2xj)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.
TUE 18:15 15 Minute Musical (b01pfy5t)
Series 7
A Right Royal Cockney Christmas
Let the music play on!
Beautifully crafted with astronomically high production values 15 Minute Musical does for your ears what chocolate does for your taste buds.
All in fifteen minutes!
Episode One: A Right Royal Cockney Christmas
Upstairs Downton with the Windsors and the Middletons.
Starring: Richie Webb, Dave Lamb, Alex Tregear and Jess Robinson
Written by: Richie Webb, Dave Cohen and David Quantick
Music by: Richie Webb
Music Production: Matt Katz
Producer: Katie Tyrrell
After a year's break 15 Minute Musical is itching to get it's musical teeth back into easily identifiable public figures and give them a West End Musical make-over. This fabricated, sugar-coated story is then told in an original, never heard before, bite-size musical that will have your toes tapping to the rhythm and shoulders shaking to the laughs.
In true West End style artistic licence is well and truly taken and stretched ridiculously as easily identifiable public figures are dressed up, gilded, fabricated and placed against the backdrop of a random period of history for sugar coated consumption. The stories are simple and engaging but the writing is razor-sharp allowing the audience to enjoy all the conventions of a musical (huge production numbers, tender ballads and emotional reprises) whilst we completely re-interpret events in major celebrities' lives. With over thirty musicals selling out in the West End night after night - the British public (and the Radio 4 audience) cannot get enough of them, therefore .
Winner of the Writers Guild of Great Britain Radio Comedy Award this series is a seasonal treat at 1815 over the Christmas week.
TUE 18:30 Bleak Expectations (b01pfy5w)
Series 5
A Loved-Up Life Potentially Totally Annihilated
The inappropriately named arbiter of all evil Mister Gently Benevolent unveils an advent calendar of evil that will culminate on Christmas day with the total destruction of the universe.
Only one man can prevent the end of everything for all time. But at a terrible terrible cost. Is this the end for our hero Pip? Or is it curtains for the whole of creation? And does that mean Harry needn't get Pippa a Christmas present?
Mark Evans's epic Victorian comedy in the style of Charles Dickens.
Sir Philip ...... Richard Johnson
Young Pip Bin ...... Tom Allen
Gently Benevolent ...... Anthony Head
Harry Biscuit ...... James Bachman
Servewell ...... James Bachman
Clampvulture ...... Geoffrey Whitehead
Ripely ...... Sarah Hadland
Lily ...... Sarah Hadland
Pippa ...... Susy Kane
The Ghost of Christmice ...... Mark Evans
Producer: Gareth Edwards
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in December 2012.
TUE 19:00 The Archers (b01pfy5y)
Fallon's delighted when she discovers that her ticket to a Six Nations rugby match is just part of a weekend in Cardiff which includes a deluxe hotel. Jazzer manages to make Kenton feel guilty enough to invite him to join his family for lunch at Lower Loxley.
Lilian's still on New York time but she springs to life when her phone beeps and Matt offers to check it.
At Home Farm, Matt mentions the texts Lilian kept getting from Jennifer, although Peggy thinks Jennifer would have been too busy to text. Lilian changes the subject. Later, when Lilian's phone rings she quickly goes off to take the call, saying it must be James.
Alice reads Jim's article on Mike Tucker in Borsetshire Life. Alice thinks Jim should interview Chris -it's an opportunity for free advertising.
Peggy starts to reminisce and Lilian offers to go away with her. Peggy wants to go to Whitby, where Peggy snatched a few days with Jack in 1943.
In the evening, Matt, Lilian and Alice head to the Bull, where Jazzer starts off the Christmas sing-song with a romantic rendition of "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas". Rhys and Fallon kiss and wish each other a happy Christmas.
TUE 19:15 Front Row (b01pfy60)
Working with the family
With Mark Lawson.
Jack Whitehall, Greg Davies, Niamh Cusack and Frances de la Tour are among the performers and artists who share memories and reflections on working with close members of their families.
Christmas is the time when people are most likely to spend time with their closest relatives. But for some in showbusiness the holidays are not a rare family reunion but a continuation of a professional relationship or, for writers and comedians, an encounter with the relatives who have been the source of their best material.
Comedians Greg Davies, Jack Whitehall and Sarah Millican regularly exploit cringeworthy family moments in the service of comedy. They describe how it feels to perform the material with the family members in question in the audience.
Actress Niamh Cusack reflects on the experience of appearing in Chekhov's Three Sisters with two of her sisters and her father, and Andy and Frances de la Tour discuss working together in Alan Bennett's People, and why they are banned from laughing while watching each other perform.
Singer Donny Osmond reveals why he and sister Marie's chemistry on stage does not necessarily reflect the reality off-stage and the conductor Alan Gilbert explains why having his violinist mother in the orchestra prevents the other musicians from indulging in a much-loved pleasure.
Producer Ellie Bury.
TUE 19:45 15 Minute Drama (b01pfwhq)
[Repeat of broadcast at
10:45 today]
TUE 20:00 The Bricklayer's Lament (b01lsqk6)
Back in December 1958, German musician and humorist Gerard Hoffnung was asked to speak at the Oxford Union in a debate entitled "This House Believes Life Begins at 38". Luckily, the BBC was on hand to record the debate and they managed to capture Gerard giving a hilarious comic speech, which included the now legendary Bricklayer's Lament story.
This half hour documentary, narrated by Jack Dee, tells the story of the speech and how The Bricklayer's Lament really came about. It includes contributions from Ian Hislop, who was a fan from an early age, and Inspector Morse creator Colin Dexter, who was taught by Gerard during the Second World War.
The programme will reveal how an early incarnation of the R4 comedy panel show Just a Minute was to play a pivotal role in the eventual success of The Bricklayer's Lament.
The programme also features many classic clips of Gerard Hoffnung speaking at the Oxford Union debate, as well as other recordings he made in the fifties. These include snippets of the hilarious interviews he gave to the Canadian broadcaster Charles Richardson.
Also included are revealing interviews with Gerard's widow, Annetta, who shares her memories of this amazingly talented man.
The Bricklayer's Lament is a fascinating insight into how this recording came about and a loving tribute to a unique personality who entertained so many generations.
Produced by Paul Russell
An Open Mike Production for BBC Radio 4.
TUE 20:30 In Touch (b01pfyfj)
David Blunkett MP, Gary O'Donoghue BBC Political Correspondent and opera singer Denise Leigh join Peter White to talk about a favourite audio book.
David chooses Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, Gary selects Robert A Caro's LBJ, Denise Leigh picks Jason Manfords' Brung Up Proper and Peter's choice is John Arlott, A Memoir, by Timothy Arlott.
TUE 21:00 Archive on 4 (b01mhnnm)
A Brief History of Blame
Blame the abstract, blame the real, blame the stars, blame the bankers, blame the mother-in-law, blame anyone but yourself ....
The American satirist Joe Queenan presents A Brief History of Blame, an archive opera in six acts featuring Margaret Thatcher, Niall Ferguson, Tom Wrigglesworth, Richard Nixon, Melvyn Bragg, the Archbishop of Canterbury, plus new interviews with Germaine Greer, John Sergeant and Charlie Campbell. Together they reveal that we are all now living in a babel of blame.
Queenan gives no nonsense answers to six headings, including How Blaming Began. There are explanations for the word scapegoat, discussion of the role of parents in messing things up, and a rare outing from Margaret Thatcher in a performance of Yes Minister which she wrote herself. "I want you to abolish economists, " she demands. "Don't worry if it goes wrong - I'll get the blame, I always do."
"My qualifications for presenting this programme are impeccable," says Queenan. "My father was an alcoholic, my mother an emotionally distant manic depressive. Together we grew up in a charm free housing project in Philadelphia. So don't whine to me about how tough life is."
The producer is Miles Warde, who previously collaborated with Joe Queenan on A Brief History of Irony and An American's Guide to Failure.
TUE 21:58 Weather (b01pf2xl)
The latest weather forecast.
TUE 22:00 Drama (b01h6463)
Roy Smiles - Dear Arthur, Love John
A comedy drama by Roy Smiles, writer of previous Afternoon Dramas Ying Tong, Good Evening and Pythonesque.
It's often assumed that it was Dad's Army that made John Le Mesurier and Arthur Lowe well known. This is not so. Arthur Lowe had come to national attention, after a long apprenticeship in theatre, as the uptight church warden Mr Swindley in Coronation Street. John had made many films and found success as the diffident Colonel in the popular sitcom George And The Dragon. But it was Dad's Army, late in their lives, that brought them fame, fortune and the oddest of friendships.
For these were strange bedfellows: Arthur was a grammar school boy made good, John a public schoolboy who'd shamed his family by going into showbusiness; Arthur was a high Tory, John a life-long fluffy liberal; Arthur had a happy and stable marriage, John notoriously difficult ones - his first wife (Hattie Jacques) had left him for a shifty car-dealer, his second wife (Joan) had left him for doomed comedian Tony Hancock.
In 1982 John writes to Arthur to say how much he misses him and, as he does, we flashback to Dad's Army: the first read through; the reaction to getting 21 million viewers; Lowe's hatred of being recognised by the public; the rivalry between John Laurie and Arnold Ridley; Lowe's hostility to Clive Dunn and socialism; the affection Le Mesurier had for them all, particularly Jimmy Beck; and how, after initial snobbery about the show, the cast came to realise it was the best time of their lives.
Producer: Liz Anstee
A CPL Production for BBC Radio 4.
TUE 22:45 Daphne Du Maurier (b01pfzcv)
Frenchman's Creek
Episode 2
Part adventure, part romance, and set in Cornwall, Daphne Du Maurier's novel tells the powerful love story between Lady Dona and the French pirate Aubery.
Episode 2
Lady Dona revels in her new found freedom, encounters the local gentry and finds a secret passage to the sea.
Read by Adjoa Andoh
Abridged by Eileen Horne
Produced by Clive Brill
A Pacificus production for BBC Radio 4.
TUE 23:00 The Infinite Monkey Cage (b01pfv8r)
[Repeat of broadcast at
16:30 on Monday]
TUE 23:30 The Playlist Series (b017ng3m)
Queen Victoria's Playlist
In Buckingham Palace, David Owen Norris and guests listen to Queen Victoria's favourite songs. We have been given access to Victoria's own gold piano, on which we'll hear music written specially by Mendelssohn for her to play in a duet with Albert. We also hear an amorous serenade written for her by Prince Albert and a song which was sung in the streets after their first child was born, Queen Victoria's Baby.
David Owen Norris has discovered a startling popular song of the period about the Great Exhibition - the excitement of setting off to see the Queen as a gold statue, and the reality of fleas, dirt, crowds, and dubious dark alleys where it was all too easy to lose one's virtue and return pregnant!
Listening to the music are Royal biographer Kate Williams, cultural critic Matthew Sweet, and expert on Victorian music Professor Jeremy Dibble. They'll be discussing what Queen Victoria's favourite songs reveal about a very musical monarch.
Producer: Elizabeth Burke.
A Loftus production first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in November 2011.
WEDNESDAY 26 DECEMBER 2012
WED 00:00 Midnight News (b01pf2yf)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4. Followed by Weather.
WED 00:15 Christmas Meditation (b01pg3q7)
Just as everyone is doing the washing up and waving off the last guests Catherine Fox reflects on how the message of Christmas can feel both too big and very small at the same time.
Having just moved to the city of Liverpool, she takes us into Liverpool's vast Anglican cathedral which is the largest in the country. And yet there inside the tallest, widest, longest nave, architect Giles Gilbert Scott put one of his smallest buildings - the red telephone box. You could step inside, pick up the receiver and phone anyone in the world.. But what would you say?
Using memories from childhood Christmases, and experiences of being a mother herself, she spends time thinking about the big and small things in life which can help to define our faith and our questioning. And with the nativity story all around, where do such thoughts take us to on Christmas night?'
In a profound, honest and down to earth reflection Catherine Fox mixes her own personal style - which will be well known to all those who regularly read her blogs or know her in the Twitter community as @FictionFox - with some beautiful Christmas carols to present an evocative and thought-provoking close to Christmas Day.
WED 00:30 Book of the Week (b01pfwhl)
[Repeat of broadcast at
09:45 on Tuesday]
WED 00:48 Shipping Forecast (b01pf2yh)
The latest shipping forecast.
WED 01:00 Selection of BBC World Service Programmes (b01pf2yk)
BBC Radio 4 joins the BBC World Service.
WED 05:20 Shipping Forecast (b01pf2ym)
The latest shipping forecast.
WED 05:30 News Briefing (b01pf2yp)
The latest news from BBC Radio 4.
WED 05:43 Prayer for the Day (b01pg3q9)
A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day Archbishop Vincent Nichols.
WED 05:45 Farming Today (b01pg3qd)
Early lambing has started in some parts of the UK and Anna Hill joins one Norfolk sheep farmer, as he anxiously awaits the arrival of around 100 pedigree lambs in just 24 hours.
This programme is presented by Anna Hill and produced in Birmingham by Angela Frain.
WED 06:00 Meeting Myself Coming Back (b01jppw6)
Series 4
Richard Branson
The first programme in the new series of 'Meeting Myself Coming Back', the series in which leading public figures explore their lives through the BBC archives, features Sir Richard Branson in conversation with John Wilson. From his early days as the founder of "Student" magazine, to the creation of the Virgin record business and expansion into a global empire, Richard Branson has been an icon of entrepreneurship. In this interview, he meets his younger self from the sound archive and discusses his reactions with John Wilson.
He begins by hearing his 21- year old self running the influential "Student Magazine" from a basement in London and relives the way he created Virgin Records as a cut price mail order enterprise. He also hears the sound archive from 1984 when he announced the setting up of Virgin Atlantic with only one plane. We hear his memories of his daring exploits in hot air balloons and at sea and his thoughts on escaping death by a whisker.
Richard Branson also relives the episode when one of his planes flew into Baghdad airport in to bring out the British hostages held by Saddam Hussain after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. He talks about the eerie stillness of the deserted airport, the tension of waiting and the relief when the hostages finally came on board.
We also hear his thoughts on doing business, taking knocks, political affiliation, plans for space travel and paying tax.
Producer: Emma Kingsley.
WED 07:00 Today (b01pg3qg)
Morning news and current affairs with Justin Webb and Evan Davis. Including Sports Desk; Weather; Thought for the Day.
WED 09:00 Midweek (b01pg3qj)
Peter Snow, Sir Trevor Nunn, Debra Searle, Mike Brace
Libby Purves looks back over the last decade with guests, writer and broadcaster Peter Snow, theatre director Sir Trevor Nunn, adventurer Debra Searle and paralympian Mike Brace.
Peter Snow CBE is a writer and broadcaster. He has presented a number of documentaries with his son Dan including 'Battleplan: The Battle for Alamein' and 'Battlefield Britain'. His book 'When Britain Burned the White House', about the British destruction of US public buildings during the Anglo-American war of 1812, is published next year.
Sir Trevor Nunn CBE is a theatre director. He is a former artistic director of both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. He has directed some of the most critically acclaimed and popular productions in recent decades. He is currently directing two shows in London's West End, Cole Porter's 'Kiss Me Kate' and Alan Ayckbourn's 'A Chorus of Disapproval'. Kiss Me Kate is at the Old Vic and Chorus of Disapproval is at the Harold Pinter Theatre.
Debra Searle MBE is an adventurer, television presenter and is a Trustee of the Duke of Edinburgh's Award. In 2001 she set off with her then husband on the Atlantic Rowing Challenge from Tenerife to Barbados. But after only 14 days he withdrew from the race, leaving Debra to finish alone. During the last decade she achieved a new world record in a dragon boat across the English Channel. She also competed in the longest canoe race in the world.
Mike Brace CBE is former chairman of the British Paralympic Association and director of Vision 2020UK. He is currently a director of UKAD, the UK's Anti-doping agency for sport. He was in Singapore in 2005 when London won the 2012 Olympic bid. Blinded at 10 in a firework accident, he represented Great Britain at cross-country skiing at six Paralympic Games, three World Championships and two European Championships.
Producer: Annette Wells.
WED 09:45 Book of the Week (b01pg3ql)
Three Houses
Episode 3
A beautifully nostalgic childhood memoir of Britain in the late 1890s, written by the eminent author Angela Thirkell.
She recalls in rich detail, and with a delightful sense of humour, the three houses which were seminal to her youth.
The third of the three houses is the country home of the author's grandfather, the artist Edward Burne-Jones. It is furnished with Morris wallpaper, Morris chintzes and carpets and a selection of beastly uncomfortable pre-Raphaelite chairs.
Read by Sian Thomas
Abridged and produced by Jane Marshall.
A Jane Marshall production for BBC Radio 4.
WED 10:00 Woman's Hour (b01pg3qp)
Inspiring women over 80: Dr Alice Rivlin, Prof Mildred Dresselhaus, Vigdis Finnbogadottir, Prof Romila Thapar
Jenni Murray introduces a special edition of Woman's Hour comprising fresh interviews with a series of octogenarian women, each a world leader in their field. The women discuss the changes they have seen in their 80-plus years and the lessons they have learned.
The women are
Dr Alice Rivlin, 81, One of the USA's top economists, she is advisor to President Obama on debt reduction.
Professor Mildred Dresselhaus, 82, is known as the Queen of Carbon and has been awarded the one million dollar Kavli Prize in nanoscience - presented to her by the King of Norway.
VigdÃs Finnbogadóttir, 82, was the world's first democratically elected female President, when she became Iceland's head of state.
Prof Romila Thapar, 81, One of India's greatest historians and the winner of Kluge Award - the equivalent of the Nobel prize for historians.
WED 10:45 15 Minute Drama (b01pg3qr)
A Little Twist of Dahl
The Hitchhiker
A series of stories by Roald Dahl
Dramatised by Stephen Sheridan.
Episode 3: The Hitchhiker
Charles Dance leads the cast as the urbane Storyteller in dramatisations of five classic tales by Roald Dahl. Bizarre and amusing by turns, these black comedies are justly famous for their surprise endings.
The stories show Dahl at the height of his powers as a writer of adult fiction. They are stylishly plotted, vividly characterised and made unforgettable by their breezy cynicism, presenting as they do, a hilariously bleak view of family life. Their satisfying conclusions invariably leave bullies, schemers, adulterers and frauds soundly punished.
In The Hitchhiker, Andrew Pym, a successful author, is driving to London in his brand new BMW. He stops to give a hitchhiker a lift. Unwisely, he allows the man to persuade him to see if the car can go as fast as its manufacturers claim. Stopped for speeding, his details are noted down by a policeman who warns him to expect a heavy fine and sends him on his way. Blithely unconcerned at causing so much trouble, the hitchhiker starts boasting that he is engaged in a line of work that requires exceptional skills. And it's these skills that can get Andrew out of his present difficulty.
Produced and directed by David Blount
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.
WED 11:00 Bellydancing and the Blues (b01pg3qt)
Dancer and drummer Guy Schalom hunts out the spirit of the new Egypt in one of its biggest cultural exports. To our ears, Baladi is the music of the bellydancer - kitsch and mock-Arab. But in its true form it is the essence of Egypt, 'of the country', 'home' in the deepest sense.
Our journey begins in Berlin, as bejwelled dancers from across Europe gather on a theatre stage ready to do battle for the title 'Miss Bellydance 2012'. They might not all know it, but the music which accompanies their gyrations is a knot of contradictions: an essence of the east inspired by western musical traditions, the spirit of rural Egypt made urban.
But the deepest contradictions rest with the very people who perform Baladi. What seems to us a provocative, alluring, even licentious dance for women in fact has roots in a ceremonial dance for men. As we discover in Cairo, deep divisions remain between those who think it is a vital expression of the oriental spirit and those committed to regenerating sexual stereotypes. So what is the reality of bellydance and Baladi in the new Egypt? Can it find any place amongst the street rappers and pop artists or is this an artform about to be consigned to realms of the tourist-pleasing clubs and cafes? As with so much in this rapidly changing culture, answers prove difficult to find.
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2012.
WED 11:30 A Charles Paris Mystery (b01pg3qw)
An Amateur Corpse
Episode 4
Charles closes in on the murderer of his old friend Hugo's wife with help from both his wife and his mother.
Bill Nighy stars as actor-cum-sleuth, Charles Paris.
By Jeremy Front - based on Simon Brett's novel.
Charles ..... Bill Nighy
Frances ..... Suzanne Burden
Joan ..... Geraldine McEwan
Maurice ..... Jon Glover
Geoff ..... Patrick Brennan
Saskia ..... Christine Absalom
Hugo ..... Paul Ritter
Holly ..... Susie Ridell
Director: Sally Avens
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in December 2012.
WED 12:00 You and Yours (b01pg3qz)
Turkey leftovers, the boss of Waitrose, and government health advice
We're told by the Government how much we should drink, eat and exercise - but what's the science behind the advice? Former Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson tells us he thinks some of the advice is too simplistic and that using units to try to measure alcohol is out of date.
Money Saving Expert Matlin Lewis looks back on how 2012 has been for consumers.
We've got some advice on what to do with that left-over turkey as we look at whether TV chefs are to blame for food waste. Winifred is joined by former MasterChef winner Thomasina Miers.
We reveal why you need to watch out for the flaw in the new style MoT certificates. They're being used to con people buying used cars.
And the row going on about our National Parks - just how accountable are they to the people that live within them.
Plus Good afternoon, thank you for the question, it's great to have this opportunity. Not phrases you hear much in everyday life but ones we hear a lot on this programme. We blame the army of media trainers and hear from one of them.
And, 'Daddy is Lego spelled like Merlot with a silent t?' hear more conversations overheard at Waitrose from their managing director Mark Price.
Presenter: Winifred Robinson
Producer: Joe Kent.
WED 12:57 Weather (b01pf2yr)
The latest weather forecast.
WED 13:00 World at One (b01pg3r1)
Shaun Ley presents national and international news. Listeners can share their views via email: wato@bbc.co.uk or on twitter: #wato.
WED 13:45 Grimm Thoughts (b01pg3r3)
Episode 8
When the Grimm brothers first published their Children's and Household Tales in 1812, in a scholarly effort to collate a national identity of the people, it was the beginning of an obsessive project of two intricately interwoven lifetimes.
To mark the bicentenary of the first edition, writer and mythographer Marina Warner explores the many compelling and often controversial aspects of the tales in a 10-part series, revealing new insights into the stories we think we know so well, and introducing us to the charms and challenges of those that we don't.
Alongside beautifully narrated extracts from the tales themselves, renowned academics and artists who work closely with the Grimm's rich heritage add to our understanding of these deceptively complex stories.
By exposing the role of fairy tales in the cultural struggle over gender, feminism transformed fairy-tale studies and sparked a debate that would change the way society thinks about the stories and the words "happily ever after". In the eighth episode, we speak to writer Helen Simpson about the presentation of the tales' female characters, and how their impact and influence still resonates today.
Producer: Kevin Dawson
A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4.
WED 14:00 The Archers (b01pfy5y)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:00 on Tuesday]
WED 14:15 The Penny Dreadfuls (b01pg3r6)
Hereward the Wake
by David Reed and Humphrey Ker
From the team who brought Radio 4 the story of Guy Fawkes and the French Revolution, The Penny Dreadfuls now turn their comic eye towards Hereward The Wake. Why has this Englishman responsible for leading the fight against the occupation of William The Conqueror, been so readily forgotten? The story didn't end when they ran out of embroidery cotton on the Bayeux Tapestry. Our mission is to make sure that from now on, you will know his name.
Producer...Julia McKenzie.
WED 15:00 Archive on 4 (b01p2wd0)
From Easy to Cryptic - 100 Years of the Crossword
Famous for her own love of word play, Lynne Truss decodes a bountiful archive of clues, answers, interviews and puzzles to celebrate the centenary of this resilient mind teaser. The first crossword appeared in the New York Times in 1913, devised by a Liverpudlian called Arthur Wynne. He was the first of many setters whose cryptic clues and clever answers encapsulate the cultural and social agenda of their age. MI5 interrogated the Telegraph's first setter in 1944 when his crossword solutions suggested he knew too much about military operations. Lynne learns that code breakers selection for Bletchley Park was based on their prowess for cracking crosswords.
In an internet age of gaming and quick access to information, Lynne Truss learns why scientists argue that the hardy crossword keeps the mind agile and listens to the sounds of the setter and crossword solver at work, pondering the trickiest clue.
WED 16:00 Thinking Allowed (b01pg54j)
Intoxication
Intoxication - In a special programme, Laurie Taylor explores the role and meaning of both alcohol and drugs in human life. Why do so many people chose to alter their consciousness with stimulants, whether legal or illicit? Professor James Mills, the author of 'Cannabis Nation..' is joined by Professor Fiona Measham and Professor Chris Hackley.
Producer: Jayne Egerton.
WED 16:30 The Media Show (b01pg54l)
From the Two Ronnies and Morecambe and Wise to the Royle Family and the battle of the soaps, Steve Hewlett unpicks the dark arts of festive TV scheduling. From the executives who make up programme titles to fool their rivals to the search for the perfect sitcom to suit all the family on Christmas night, he asks industry experts to reveal the tricks of the trade. His guests include David Liddiment, independent producer, former director of ITV Programmes and now a BBC Trustee; former scheduler Stephen Price and Lisa Campbell, editor of Broadcast magazine.
He is also joined by Sir David Jason the star of one of the most successful and long-running sitcoms, Only Fools and Horses. Sir David describes working on the Christmas editions and how his inspiration for Del Boy Trotter was a man from London's Eastend who he met while working as an electrician.
WED 17:00 PM (b01pg54n)
Carolyn Quinn with interviews, context and analysis.
WED 18:00 Six O'Clock News (b01pf2yt)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.
WED 18:15 15 Minute Musical (b01pg54q)
Series 7
Brian Elliott
A series of satirical, barbed, bittersweet fifteen-minute comedy musicals.
Episode Two: Brian Elliott
Brian Cox in Brian Elliott about a boy who D-reams of being a Scientist.
Starring: Richie Webb, Dave Lamb and Pippa Evans
Written by: Richie Webb, Dave Cohen and David Quantick
Music by: Richie Webb
Music Production: Matt Katz
Producer: Katie Tyrrell
Beautifully crafted with astronomically high production values 15 Minute Musical does for your ears what chocolate does for your taste buds.
All in fifteen minutes!
The fun-size yet satisfying musicals take an easily identifiable public figure and give them a West End Musical make-over. The fabricated, sugar-coated story is told in an original, never heard before, musical.
Delicious musical delicacies that melt in your ear not in your hand.
So, enjoy a West End Musical experience for a fraction of the cost - well, actually for no cost at all.
With over thirty musicals selling out in the West End night after night - the British public (and the Radio 4 audience) cannot get enough of them, therefore ...
In true West End style artistic licence is well and truly taken and stretched ridiculously as easily identifiable public figures are dressed up, gilded, fabricated and placed against the backdrop of a random period of history for sugar coated consumption. The stories are simple and engaging but the writing is razor-sharp allowing the audience to enjoy all the conventions of a musical (huge production numbers, tender ballads and emotional reprises) whilst we completely re-interpret events in major celebrities' lives. With over thirty musicals selling out in the West End night after night - the British public (and the Radio 4 audience) cannot get enough of them, therefore ...
WED 18:30 Mark Steel's in Town (b01phj47)
Series 4
Corby
Comedian Mark Steel returns with a new series, looking under the surface of some of the UK's more distinctive towns to shed some light on the people, history, rivalries, slang, traditions, and eccentricities that makes them unique.
Creating a bespoke stand-up set for each town, Mark performs the show in front of a local audience.
As well as examining the less visited areas of Britain, Mark uncovers stories and experiences that resonate with us all as we recognise the quirkiness of the British way of life and the rich tapestry of remarkable events and people who have shaped where we live.
During this 4th series of 'Mark Steel's In Town', Mark will visit Tobermory, Whitehaven, Handsworth, Ottery St Mary, Corby, and Chipping Norton.
This week, Mark visits Corby to uncover an unlikely town rivalry, the extraordinary story behind a baffling accent, and the truth behind the trouser press rumours... From December 2012.
Additional material by Pete Sinclair.
Produced by Sam Bryant.
WED 19:00 The Archers (b01pg54s)
Ed finds himself getting under Susan's feet in Ambridge View's unfamiliar kitchen, so heads out to start milking. Ed accepts Ruth's offer to show him how dairy management programmes work. There's the possibility of downloading a simple accounting programme for free. Ruth offers to help Ed get set up and they agree to meet next week.
Jill, Jim and Kenton discuss the awkward moment yesterday when Jim spat out one of Jill's mince pies - the batch had been mixed up and he'd got a meaty one. Jim fears the Christmas show will be dreary, but Kenton says he may be pleasantly surprised. Jim criticises Borsetshire Life magazine, although he's interested in interviewing Chris at Alice's suggestion, so won't resign.
Shocked Jill reports the death of Bob Pullen, who has given Jill authority to organise his funeral arrangements. Glasses are raised and stories are shared, before Jill realises she'd better tell Joe. He's now the official village elder.
Susan apologises to Ed for being a bit short with him this morning. Ed thanks her for having him and Emma. He feels he's let Emma down, but is going to do everything he can to get them back on their feet. Susan's confident he will - new year, new start.
WED 19:15 Front Row (b01pg54v)
Neil Young, Pete Townshend, Mick Jagger and more on their musical roots
John Wilson talks to musicians including Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Neil Young, Neil Diamond, Paul McCartney, Emeli Sandé, Jonny Greenwood and Pete Townshend about their first musical influences.
Neil Young reveals why he recently recorded a version of God Save The Queen, the anthem he sang regularly during his Canadian childhood.
Paul McCartney discusses how songs by the great American tunesmiths of the 1930s, which he heard in his childhood home, influenced his own approach to writing.
Pete Townshend contrasts his love of abrasive rock and roll with the music performed by his father, who played the saxophone in a dance band.
Soul singer Bobby Womack remembers how he also rebelled against his father, who wanted his sons to perform only gospel music, rather than anything more secular.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards reflect on their early shared love of raw American blues records.
And Neil Diamond, Emeli Sandé and Jonny Greenwood, from the band Radiohead, recall the early musical encounters which shaped their subsequent careers.
Producer John Goudie.
WED 19:45 15 Minute Drama (b01pg3qr)
[Repeat of broadcast at
10:45 today]
WED 20:00 Unreliable Evidence (b01pg54x)
Courtroom Drama
With its sets and costumes, soliloquies, suspense and dramatic revelations - the courtroom is pure theatre.
Following the return of Rumpole to Radio 4, Clive Anderson and his guests discuss how accurately the legal world is depicted in stage and screen dramas. And they discuss the issues which arise when the distinctions between fiction and fact - between Rumpole and reality - become blurred in the public's mind.
Guests Helena Kennedy QC, appeal court judge Sir Alan Moses, German judge Ruth Herz and former barrister and co-creator of Garrow's Law, Mark Pallis, reflect on 50 years of fictional courtroom dramas - from To Kill a Mockingbird to Silk, and ask if lawyers can learn things from the actors who portray them.
Does the way courtroom dramas introduce dramatic last minute evidence, show defendants crumbling under cross-examination and defence barristers reducing juries to tears, even remotely reflect the real world? Are judges really as out of touch, and lawyers as pompous and greedy as their screen counterparts? And does it really matter if screenwriters fail to stick to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
Award-winning producers of comedy, drama, factual and entertainment programming.
Producer: Brian King
An Above The Title production for BBC Radio 4.
WED 20:45 Four Thought (b01pg54z)
Series 3
Tom Armitage: The Coded World
Designer and technologist Tom Armitage argues that learning to write computer code means learning to think in a modern way, and that it should spur creativity: the possibility of doing entirely new things.
Four Thought is a series of talks which combine thought provoking ideas and engaging storytelling. Recorded live in front of an audience, speakers air their latest thinking on the trends, ideas, interests and passions that affect our culture and society.
Producer: Giles Edwards.
WED 21:00 And No Birds Sing: Rachel Carson and Silent Spring (b01ptgb4)
Franny Armstrong - the film maker behind the blockbuster The Age of Stupid - looks at the explosive impact of Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring and its role in the growth of the environmental movement.
'All Mankind is in her debt', said one Senator on Rachel Carson's death in 1964. At a time when 'attacks from the air' as Carson described them - the indiscriminate spraying of crops with pesticides - were a regular occurrence in the US, Carson's book 'Silent Spring' questioned the logic of releasing large amounts of chemicals into the environment without fully understanding their effects on ecology or human health. Carson presented evidence from state after state of entire bird populations being wiped out, the desecration of plant life, contamination of ground water and instances of the deaths of human beings. Beyond these specific concerns, she suggested that the spraying was a 'war on life' - and put this as a moral, as well as scientific, question. In an age where there was palpable excitement in the agricultural and chemical industries at the prospect of man controlling nature, Carson introduced the idea that man's war against nature is a war against himself.
Fifty years after the book's publication, Franny Armstrong, director of the film 'Age of Stupid' and founder of the
10:10 Climate Change campaign, looks at the far-reaching influence of Carson's book. She talks to Caroline Lucas, who has written the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of the book, about the impact Silent Spring had when it was first published, the challenges she faced, and how she made her case so effectively. Contributors include nature writer Mark Cocker, who talks about Carson's lucid and beautifully composed depiction of a world which has faced apocalypse, science writer Colin Tudge on the method and message of the book, and Linda Lear, Carson's biographer, who reveals the price Carson paid to bear witness to what she had discovered. While researching the connection between pesticides and onset of cancer, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and had to minimize her own health problems in order to complete her life's work.
'I could never again listen to a thrush's song if I had not done all I could' wrote Carson towards the end of her life. Already a bestselling nature writer, Carson deliberately employed the rhetoric of the cold war and a tone of moral crisis to persuade readers of the urgency of her message. The book is an assault on the wilful ignorance of major commercial interests, but despite warnings that she would be subjected to personal attack and threats of legal action, Carson continued her crusade, and ultimately wrought political change, under the Kennedy administration and beyond. In his Preface to the 1994 edition, Al Gore described Silent Spring as the most influential book of the last fifty years, which brought us back to a fundamental idea: the interconnection of human beings and the natural environment. If this is a fairly widely accepted concept today, in the early 1960s, Carson was labelled by business interests as 'emotional and hysterical', a 'crackpot' and 'subversive'. This programme looks at the events surrounding the production of 'Silent Spring', and its hostile reception in some quarters, to its legacy today.
WED 21:30 Midweek (b01pg3qj)
[Repeat of broadcast at
09:00 today]
WED 21:58 Weather (b01pf2yw)
The latest weather forecast.
WED 22:00 The World Tonight (b01pg551)
Syrian army police chief defects to rebels.
High court judge intervenes in gay marriage row.
Will tensions between Japan and China worsen in 2013?
With Paul Moss.
WED 22:45 Daphne Du Maurier (b01pg553)
Frenchman's Creek
Episode 3
Part adventure, part romance, and set in Cornwall, Daphne Du Maurier's novel tells the powerful love story between Lady Dona and the French pirate Aubery.
Episode 3
Dona is captured by pirates, which is not altogether unpleasant, and finds she is not the only one who has come to Navron for refuge.
Read by Adjoa Andoh
Abridged by Eileen Horne
Produced by Clive Brill
A Pacificus production for BBC Radio 4.
WED 23:00 Tim Key and Gogol's Overcoat (b01nt3y0)
Tim Key spins his own surreal tale of one of Russian fiction's greatest short stories, whilst contending with his own filthy disgrace of a jacket. With contributions from Alexei Sayle and John Motson.
Tim Key - poet, comedian, and crumpled polymath - is obsessed with Nikolai Gogol's short story "The Overcoat". Written in 1842, it's a fable of a simple clerk, Akakiy Akakievich, whose desire for a new coat to keep the St Petersburg winter at bay forever changes his life...and ultimately destroys him.
Its author - the enigmatic Ukrainian-born writer Nikolai Gogol - is one of Tim's idols. In this deceptively simple yet utterly surreal tale, Gogol spins webs around the reader, foxing them with an unreliable narrator, blending stark realism with the eye-poppingly fantastical, and constantly deconstructing and undercutting the story of poor Akaky Akakievich with his own running commentary.
More than 150 years on, no-one, it seems, quite knows what The Overcoat is really about. Is it a dark satire on the powerlessness of the individual and the tyranny of totalitarian governments? A fantastical, proto-Dadaist fable of devils, toenails and ghostly goings-on? Or a deeply realist moral message to be kind to the poorest in our society?
Tim's off to find out what - if anything - Gogol's mysterious story can tell us...and why The Overcoat feels even more relevant in the 21st century. Is this fable the seed of alternative comedy? Should more of us pay heed to this bizarre morality tale? And above all, isn't it about time Tim replaced his own filthy disgrace of a coat?
Fact blends with surreal fantasy, as Tim gets sidetracked, Gogol-style, into his own private coat Hades...
Featuring contributions from Russian experts Donald Rayfield, Maria Rubins and Konstantin von Eggert - plus East End tailor and Master Cutter Clive Phythian, 'father of alternative comedy' Alexei Sayle, and football commentator and sheepskin coat-wearing icon John Motson.
WED 23:30 The Playlist Series (b01gd4lk)
William Shakespeare's Playlist
David Owen Norris and guests compile a playlist for the bard. Choosing Shakespeare's favourite songs are the renowned Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells, RSC director Greg Doran and musician Lucie Skeaping.
The music ranges from a lullaby Shakespeare's mother Mary Arden might have sung him, through bawdy ballads from the local tavern, to haunting songs written by Shakespeare himself. What do they tell us about our most enigmatic genius?
The programme is recorded at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, a wooden recreation of a Shakespearean playhouse.
With singers Gwyneth Herbert and Thomas Guthrie, and a trumpeter from Shakespeare's old school to test the theatre acoustics with some rousing fanfares.
Producer: Elizabeth Burke.
A Loftus production for BBC Radio 4.
THURSDAY 27 DECEMBER 2012
THU 00:00 Midnight News (b01pf2zq)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4. Followed by Weather.
THU 00:15 Stephen Fry on the Phone (b017cb0m)
Creating the Network
Stephen Fry traces the evolution of the mobile phone, from hefty executive bricks that required a separate briefcase to carry the battery to the smart little devices complete with personal assistant we have today.
There are more mobile phones in the world than there are people on the planet: Stephen Fry talks to the backroom boys who made it all possible and hears how the technology succeeded, in ways that the geeks had not necessarily intended.
In the first episode, Stephen Fry meets the men who first dreamt of creating a cellular network. Back in the sixties, two Bell Labs engineers in the US thought perhaps a maximum of 50,000 people might use a cellular phone network. Now, there are billions of phones in the world, all of them dependent on the networks based on their design. It was an enormous technical challenge that took decades to complete; but the main problems were political. Motorola, for example, argued that phone calls were a frivolous waste of radio spectrum compared to more worthy causes like television.
Producer: Anna Buckley.
THU 00:30 Book of the Week (b01pg3ql)
[Repeat of broadcast at
09:45 on Wednesday]
THU 00:48 Shipping Forecast (b01pf2zs)
The latest shipping forecast.
THU 01:00 Selection of BBC World Service Programmes (b01pf2zv)
BBC Radio 4 joins the BBC World Service.
THU 05:20 Shipping Forecast (b01pf2zx)
The latest shipping forecast.
THU 05:30 News Briefing (b01pf2zz)
The latest news from BBC Radio 4.
THU 05:43 Prayer for the Day (b01pghmb)
A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day Archbishop Vincent Nichols.
THU 05:45 Farming Today (b01pg57f)
Charlotte Smith visits the meadows, ponds and orchards of the Worcestershire Wildlife Trust to find out how wildlife is faring in the winter.
Presenter: Charlotte Smith. Producer: Angela Frain.
THU 06:00 Today (b01pg5nr)
0738
Scientists often complain that journalists - in search of attention-grabbing headlines - misrepresent their work through simplification and exaggeration and journalists often complain that scientists are unwilling to explain what they do to the public. Today's guest editor, Sir Paul Nurse, wants to bridge that gap, so he took Today presenter John Humphrys on a tour of his lab at Cancer Research UK to see science in action.
0750
Chancellor George Osborne on Thursday announced the award of investment funds totalling £21.5m to some of Britain's top universities to develop commercial uses for the "super-material" graphene. Guest editor Sir Paul Nurse began by asking him how central science was to the government's plans for reviving the economy.
0810
Every child taken to a hospital accident and emergency department in England is to be checked against a computer database to help detect signs of abuse. Dr Simon Eccles, a consultant in emergency medicine at Homerton Hospital, London, explains that the system will allow medical staff to see if the children they treat are subject to a child protection plan or being looked after.
0815
Today's Christmas guest editor, Sir Paul Nurse, asks the novelist Ian McEwan why writers are so wary of scientific themes.
0820
The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games passed pretty much without a glitch this year. Sir John Armitt, chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority and who is now heading a review of infrastructure for the Labour Party, and Paul Deighton, chief executive of London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, discuss the lessons that can be learned in terms of building new infrastructure.
THU 09:00 In Our Time (b01pg5nt)
The Cult of Mithras
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the cult of Mithras, a mystery religion that existed in the Roman Empire from the 1st to the 4th centuries AD. Also known as the Mysteries of Mithras, its origins are uncertain. Academics have suggested a link with the ancient Vedic god Mitra and the Iranian Zoroastrian deity Mithra, but the extent and nature of the connection is a matter of controversy.
Followers of Mithras are thought to have taken part in various rituals, most notably communal meals and a complex seven-stage initiation system. Typical depictions of Mithras show him being born from a rock, enjoying food with the sun god Sol and stabbing a bull. Mithraic places of worship have been found throughout the Roman world, including an impressive example in London. However, Mithraism went into decline in the 4th century AD with the rise of Christianity and eventually completely disappeared. In recent decades, many aspects of the cult have provoked debate, especially as there are no written accounts by its members. As a result, archaeology has been of great importance in the study of Mithraism and has provided new insights into the religion and its adherents.
With:
Greg Woolf
Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews
Almut Hintze
Zartoshty Professor of Zoroastrianism at SOAS, University of London
John North
Acting Director of the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London.
Producer: Victoria Brignell.
THU 09:45 Book of the Week (b01pg5nw)
Three Houses
Episode 4
A beautifully nostalgic childhood memoir of Britain in the late 1890s, written by the eminent author Angela Thirkell.
She recalls in rich detail, and with a delightful sense of humour, the three houses which were seminal to her youth.
At her grandfather's house in Rottingdean, the author listens to her cousin's latest stories. The cousin is Rudyard Kipling and the tales are later published as The Just So Stories.
Read by Sian Thomas
Abridged and produced by Jane Marshall
A Jane Marshall production for BBC Radio 4.
THU 10:00 Woman's Hour (b01pg5ny)
Jessica Ennis, Victoria Pendleton, Katherine Grainger
Jessica Ennis, Victoria Pendleton and Sarah Storey on how they reached the top and the pressures of being an elite female athlete. Gold medal winning rower Katherine Grainger, BBC sports journalist Eleanor Oldroyd, Sue Tibballs from the Women's Sport and Fitness Foundation, and chief executive of UK Sport Liz Nicholl joins Jane Garvey to discuss how women's sport in Great Britain can build on the Olympic success of London 2012.
Producer: Emma Wallace
Studio Producer: Ella-mai Robey
Editor: Alice Feinstein.
THU 10:45 15 Minute Drama (b01pg5p0)
A Little Twist of Dahl
Edward the Conqueror
A series of stories by Roald Dahl
Dramatised by Stephen Sheridan.
Episode 4: Edward the Conqueror
Charles Dance leads the cast as the urbane Storyteller in dramatisations of five classic tales by Roald Dahl. Bizarre and amusing by turns, these black comedies are justly famous for their surprise endings.
The stories show Dahl at the height of his powers as a writer of adult fiction. They are stylishly plotted, vividly characterised and made unforgettable by their breezy cynicism, presenting as they do, a hilariously bleak view of family life. Their satisfying conclusions invariably leave bullies, schemers, adulterers and frauds soundly punished.
In Edward the Conqueror, Louisa, a retired piano teacher, takes in a stray cat. She is astonished at how happy it seems when she plays it some Liszt. Noticing that, like Liszt, it has warts on its face, she decides that it must be the re-incarnation of the great composer. Edward, her monstrously selfish husband, resents the cat's presence and is ruthlessly dismissive of her theories on its true identity. Unabashed, Louisa announces, to Edward's acute embarrassment, that she intends to make her findings public.
Produced and directed by David Blount
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.
THU 11:00 Crossing Continents (b01pg5p2)
Burma
Lucy Ash asks what the explosion in popular protest over a Chinese-backed copper mine says about changes in Burma and asks if this is a test case for the government's commitment to democratic reforms.
Farmers' daughters Aye Net and Thwe Thwe Win have led thousands of villagers in protest against what they say is the unlawful seizure of thousands of acres of land to make way for a $1 billion expansion of a copper mine run by the military and a large Chinese arms manufacturer. They have been thrown in jail and they have been harassed by their own police and military, and yet they have refused to back down.
Their bravery has been celebrated by the poet Ant Maung from the nearest big city Monywa, who wrote: "The struggle made them into iron ladies. . .This is life or death for them - they will defend it at the cost of everything."
Burmese officials and the Chinese company say the Monywa copper mine will create jobs and bring prosperity to one of the poorest and least developed nations in Asia. But the villagers complain about pollution, damage to crops and the loss of fertile land.
A violent crackdown on the protestors was a stark reminder that the country's transition to democracy remains fraught with difficulties. Some suspect the government acted to avoid scaring away foreign investors. Others say the brutal response shows Burma's military leaders are still in charge behind the scenes and that they are not prepared to tolerate any dissent which encroaches on their economic interests.
Meanwhile there is a rising tide of Sinophobia in a country which feels overshadowed by its powerful northern neighbour. How the mine dispute is resolved may provide vital clues about the future of Burma.
Producer: Katharine Hodgson.
THU 11:30 Beatrix Potter's Favourite Tale (b01pgg3x)
Philip Glassborow recounts the tale of the original version of The Tailor of Gloucester - Beatrix Potter's personal favourite - and learns about her attachment to the many traditional songs and carols which were included when the book was first published in 1901 but excised from the more familiar later version. With Finty Williams as Beatrix Potter.
It was after a visit to Gloucester that Beatrix Potter became fascinated by the true story behind the miraculous tale of grateful mice stitching the mayor's wonderful waistcoat after the tailor himself had fallen ill and there was no "no more twist".
Potter transformed this into The Tailor of Gloucester and sent it as a gift to Freda, the little daughter of her old governess. She published this privately, including many local songs and carols associated with the old legend that on the stroke of midnight on Christmas eve, the animals are able to speak.
As she had anticipated - and in spite of the astonishing success of her first book, Peter Rabbit - Frederick Warne declined to publish this and eventually brought out a version stripped of most of its music.
Philip Glassborow tracks down the sources of this music and explores Potter's passion for it and the traditions at the heart of the story.
Producer: Beaty Rubens.
THU 12:00 You and Yours (b01pgg3z)
Online romance fraud, rising rail fares, dog-friendly towns
Deaf people searching for love on the internet are being targeted by criminals. It's prompted police to issue new warnings to people using online dating websites. Rail fares are set to rise again in the New Year, so how do prices here compare with the rest of Europe? Trading Standards are there to protect us from fraudsters and rogue traders, but their budgets have been cut by nearly a third in just three years. How will ordinary consumers be affected? Is Keswick in Cumbria really the most dog-friendly town in Britain?
Producer: Jonathan Hallewell
Presenter: Winifred Robinson.
THU 12:57 Weather (b01pf301)
The latest weather forecast.
THU 13:00 World at One (b01pgg41)
Shaun Ley presents national and international news. Listeners can share their views via email: wato@bbc.co.uk or on twitter: #wato.
THU 13:45 Grimm Thoughts (b01pgh23)
Episode 9
When the Grimm brothers first published their Children's and Household Tales in 1812, in a scholarly effort to collate a national identity of the people, it was the beginning of an obsessive project of two intricately interwoven lifetimes.
To mark the bicentenary of the first edition, writer and mythographer Marina Warner explores the many compelling and often controversial aspects of the tales in a 10-part series, revealing new insights into the stories we think we know so well, and introducing us to the charms and challenges of those that we don't.
Alongside beautifully narrated extracts from the tales themselves, renowned academics and artists who work closely with the Grimm's rich heritage add to our understanding of these deceptively complex stories.
In the ninth episode, we break the silence on the tales' history of censorship. Throughout their lifetime the collection's innocent veneer has had its blood, violence, and sexual overtones softened or removed altogether by successive editors, each reacting to the particular sensitivities of the day, and even to the Grimms themselves.
Even so the stories have found as many champions as censors, most notably J.R.R. Tolkien in his defence of The Juniper Tree's brutal depiction of murder. Why is it that although the details that prove controversial have changed over time - each one a telling insight into the temperament of a society - the tales' fundamental power to shock remains unchanged?
Producer: Kevin Dawson
A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4.
THU 14:00 The Archers (b01pg54s)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:00 on Wednesday]
THU 14:15 Drama (b01pgh25)
The Sensitive
Queen of the Dead
By Alastair Jessiman.
Glasgow's psychic detective returns for a new case. A grieving daughter finds hundreds of cassette recordings made by a woman obsessed with her late father, a Professor of English. Thomas Soutar is hired to trace the identity of the woman behind the tapes - who styles herself the "Queen Of the Dead".
Producer/director: Bruce Young.
THU 15:00 Open Country (b01pgh27)
Finding Neverland
Helen Mark takes us on a journey to the real Never Never Land.
Peter Pan first came to life on the glittering stage of London's Duke of York Theatre on 27th December 1904, but he began life far away from the hustle, bustle and glamour of the West End in the market town of Kirriemuir near Dundee. Helen Mark visits the birth place of J.M. Barrie who immortalised this "wee red toonie" as "Thrums" in his popular (pre-Pan) novels Auld Licht Idylls, A Window in Thrums, and The Little Minister. Helen also takes us out into the landscape that is believed to have inspired Never Never Land and the adventures of Peter Pan himself.
Producer: Nicola Humphries.
THU 15:27 Radio 4 Appeal (b01pf6dn)
[Repeat of broadcast at
07:55 on Sunday]
THU 15:30 Open Book (b01pf7kc)
[Repeat of broadcast at
16:00 on Sunday]
THU 16:00 The Film Programme (b01pgh5v)
The Unfilmable Books That Have Made It to the Big Screen
In a special edition, Francine Stock and guests discuss difficult books adapted for the big screen. Deepa Mehta talks Midnight's Children, Ang Lee reveals the challenges of making Life of Pi, and Walter Salles discusses On the Road. Meanwhile, Sir Christopher Frayling, critic Tim Robey, and screenwriter Tony Grisoni look back over the years at cinema's attempts at realising 'unfilmable' books.
Producer: Craig Smith.
THU 16:30 Material World (b01pgh5x)
Unsung heroes of Science
Recorded in front of an audience Quentin Cooper and guests, Kevin Fong, Adam Rutherford, Mark Miodownik, Vivienne Parry and Dallas Campbell, discuss the unsung heroes of science
THU 17:00 PM (b01pgh5z)
Carolyn Quinn with interviews, context and analysis.
THU 18:00 Six O'Clock News (b01pf303)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.
THU 18:15 15 Minute Musical (b01pgh61)
Series 7
The Ozfather
After a year's break 15 Minute Musical is itching to get it's musical teeth back into easily identifiable public figures and give them a West End Musical make-over. This fabricated, sugar-coated story is then told in an original, never heard before, bite-size musical.
Episode 3: The Ozfather
The story of Rupert Murdoch and how he come to Britain to build a media empire.
Starring: Richie Webb, Dave Lamb and Jess Robinson
Written by: Richie Webb, Dave Cohen and David Quantick
Music by: Richie Webb
Music Production: Matt Katz
Producer: Katie Tyrrell
So, enjoy a West End Musical experience for a fraction of the cost - well, actually for no cost at all.
The bitesize yet satisfying musicals take easily identifiable public figures and give them a West End Musical make-over with original, never heard before musicals that will have both your goose-bumps and the hairs on the back of your neck dancing.
With over thirty musicals selling out in the West End night after night the British public cannot get enough of them, therefore enjoy the music, the singing, the dancing and the high production values from your radio - without the hassle, discomfort and expense of actually going to the West End.
Winner of the Writers Guild of Great Britain Radio Comedy Award this series is a seasonal treat at 1815 over the Christmas week.
THU 18:30 Births, Deaths and Marriages (b01jrqr1)
Series 1
Episode 4
In this episode, the team are horrified that the media have been invited to one of Malcolm's citizenship ceremonies, Anita's got problems with childcare and Luke's having a 'quarter life' crisis.
Births, Deaths and Marriages is a new sitcom set in a Local Authority Register Office where the staff deal with the three greatest events in anybody's life.
Written by David Schneider (The Day Today, I'm Alan Partridge), he stars as chief registrar Malcolm Fox who is a stickler for rules and would be willing to interrupt any wedding service if the width of the bride infringes health and safety. He's single but why does he need to be married? He's married thousands of women.
Alongside him are rival and divorcee Lorna who has been parachuted in from Car Parks to drag the office (and Malcolm) into the 21st century. To her, marriage isn't just about love and romance, it's got to be about making a profit in our new age of austerity.
There's also the ever spiky Mary, geeky Luke who's worried he'll end up like Malcolm one day, and ditzy Anita who may get her words and names mixed up occasionally but, as the only parent in the office, is a mother to them all.
Cast:
Malcolm ...... David Schneider
Lorna ....... Sarah Hadland
Anita ........ Sandy McDade
Luke ....... Russell Tovey
Mary ....... Sally Bretton
Mr. Arnold/Peter Stephenson ...... Andrew Brooke
Bereaved woman/New Citizen/Mum ...... Jane Whittenshaw
Producer: Simon Jacobs
A Unique production for BBC Radio 4.
THU 19:00 The Archers (b01pgh63)
At the village hall, Kirsty and Fallon prepare to rehearse 'Hey Nonny' and Lynda has a general costume nightmare. Later, when people have gone, Fallon tells Kenton she's not feeling the excitement of the show - there's something missing.
Matt's bored and fancies a trip into Borchester with Lilian, but Lilian declines as she's got a run through of the show later. When she arrives at rehearsals, she's immediately greeted by criticism from Lynda. Lilian gives as good as she gets and flounces out, leaving Lynda stunned.
Lilian rings Paul. She realises she ought to apologise to Lynda, but she had to get it off her chest. Paul mentions she could get a flight to Dubai and join him. Lilian wonders how on earth she'd swing that, but Paul says she's resourceful enough. Otherwise it's another ten days before they can see each other again - which is a long time.
At home, Matt wishes they were going away just after Christmas, but Lilian reminds Matt they can't, they have other commitments. When Matt continues to moan, Lilian finally snaps at him and a piqued Matt goes to bed. Left alone, Lilian picks up the phone and dials - asking to make a reservation...
THU 19:15 Front Row (b01pgh65)
The creative backstage stars of Strictly, Downton and the Olympics
Kirsty Lang turns the spotlight on the backstage stars, some of the key individuals behind-the-scenes who play a key role in big events and major TV shows.
The band from Strictly Come Dancing lurk at the back of the stage in the shadows as the brightly-lit action takes place on the dance floor in front of them. Band leader Dave Arch, bass player Trevor Barry and singers Haley Sanderson and Lance Ellington give us an insight into the view from the back, and what they can do when things don't quite go according to plan.
Costume designer Caroline McCall is in charge of creating, sourcing, designing and hiring the wide selection of period dress for Julian Fellowes' ITV1 hit drama series Downton Abbey. She takes Kirsty round her main costume suppliers who provided the extensive high-end wardrobe for Shirley MacLaine in Series 3, and describes what it's like to see the script for the first time and find there's a big wedding, a jazz party and a trip to London, and filming starts in two weeks.
And Patrick Woodroffe, lighting designer of choice for the Rolling Stones since 1982, has had a busy year lighting the Queen's Diamond Jubilee concert outside Buckingham Palace, the Stones' 50th anniversary tour, and not least the opening and closing ceremonies for the Olympics and Paralympics. He discusses the pleasures of creating a new show from scratch and the challenges that faced him when Danny Boyle described his vision for his opening ceremony - and why the big orange Olympic rings so nearly didn't light up.
Producer Jerome Weatherald.
THU 19:45 15 Minute Drama (b01pg5p0)
[Repeat of broadcast at
10:45 today]
THU 20:00 The Report (b01pgh6r)
HP and Autonomy
Current affairs series. Phil Kemp investigates the sale of the British software company Autonomy to IT giant Hewlett Packard, which claims it was misled about the firm's value.
THU 20:30 In Business (b01pgh6t)
The Business of Kindness
Random acts of kindness can help businesses grow in surprising ways. Peter Day talks with one woman who explains how the generosity of others has made all the difference to her company. Henrietta Lovell, the Rare Tea Lady, started her firm just before becoming seriously ill. Through the kindness of strangers she has managed to return to health and run a prosperous company. She is now a great advocate for spreading the idea that kind gestures are an important force in the way we conduct our personal and professional lives.
THU 21:00 Saving Species (b01pfwhs)
[Repeat of broadcast at
11:30 on Tuesday]
THU 21:30 In Our Time (b01pg5nt)
[Repeat of broadcast at
09:00 today]
THU 21:58 Weather (b01pf305)
The latest weather forecast.
THU 22:00 The World Tonight (b01pgh81)
President Obama has returned to the White House to try to break the political deadlock in Congress which risks sending the United States over what's known as the "fiscal cliff", and tipping its economy back into recession. President Putin has signalled he'll sign into law a bill barring Americans from adopting Russian children. And how enduring has the Olympic cheer been from London 2012? Presented by Ritula Shah.
THU 22:45 Daphne Du Maurier (b01pghc1)
Frenchman's Creek
Episode 4
Part adventure, part romance, and set in Cornwall, Daphne Du Maurier's novel tells the powerful love story between Lady Dona and the French pirate Aubery.
Episode 4
Lady Dona socializes with French pirates and English gentry, juggling her two different lives.
Read by Adjoa Andoh
Abridged by Eileen Horne
Produced by Clive Brill
A Pacificus production for BBC Radio 4.
THU 23:00 The Simon Day Show (b010y312)
Series 1
Billy Bleach
With no headliner at The Mallard, newcomer Billy Bleach is asked to extend his stand-up set. With Simon Greenall. From May 2011.
THU 23:30 The Playlist Series (b017l5y3)
Robert Burns's iPod
David Owen Norris and guests listen to Robert Burns' favourite songs in his drinking club in Tarbolton, near Glasgow. With National Poet of Scotland Liz Lochhead (writer of a play about Burns), Dr Kirsteen McCue and Professor Nigel Leask - and featuring Burns' own fiddle.
We hear the songs with the tunes he wanted - not always the ones which have become famous. For instance, 'My Love is like a Red Red Rose' was changed by his publisher against Burns' wishes. Kirsteen McCue is the world expert on Burns' songs and she reveals the original versions. We also hear a naughty song called 'Nine Inch will Please a Lady'.
Robert Burns' playlist reflects his political vision and also his complex love life. Burns was writing for the high-class Edinburgh ladies who took him up in his 30s, but he was also composing songs in broader Scots about their maids. Songs were a crucial part of his seduction technique - and they seem to have worked for him. He left 15 illegitimate children. Even on his death-bed, Burns was writing songs - for the pretty blonde teenager who was nursing him. That song, 'Oh Wert Thou in the Cold Blast', is one of his most beautiful and almost unbearably moving. Burns was destitute, he was dying at the age of only 37, and yet he sang to his nurse: "Oh wert thou in the cold blast, I'd shelter thee, I'd shelter thee".
Presenter David Owen Norris is a broadcaster, composer and concert pianist. He has arranged the songs, which are performed by Thomas Guthrie and jazz singer Gwyneth Herbert.
Producer: Elizabeth Burke.
A Loftus production for BBC Radio 4.
FRIDAY 28 DECEMBER 2012
FRI 00:00 Midnight News (b01pf311)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4. Followed by Weather.
FRI 00:15 Stephen Fry on the Phone (b017cfkj)
From Car Phone to Executive Brick
Stephen Fry traces the evolution of the mobile phone, from hefty executive bricks that required a separate briefcase to carry the battery to the smart little devices complete with personal assistant we have today.
There are more mobile phones in the world than there are people on the planet: Stephen Fry talks to the backroom boys who made it all possible and hears how the technology succeeded, in ways that the geeks had not necessarily intended.
In episode two, Stephen Fry meets the men who brought mobile phones to Britain. Thanks to Margaret Thatcher opening up the airwaves, Britain became a world leader in mobile phone technology in the eighties. Vodafone (short for voice-data-phone) competed fiercely with the BT's mobile baby, Cellnet (short for cellular network), to create the first mobile phone network in the UK which was launched to great fanfare on Christmas Day 1985. Coverage was truly patchy, handsets were seriously hefty and calls cost a fortune, but mobile phones quickly replaced car phones as the ultimate yuppie accessory. Voicemail, incidentally, was a good excuse to charge customers yet more for a service that was, in reality, rather poor..
Producer: Anna Buckley.
FRI 00:30 Book of the Week (b01pg5nw)
[Repeat of broadcast at
09:45 on Thursday]
FRI 00:48 Shipping Forecast (b01pf313)
The latest shipping forecast.
FRI 01:00 Selection of BBC World Service Programmes (b01pf315)
BBC Radio 4 joins the BBC World Service.
FRI 05:20 Shipping Forecast (b01pf317)
The latest shipping forecast.
FRI 05:30 News Briefing (b01pf319)
The latest news from BBC Radio 4.
FRI 05:43 Prayer for the Day (b01pghpc)
A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day Archbishop Vincent Nichols.
FRI 05:45 Farming Today (b01pgjy3)
Young farmers struggling to find their way onto the farming ladder are working with the Forestry Commission in Scotland. A pilot project has offered ten-year leases to two young farmers in Fife, on 'starter farms' where some of the land is best suited to tree planting. The project addresses two of Scotland's government targets: the need to plant more trees and the need to get more young people into farming.
Is this, though, an erosion of a precious resource at a time when food production should be paramount? Moira Hickey visits Pitcairn Farm near Lochgelly to find out.
Presented and produced by Moira Hickey.
FRI 06:00 Today (b01pgjy5)
Morning news and current affairs with James Naughtie and Sarah Montague. Including Sports Desk; Weather; Thought for the Day.
FRI 09:00 Desert Island Discs (b01pf6dx)
[Repeat of broadcast at
11:15 on Sunday]
FRI 09:45 Book of the Week (b01pgjy7)
Three Houses
Episode 5
A beautifully nostalgic childhood memoir of Britain in the late 1890s, written by the eminent author Angela Thirkell.
She recalls in rich detail, and with a delightful sense of humour, the three houses which were seminal to her youth.
It's Christmas at North End House in Rottingdean and the waits and the mummers are busy touring the village. But for one little girl, opening her stocking on her grandmother's bed, it's a tiny dormouse that steals the day.
Read by Sian Thomas
Abridged and produced by Jane Marshall.
A Jane Marshall production for BBC Radio 4.
FRI 10:00 Woman's Hour (b01pgjy9)
Rings, going home, dressing for success and fashion howlers
Presented by Jenni Murray. On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me.... what makes the ring more symbolic and significant than any other piece of jewellery? Anthea Jarvis, author of "How to be Adored" and Caroline Cox, who writes about fashion, advise us on how to dress for success. Home can be a place we long for, or a place we want to escape from and forget? What is this notion of 'home' and belonging, and how does it shape us for good or bad? And, the television presenter, Kate Garraway, commented recently that 'a sad and sorry collection of fashion howlers lies at the back of every woman's wardrobe'. To discuss some of fashion's biggest faux pas, and how to avoid them, Jenni is joined by fashion journalist, Helen Tither, and columnist, Judith Woods.
FRI 10:45 15 Minute Drama (b01pgjyc)
A Little Twist of Dahl
The Neck
A series of stories by Roald Dahl
Episode 5: Neck
Charles Dance leads the cast as the urbane Storyteller in dramatisations of five classic tales by Roald Dahl. Bizarre and amusing by turns, these black comedies are justly famous for their surprise endings.
The stories show Dahl at the height of his powers as a writer of adult fiction. They are stylishly plotted, vividly characterised and made unforgettable by their breezy cynicism, presenting as they do, a hilariously bleak view of family life. Their satisfying conclusions invariably leave bullies, schemers, adulterers and frauds soundly punished.
In Neck, Sir Basil Turton, a wealthy newspaper magnate, has recently taken a young wife. Bossy and openly adulterous, the new Lady Turton is despised by Jelks, Sir Basil's butler, for her cruel treatment of his master. One morning she is openly frolicking with her latest lover in the grounds of the estate, when, for a joke, she sticks her head through a hole in one of Sir Basil's priceless Henry Moore sculptures. When she finds she is stuck, Sir Basil with Jelks' assistance, must decide on a course of action.
Produced and directed by David Blount
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.
FRI 11:00 UK Confidential (b01pgksh)
1982
With unique access to secret government papers, Martha Kearney presents a look at the political events of 1982 as told through the Cabinet minutes, Prime Ministerial papers and Foreign and Commonwealth Office documents and briefings that are being released to the public at the end of the year.
Close to 30,000 Government papers containing top secret memos, notes and briefings are included in the release, and the Radio 4 team have been given special access over the last few weeks.
In a dramatic year, 1982 saw Britain at war with Argentina over the Falklands, which is expected to dominate much of the papers released under the thirty year rule.
We anticipate discovering details of the talks to avert conflict, of events such as the loss of HMS Sheffield and the Battle of Goose Green, and of the controversial sinking of the Argentine Navy cruiser General Belgrano.
In addition we may well find out details of how the Franks Inquiry into the Falklands War put politicians and civil servants under the spotlight and how those around Margaret Thatcher sought to capitalise on her renewed popularity in the wake of the victory in the South Atlantic.
Producer: Deborah Dudgeon
A Whistledown Production for BBC Radio 4, in association with Takeaway Media.
FRI 12:00 You and Yours (b01pglkx)
Convenience stores, Odeon Cinema boss and the Olympic legacy
How local independent stores are coping with the twin threats of cash strapped customers and the expansion of the big supermarkets into convenience stores
Why the boss of Odeon cinemas, Rupert Gavin, thinks that Strictly Come Dancing is more of a threat to his business than online downloads.
Melanie Abbott has been back to the Olympic Park in search of the Olympic legacy.
We examine the economics behind the online retailer Amazon and look at how one town has spent its 'Portas Money' and if it has had any effect.
FRI 12:52 The Listening Project (b01pglkz)
John and Colin: Atomic Test Witness
Fi Glover presents a conversation between a father and son about the father's National Service experience on Christmas Island, as a witness to atomic testing, proving 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. Many of the long 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 upload your own conversations or just learn more about The Listening Project by visiting bbc.co.uk/listeningproject
Producer: Marya Burgess.
FRI 12:57 Weather (b01pf31c)
The latest weather forecast.
FRI 13:00 World at One (b01pgg81)
James Robbins presents national and international news. Listeners can share their views via email: wato@bbc.co.uk or on twitter: #wato.
FRI 13:45 Grimm Thoughts (b01pgll1)
Episode 10
When the Grimm brothers first published their Children's and Household Tales in 1812, in a scholarly effort to collate a national identity of the people, it was the beginning of an obsessive project of two intricately interwoven lifetimes.
To mark the bicentenary of the first edition, writer and mythographer Marina Warner explores the many compelling and often controversial aspects of the tales in a 10-part series, revealing new insights into the stories we think we know so well, and introducing us to the charms and challenges of those that we don't.
Alongside beautifully narrated extracts from the tales themselves, renowned academics and artists who work closely with the Grimm's rich heritage add to our understanding of these deceptively complex stories.
In the final episode, with fairy tales enjoying a renaissance across film and literature, we look to the future of these tales that have haunted our past and the fundamental appeal of storytelling.
Considering Hansel and Gretel, a universal story of the joys and dangers of youth and innocence, we speak to playwright Lucy Kirkwood about her brand new National Theatre adaptation of the tale, and explore what the many contemporary takes on the Grimms' legacy might tell us about the modern world.
Producer: Kevin Dawson
A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4.
FRI 14:00 The Archers (b01pgh63)
[Repeat of broadcast at
19:00 on Thursday]
FRI 14:15 Drama (b01pgll3)
Sarah Weatherall - Storm
By Sarah Weatherall. Sound is Andrei's passion and has become his life. Working on a film soundtrack on a remote Scottish island he discovers his recordings filled with human cries floating on the wind. Braving the storms, Andrei sets out to solve the mystery.
Directed by Anne Bunting.
FRI 15:00 Gardeners' Question Time (b01pgll5)
Newcastleton, Scotland
Eric Robson and the team are in Newcastleton in Scotland for the final GQT of 2012. Bob Flowerdew, Matt Biggs and Anne Swithinbank join Eric as this week's GQT panel.
Produced by Howard Shannon
A Somethin' Else Production for BBC Radio 4.
Overflow and notes:
Q. I have a north-facing concrete garden, in the constant shade of my house. What can an armchair gardener do with this garden?
A. Get a greenhouse and also consider building some raised beds from railway sleepers. Small trees could be planted in large containers, and walkways covered in bark or gravel to hide the rest of the concrete pad.
Q. When and how hard should a Hydrangea Hortensia be pruned to encourage it back to life after being cut down to ground level?
A. Leave the thicket of stems that have grown back until they are ready to flower, then after flowering some of the stems can be thinned out. Leave the flower heads on the plant to protect developing buds below.
Q. What is the best way to move my clump of Common Dog Violets from a gravel bed when I undertake re-landscaping next spring?
A. Divide the clump into smaller pieces in the spring and replant into trays of potting compost before planting out again into multiple clumps.
Q. How does the panel recommend making the most of cold frames attached to a greenhouse?
A. Cold frames are good for over-wintering almost-hardy plants that will overheat in the greenhouse. Potted-out Strawberry plants can be kept in the cold frame and insulated space blankets can be laid over the frames to keep Fuschias and Pelargoniums through the winter. Seeds that need a cold period, such as some trees, shubs and herbaceous plants, can be put in a cold frame to break their dormancy.
Q. How do I look after my large Mock Orange (Philadelphus) bush? Last year I pruned them and this year they did not blossom.
A. These should be pruned directly after flowering but will not respond well to being shaped in general. To reduce the plant in size whilst maintaining its flowering, thin out the shoots annually. Philadelphus Microcarpam is a recommended smaller variety of Philadelphus.
Q. Against the odds a vine has survived after the destruction of its greenhouse home. How can we encourage it to fruit?
A. Prune back very hard to remove last year's growth. Leave two or three shoots on each shoot and remove again any shoots that do not develop flower trusses on them. When berries develop, remove intermittent bunches to encourage the vine to ripen sooner and shorten the shoots again to concentrate growth.
Q. Would Myrtle grow in the Scottish Borders?
A. Temperatures below -8 or -9 degrees will harm a Myrtle. They can be grown in a conservatory or greenhouse, or in pots that you can move inside in the winter.
Q. Will a tree grown from a plum stone bear fruit and if so, when? It is currently about 18in tall.
A. This needs to be planted out, as plums are not happy in pots. It probably will bear fruit, though in its original form.
Q. How do you garden when you only get 7 hours of sunshine in the whole month of July?
A. Jerusalem Artichokes, Celeriac, runner beans and even roses did OK this year despite the wet weather. A greenhouse will make your life easier as a gardener, as will a helmet with a torch on top!
________________________________________________________________
PRODUCER
name: Howard Shannon
Produced by Howard Shannon
A Somethin' Else production for BBC Radio 4.
FRI 15:45 Morven Crumlish - Murals (b01pgll7)
A Bowl of Cherries
These three stories by Morven Crumlish - commissioned specially for Radio 4 - are inspired by the work of the artist Phoebe Anna Traquair. Traquair (1852-1936) was born in County Dublin and in the 1870s moved to Edinburgh, where she would later become a prominent figure in the Scottish Arts and Crafts movement.
Probably her best-known works are the vibrantly-coloured murals in what was formerly the Catholic Apostolic Church in Broughton Street, Edinburgh, which Traquair took eight years to complete (1893-1901). When the church fell out of ecclesiastical use, the murals suffered badly through neglect, but following the formation of the Mansfield Traquair Trust, a major restoration was undertaken, completed in 2005.
While art is at the core of all three fictions, Murals also mirrors the evolution of a similar building: from church, to brickyard, to present-day use for visitors and as a venue for events."
3/3. A Bowl Of Cherries
An events manager, organising a christening party at the former church, is beset by crises. One is professional - there's a dead dog in the basement. But the other is more existential.
Morven Crumlish's stories have been broadcast widely, and she also contributes to the Guardian. Her work has featured in four previous Sweet Talk productions for BBC Radio 4, including Dilemmas of Modern Martyrs - five of her stories - in 2008; and most recently 'Harold Lloyd Is Not The Man Of My Dreams' (Three For My Baby, 2011).
Morven lives in Edinburgh.
Reader: Ashley Jensen
Producer: Jeremy Osborne
A Sweet Talk production for BBC Radio 4.
FRI 16:00 Bute: Dreams of the World's Richest Man (b01pgll9)
Jonathan Glancey discovers the astonishing contribution to British art and architecture of the 3rd Marquis of Bute.
In the second half of the 19th Century, the 3rd Marquis of Bute would have had claim to the world's richest man. His wealth was based not just on the family estates in Scotland, but on his ownership of the docks of Cardiff, then the world's richest port whose coal powered the greatest navy and the greatest empire in the world. The wealth was simply extraordinary.
What he did with that wealth matches it in scale: he embarked on artistic patronage on an almost incomprehensible scale. When he met the Gothic designer William Burgess it marked the start of a lifetime of collaboration with the finest architects and artists of his day, producing the High Victorian Gothic exuberance of Cardiff Castle and Castell Coch, the ostentation of Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute and the sumptuous restoration of the Renaissance Falkland Palace. They are the most extraordinary buildings.
The grand halls of the castles and houses are furnished with the most expensive materials in the world, worked into elaborate decoration by the finest Victorian artists: Nathaniel Westlake, William Frame, Rowland Anderson and Lonsdale. Etched into them all (there are 5 grand houses altogether) are Bute's great loves - the signs of the zodiac and exotic animals, appearing camouflaged in every part of every home. These buildings are masterpieces which modern tastes are only just rediscovering.
In this programme Jonathan Glancey revisits and rediscovers these amazing buildings, the artistic and social currents that fuelled the rise in Victorian Gothic as well as the life and legacy of the remarkable man who remains one of our most remarkable artistic patrons.
FRI 16:30 More or Less (b01pglrw)
Numbers of 2012
A guide to 2012 in numbers - the most informative, interesting and idiosyncratic statistics of the year discussed by More or Less interviewees.
Contributors: Robert Peston, BBC's Business Editor; Dr Pippa Wells, physicist at CERN; Bill Edgar, author of Back of the Net One Hundred Golden Goals; John Rodda, Hydrologist; Gabriella Lebrecht, sports analyst at Decision Technology; Helen Joyce, Brazil correspondent for The Economist; Jack Straw, Member of Parliament for Blackburn; Jil Matheson, the UK's National Statistician; Dr James Grime, from the Millennium Mathematics Project at the University of Cambridge; Gillian Tett, columnist and assistant editor of the Financial Times; David Spiegelhalter, Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University
Presenter: Tim Harford.
Producer: Charlotte Pritchard.
FRI 16:55 The Listening Project (b01pglry)
Diane and Michael: Man's Best Friend
Fi Glover presents a conversation between a father and daughter Radio 4's series that proves it's surprising what you hear when you listen. Michael is devoted to his Border Collie and Diane wonders whether perhaps he prefers his dog to his daughter.
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. Many of the long 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 upload your own conversations or just learn more about The Listening Project by visiting bbc.co.uk/listeningproject.
FRI 17:00 PM (b01pgls0)
Carolyn Quinn with interviews, context and analysis.
FRI 18:00 Six O'Clock News (b01pf31f)
The latest national and international news from BBC Radio 4.
FRI 18:15 15 Minute Musical (b01pgls2)
Series 7
The Reducers
A series of satirical, barbed, bittersweet fifteen-minute comedy musicals.
Episode Four: The Reducers
Can the coalition cash in by crashing out at the next election? Cameron can only hope in this musical.
Starring: Richie Webb, Dave Lamb and Jess Robinson
Written by: Richie Webb, Dave Cohen and David Quantick
Music by: Richie Webb
Music Production: Matt Katz
Producer: Katie Tyrrell
The fun-size yet satisfying musicals take an easily identifiable public figure and give them a West End Musical make-over. The fabricated, sugar-coated story is told in an original, never heard before, musical.
Delicious musical delicacies that melt in your ear not in your hand.
15 Minute Musicals are beautifully crafted treats for the ear!
The bitesize yet satisfying musicals take easily identifiable public figures and give them a West End Musical make-over with original, never heard before musicals that will have both your goose-bumps and the hairs on the back of your neck dancing.
Winner of the Writers Guild of Great Britain Radio Comedy Award this series is a seasonal treat at 1815 over the Christmas week.
FRI 18:30 The News Quiz (b01pgls4)
Series 79
Episode 2
A compilation of the best bits of The News Quiz from 2012, presented by Sandi Toksvig.
Produced by Martha Owen and Lyndsay Fenner.
FRI 19:00 The Archers (b01pgls6)
Excited Peggy tells David all about her upcoming trip to Whitby. Surprised David wonders at the timing though - it'll be rather cold. Undeterred Peggy tells David about her trip there with Jack in 1943.
At the village hall, there's gossip about dramatic events at the Horrobins' yesterday, with Clive showing up in Ambridge and being arrested for breaking his licence. David and Peggy feel for Susan.
Master of Ceremonies Kenton gets the Christmas show going and surprises everyone dressed as a jester and bopping the audience on their heads with balloons. Lynda's horrified as Kenton introduces himself as the Lord of Misrule. But Robert encourages Lynda to see how it plays out.
Despite herself, Lynda's intrigued by Kenton's popular routine, which seems to enhance the acts - not least Jim's rather dry recitation. Lynda fears she'll have to go and hide - until she's showered with compliments for her ingenuity. Kenton selflessly joins in, making out that Lynda was behind it all.
Lynda hopes Kenton doesn't take any liberties with her big closing speech. But as the evening draws to a close, Kenton pays tribute to the late Bob Pullen, before also paying warm tribute to Lynda. Lynda's touched and closes the show with a heartfelt speech from The Tempest.
FRI 19:15 Front Row (b01pgls8)
British actors in America
With Mark Lawson.
Damian Lewis, Hugh Laurie, Thandie Newton, Adrian Lester, Clive Owen and Ashley Jensen are among the actors who discuss the highs and lows of working as British performers in America.
Many high profile American TV shows and films are casting British actors in key roles. The success of programmes such as Homeland and House are testament to the strong parts tempting British actors across the pond.
Director Stephen Frears explains his theory that there is a crisis in American acting, prompting producers and directors to seek talent on this side of the Atlantic.
Hugh Laurie and Damian Lewis reflect on the pros and cons of the long contracts and extended seasons on prime time US TV shows and Adrian Lester and Thandie Newton explore the reasons behind the success of many black British actors in America.
Producer Ellie Bury.
FRI 19:45 15 Minute Drama (b01pgjyc)
[Repeat of broadcast at
10:45 today]
FRI 20:00 Correspondents' Look Ahead (b01pgg83)
Owen Bennett-Jones is joined by some of the BBC's top correspondents as they give their predictions about what will shape our world next year.
Will the global economy recover? How will the Arab Spring play out across the Middle East - and how will the conflict in Syria be resolved? Will Burma and North Korea continue to come out of the cold? And will a re-elected Barack Obama play a more assertive role in global affairs?
Join Owen and his guests as they gaze into their crystal balls - and he rates their predictions from last year's look ahead.
Producer: Linda Pressly.
FRI 20:50 A Point of View (b01pglsb)
Will Self: The British Vomitorium
"Are you full yet? Stuffed? Fit to burst?" asks Will Self as he appeals to the post-Christmas glutton to consider a major lifestyle change in the year ahead.
"What I think we should all do", he says, "is throw up our very obsession with food itself, and enter the New Year purged".
He takes us on a tour of foodie history, and explores how we've gone from being a culinary backwater to "the most food-obsessed nation in Europe - if not the world".
Producer: Adele Armstrong.
FRI 21:00 With Great Pleasure (b01pfwzw)
[Repeat of broadcast at
12:00 on Tuesday]
FRI 21:58 Weather (b01pf31h)
The latest weather forecast.
FRI 22:00 The World Tonight (b01pglw4)
Ritula Shah presents national and international news and analysis.
FRI 22:45 Daphne Du Maurier (b01pglw6)
Frenchman's Creek
Episode 5
Part adventure, part romance, and set in Cornwall, Daphne Du Maurier's novel tells the powerful love story between Lady Dona and the French pirate Aubery.
Episode 5
Dona enjoys her newfound secret friendship and is invited to accompany the pirates on their next adventure.
Read by Adjoa Andoh
Abridged by Eileen Horne
Produced by Clive Brill
A Pacificus production for BBC Radio 4.
FRI 23:00 Great Lives (b01pfxj3)
[Repeat of broadcast at
16:30 on Tuesday]
FRI 23:27 The Playlist Series (b01jpptd)
James Joyce's Playlist
James Joyce had a fine singing voice and earned money singing professionally as a young man. All his life he sang for friends; he sang to his desperately sick young brother, dying of typhoid; he sang to his mother on her deathbed. He sang to Nora, and she sang to him - their songs becoming a part of their courtship and marriage. He wrote songs, and set them to music; and certain special songs are repeated again and again through his fiction.
In this programme, recorded in James Joyce's Martello Tower near Dublin, we discover and recreate James Joyce's favourite songs. We also find, and hear, Joyce's own guitar. At one point in his life he had a plan to make a living travelling round Ireland playing it, as a wandering minstrel.
The songs include sentimental classics like 'Love's Old Sweet Song', which appears seven times in 'Ulysses'; the bawdy music hall ballad 'Those Seaside Girls', one of Joyce's favourites (his most erotic scenes are set by the sea); and a hauntingly sad farewell he wrote to his wife Nora, 'Bid Adieu'. We end with the rollicking 'Finnegan's Wake', an Irish song about a drunken wake which gave its name to the novel.
The contributors are Declan Kiberd, eminent Irish scholar and author of 'Ulysses and Us: the Art of Everyday Living'; actor Barry McGovern; and Katherine O'Callaghan, who has spent several years researching Joyce's music.
The presenter is David Owen Norris, pianist and music Professor, who has also arranged the songs which are sung by Thomas Guthrie and Gwyneth Herbert.
The setting is the Martello Tower near Dublin where Joyce lived as a young man, and which becomes the setting for the opening scenes of 'Ulysses'.
Producer: Elizabeth Burke
A Loftus Production for BBC Radio 4.
FRI 23:55 The Listening Project (b01pglw8)
Karl and Camila: Gang Culture
Fi Glover presents a conversation between the founder of Kids Company, Camila Batmanghelidjh, and Karl, who now helps others move away from violence and gang culture as he did, in Radio 4's 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. Many of the long 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 upload your own conversations or just learn more about The Listening Project by visiting bbc.co.uk/listeningproject
Producer: Marya Burgess.
LIST OF THIS WEEK'S PROGRAMMES
(Note: the times link back to the details; the pids link to the BBC page, including iPlayer)
...But Still They Come
10:30 SAT (b01pf5cx)
15 Minute Drama
10:45 MON (b01pftbg)
15 Minute Drama
19:45 MON (b01pftbg)
15 Minute Drama
10:45 TUE (b01pfwhq)
15 Minute Drama
19:45 TUE (b01pfwhq)
15 Minute Drama
10:45 WED (b01pg3qr)
15 Minute Drama
19:45 WED (b01pg3qr)
15 Minute Drama
10:45 THU (b01pg5p0)
15 Minute Drama
19:45 THU (b01pg5p0)
15 Minute Drama
10:45 FRI (b01pgjyc)
15 Minute Drama
19:45 FRI (b01pgjyc)
15 Minute Musical
18:15 TUE (b01pfy5t)
15 Minute Musical
18:15 WED (b01pg54q)
15 Minute Musical
18:15 THU (b01pgh61)
15 Minute Musical
18:15 FRI (b01pgls2)
A Charles Paris Mystery
11:30 WED (b01pg3qw)
A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols
15:00 MON (b01pftnk)
A Point of View
08:50 SUN (b01pcwrc)
A Point of View
20:50 FRI (b01pglsb)
Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo
21:00 SAT (b01p9gjy)
And No Birds Sing: Rachel Carson and Silent Spring
21:00 WED (b01ptgb4)
Any Answers?
14:00 SAT (b01pf5d5)
Any Questions?
13:10 SAT (b01pcwr9)
Archive on 4
20:00 SAT (b01pf5sv)
Archive on 4
21:00 TUE (b01mhnnm)
Archive on 4
15:00 WED (b01p2wd0)
Beatrix Potter's Favourite Tale
11:30 THU (b01pgg3x)
Bells on Sunday
05:43 SUN (b01pf6db)
Bells on Sunday
00:45 MON (b01pf6db)
Bellydancing and the Blues
11:00 WED (b01pg3qt)
Births, Deaths and Marriages
18:30 THU (b01jrqr1)
Bleak Expectations
18:30 TUE (b01pfy5w)
Book of the Week
00:30 SAT (b01pcvkw)
Book of the Week
09:45 MON (b01pftbb)
Book of the Week
09:45 TUE (b01pfwhl)
Book of the Week
00:30 WED (b01pfwhl)
Book of the Week
09:45 WED (b01pg3ql)
Book of the Week
00:30 THU (b01pg3ql)
Book of the Week
09:45 THU (b01pg5nw)
Book of the Week
00:30 FRI (b01pg5nw)
Book of the Week
09:45 FRI (b01pgjy7)
Brain of Britain
23:00 SAT (b01pbk81)
Broadcasting House
09:00 SUN (b01pf6ds)
Bute: Dreams of the World's Richest Man
16:00 FRI (b01pgll9)
Christmas Meditation
00:15 WED (b01pg3q7)
Christmas Service
09:00 TUE (b01pfwhj)
Classic Serial
15:00 SUN (b01pf6f7)
Correspondents' Look Ahead
20:00 FRI (b01pgg83)
Crossing Continents
20:30 MON (b01pcs5q)
Crossing Continents
11:00 THU (b01pg5p2)
Daphne Du Maurier
22:45 MON (b01pfv98)
Daphne Du Maurier
22:45 TUE (b01pfzcv)
Daphne Du Maurier
22:45 WED (b01pg553)
Daphne Du Maurier
22:45 THU (b01pghc1)
Daphne Du Maurier
22:45 FRI (b01pglw6)
Desert Island Discs
11:15 SUN (b01pf6dx)
Desert Island Discs
09:00 FRI (b01pf6dx)
Drama
14:15 MON (b01pftnh)
Drama
14:15 TUE (b01pfx04)
Drama
22:00 TUE (b01h6463)
Drama
14:15 THU (b01pgh25)
Drama
14:15 FRI (b01pgll3)
Earworms
20:00 MON (b01ng2qz)
Ed Reardon's Week
08:30 TUE (b01pfwhg)
Eddie Goes Country
17:10 TUE (b01p2w7d)
Enid Blyton - The Magic Faraway Tree
11:30 MON (b01pftbl)
Eric Sykes - The Radio Years
07:30 TUE (b0088z58)
Europe Moves East
17:00 SUN (b01p9l5f)
Farming Today
06:30 SAT (b01pf5cq)
Farming Today
05:45 MON (b01pftb4)
Farming Today
05:45 TUE (b01pfwhb)
Farming Today
05:45 WED (b01pg3qd)
Farming Today
05:45 THU (b01pg57f)
Farming Today
05:45 FRI (b01pgjy3)
Food and Farming Awards
06:00 TUE (b01p0vfj)
Four Thought
05:45 SUN (b01pcqkh)
Four Thought
20:45 WED (b01pg54z)
Freedom Pass
11:00 MON (b01pftbj)
From Fact to Fiction
19:00 SAT (b01pf5sq)
From Our Own Correspondent
11:30 SAT (b01pf5d1)
Front Row
19:15 MON (b01pfv92)
Front Row
19:15 TUE (b01pfy60)
Front Row
19:15 WED (b01pg54v)
Front Row
19:15 THU (b01pgh65)
Front Row
19:15 FRI (b01pgls8)
Gardeners' Question Time
14:00 SUN (b01pcwqq)
Gardeners' Question Time
15:00 FRI (b01pgll5)
Grease Was Our World
13:15 TUE (b01pth5g)
Great Lives
16:30 TUE (b01pfxj3)
Great Lives
23:00 FRI (b01pfxj3)
Grimm Thoughts
13:45 MON (b01pftnf)
Grimm Thoughts
13:45 TUE (b01pfx02)
Grimm Thoughts
13:45 WED (b01pg3r3)
Grimm Thoughts
13:45 THU (b01pgh23)
Grimm Thoughts
13:45 FRI (b01pgll1)
HM The Queen
15:00 TUE (b01pfxhv)
HV Morton: Travelling into the Light
07:00 TUE (b01mqr4t)
Hardeep's Sunday Lunch
13:30 SUN (b01pf6f3)
I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue
12:00 SUN (b01pbq3t)
I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue
18:15 MON (b01pfv8y)
In Business
21:30 SUN (b01pcsmc)
In Business
20:30 THU (b01pgh6t)
In Our Time
09:00 THU (b01pg5nt)
In Our Time
21:30 THU (b01pg5nt)
In Touch
20:30 TUE (b01pfyfj)
Just William - Live!
19:15 SUN (b01pfrrc)
Last Word
20:30 SUN (b01pcwqv)
Letter from America by Alistair Cooke
17:40 SUN (b01q16zd)
Loose Ends
18:15 SAT (b01pf5sn)
Mark Steel's in Town
18:30 WED (b01phj47)
Material World
21:00 MON (b01pcs67)
Material World
16:30 THU (b01pgh5x)
Meeting Myself Coming Back
06:00 WED (b01jppw6)
Midnight Mass
23:30 MON (b01pfv9b)
Midnight News
00:00 SAT (b01pcvym)
Midnight News
00:00 SUN (b01pf2sr)
Midnight News
00:00 MON (b01pf2vn)
Midnight News
00:00 WED (b01pf2yf)
Midnight News
00:00 THU (b01pf2zq)
Midnight News
00:00 FRI (b01pf311)
Midweek
09:00 WED (b01pg3qj)
Midweek
21:30 WED (b01pg3qj)
Money Box
12:00 SAT (b01pf5d3)
Money Box
21:00 SUN (b01pf5d3)
More or Less
20:00 SUN (b01pcwqx)
More or Less
16:30 FRI (b01pglrw)
Morven Crumlish - Murals
15:45 FRI (b01pgll7)
Nabokov's Christmas
17:40 TUE (b01pfy5p)
News Briefing
05:30 SAT (b01pcvyy)
News Briefing
05:30 SUN (b01pf2t0)
News Briefing
05:30 MON (b01pf2vx)
News Briefing
05:30 TUE (b01pf2xd)
News Briefing
13:00 TUE (b01pfwzy)
News Briefing
15:05 TUE (b01pfxhx)
News Briefing
17:00 TUE (b01pfxj5)
News Briefing
05:30 WED (b01pf2yp)
News Briefing
05:30 THU (b01pf2zz)
News Briefing
05:30 FRI (b01pf319)
News Headlines
06:00 SUN (b01pf2t2)
News and Papers
06:00 SAT (b01pcvz0)
News and Papers
07:00 SUN (b01pf2t6)
News and Papers
08:00 SUN (b01pf2tb)
News and Weather
22:00 SAT (b01pcvzl)
News
13:00 SAT (b01pcvz8)
No Ideas But in Things: The Poetry of William Carlos Williams
23:30 SAT (b01p9gk2)
On Your Farm
06:35 SUN (b01pf6dg)
Open Book
16:00 SUN (b01pf7kc)
Open Book
15:30 THU (b01pf7kc)
Open Country
06:07 SAT (b01pcs63)
Open Country
15:00 THU (b01pgh27)
PM
17:00 SAT (b01pf5sl)
PM
17:00 MON (b01pfv8w)
PM
17:00 WED (b01pg54n)
PM
17:00 THU (b01pgh5z)
PM
17:00 FRI (b01pgls0)
Pick of the Week
18:15 SUN (b01pf7kh)
Pick of the Year
15:15 TUE (b01pfxhz)
Poetry Please
16:30 SUN (b01pf7kf)
Prayer for the Day
05:43 SAT (b01pcwtc)
Prayer for the Day
05:43 MON (b01pftb2)
Prayer for the Day
05:43 TUE (b01pfwh8)
Prayer for the Day
05:43 WED (b01pg3q9)
Prayer for the Day
05:43 THU (b01pghmb)
Prayer for the Day
05:43 FRI (b01pghpc)
Radio 4 Appeal
07:55 SUN (b01pf6dn)
Radio 4 Appeal
21:26 SUN (b01pf6dn)
Radio 4 Appeal
15:27 THU (b01pf6dn)
Rhys Davies Competition Winners
00:30 SUN (b01pf5v0)
Saturday Drama
14:30 SAT (b01pf5d7)
Saturday Live
09:00 SAT (b01pf5cv)
Saturday Review
19:15 SAT (b01pf5ss)
Saving Species
11:30 TUE (b01pfwhs)
Saving Species
21:00 THU (b01pfwhs)
Selection of BBC World Service Programmes
01:00 SAT (b01pcvyr)
Selection of BBC World Service Programmes
01:00 SUN (b01pf2sw)
Selection of BBC World Service Programmes
01:00 MON (b01pf2vs)
Selection of BBC World Service Programmes
01:00 TUE (b01pf2x8)
Selection of BBC World Service Programmes
01:00 WED (b01pf2yk)
Selection of BBC World Service Programmes
01:00 THU (b01pf2zv)
Selection of BBC World Service Programmes
01:00 FRI (b01pf315)
Shipping Forecast
00:48 SAT (b01pcvyp)
Shipping Forecast
05:20 SAT (b01pcvyw)
Shipping Forecast
17:54 SAT (b01pcvzd)
Shipping Forecast
00:48 SUN (b01pf2st)
Shipping Forecast
05:20 SUN (b01pf2sy)
Shipping Forecast
17:54 SUN (b01pf2tg)
Shipping Forecast
00:48 MON (b01pf2vq)
Shipping Forecast
05:20 MON (b01pf2vv)
Shipping Forecast
00:48 TUE (b01pf2x6)
Shipping Forecast
05:20 TUE (b01pf2xb)
Shipping Forecast
17:54 TUE (b01pfy5r)
Shipping Forecast
00:48 WED (b01pf2yh)
Shipping Forecast
05:20 WED (b01pf2ym)
Shipping Forecast
00:48 THU (b01pf2zs)
Shipping Forecast
05:20 THU (b01pf2zx)
Shipping Forecast
00:48 FRI (b01pf313)
Shipping Forecast
05:20 FRI (b01pf317)
Six O'Clock News
18:00 SAT (b01pcvzj)
Six O'Clock News
18:00 SUN (b01pf2tl)
Six O'Clock News
18:00 MON (b01pf2w3)
Six O'Clock News
18:00 TUE (b01pf2xj)
Six O'Clock News
18:00 WED (b01pf2yt)
Six O'Clock News
18:00 THU (b01pf303)
Six O'Clock News
18:00 FRI (b01pf31f)
Something Understood
06:05 SUN (b01pf6dd)
Something Understood
23:30 SUN (b01pf6dd)
Start the Week
09:00 MON (b01pftb8)
Start the Week
21:30 MON (b01pftb8)
Stephen Fry on the Phone
00:15 THU (b017cb0m)
Stephen Fry on the Phone
00:15 FRI (b017cfkj)
Sunday Worship
08:10 SUN (b01pf6dq)
Sunday
07:10 SUN (b01pf6dj)
The Apocalypse Clock
19:45 SUN (b01pfrrf)
The Archers Omnibus
10:00 SUN (b01pf6dv)
The Archers
19:00 SUN (b01pf7kk)
The Archers
14:00 MON (b01pf7kk)
The Archers
19:00 MON (b01pfv90)
The Archers
14:00 TUE (b01pfv90)
The Archers
19:00 TUE (b01pfy5y)
The Archers
14:00 WED (b01pfy5y)
The Archers
19:00 WED (b01pg54s)
The Archers
14:00 THU (b01pg54s)
The Archers
19:00 THU (b01pgh63)
The Archers
14:00 FRI (b01pgh63)
The Archers
19:00 FRI (b01pgls6)
The Bricklayer's Lament
20:00 TUE (b01lsqk6)
The Film Programme
23:00 SUN (b01pcs65)
The Film Programme
16:00 THU (b01pgh5v)
The Food Programme
12:32 SUN (b01pf6dz)
The Infinite Monkey Cage
16:30 MON (b01pfv8r)
The Infinite Monkey Cage
23:00 TUE (b01pfv8r)
The Kitchen Cabinet
08:00 TUE (b01pfwhd)
The Listening Project
14:45 SUN (b01pf6f5)
The Listening Project
12:52 FRI (b01pglkz)
The Listening Project
16:55 FRI (b01pglry)
The Listening Project
23:55 FRI (b01pglw8)
The Media Show
16:30 WED (b01pg54l)
The News Quiz
12:30 SAT (b01pcwr3)
The News Quiz
18:30 FRI (b01pgls4)
The Penny Dreadfuls
14:15 WED (b01pg3r6)
The Playlist Series
23:30 TUE (b017ng3m)
The Playlist Series
23:30 WED (b01gd4lk)
The Playlist Series
23:30 THU (b017l5y3)
The Playlist Series
23:27 FRI (b01jpptd)
The Report
20:00 THU (b01pgh6r)
The Simon Day Show
23:00 THU (b010y312)
The Week in Westminster
11:00 SAT (b01pf5cz)
The World This Weekend
13:00 SUN (b01pf6f1)
The World Tonight
22:00 MON (b01pfv96)
The World Tonight
22:00 WED (b01pg551)
The World Tonight
22:00 THU (b01pgh81)
The World Tonight
22:00 FRI (b01pglw4)
Thinking Allowed
00:15 MON (b01pc37z)
Thinking Allowed
16:00 WED (b01pg54j)
Tim Key and Gogol's Overcoat
23:00 WED (b01nt3y0)
Today
07:00 SAT (b01pf5cs)
Today
06:00 MON (b01pftb6)
Today
07:00 WED (b01pg3qg)
Today
06:00 THU (b01pg5nr)
Today
06:00 FRI (b01pgjy5)
UK Confidential
11:00 FRI (b01pgksh)
Unreliable Evidence
22:15 SAT (b01pcqkf)
Unreliable Evidence
20:00 WED (b01pg54x)
Weather
06:04 SAT (b01pcvz2)
Weather
06:57 SAT (b01pcvz4)
Weather
12:57 SAT (b01pcvz6)
Weather
17:57 SAT (b01pcvzg)
Weather
06:57 SUN (b01pf2t4)
Weather
07:57 SUN (b01pf2t8)
Weather
12:57 SUN (b01pf2td)
Weather
17:57 SUN (b01pf2tj)
Weather
05:57 MON (b01pf2vz)
Weather
12:57 MON (b01pf2w1)
Weather
21:58 MON (b01pf2w5)
Weather
12:57 TUE (b01pf2xg)
Weather
17:57 TUE (b01pjvps)
Weather
21:58 TUE (b01pf2xl)
Weather
12:57 WED (b01pf2yr)
Weather
21:58 WED (b01pf2yw)
Weather
12:57 THU (b01pf301)
Weather
21:58 THU (b01pf305)
Weather
12:57 FRI (b01pf31c)
Weather
21:58 FRI (b01pf31h)
Westminster Hour
22:00 SUN (b01pfrzr)
What the Papers Say
22:45 SUN (b01pfrzt)
With Great Pleasure
12:00 TUE (b01pfwzw)
With Great Pleasure
21:00 FRI (b01pfwzw)
Woman's Hour
16:00 SAT (b01pf5sj)
Woman's Hour
10:00 MON (b01pftbd)
Woman's Hour
10:00 TUE (b01pfwhn)
Woman's Hour
11:00 TUE (b01pfyfg)
Woman's Hour
10:00 WED (b01pg3qp)
Woman's Hour
10:00 THU (b01pg5ny)
Woman's Hour
10:00 FRI (b01pgjy9)
Word of Mouth
23:00 MON (b01p9l1x)
Word of Mouth
16:00 TUE (b01pfxj1)
World at One
13:00 MON (b01pftnc)
World at One
13:00 WED (b01pg3r1)
World at One
13:00 THU (b01pgg41)
World at One
13:00 FRI (b01pgg81)
You and Yours
12:00 MON (b01pftn9)
You and Yours
12:00 WED (b01pg3qz)
You and Yours
12:00 THU (b01pgg3z)
You and Yours
12:00 FRI (b01pglkx)
iPM
05:45 SAT (b01pcwtf)
iPM
17:30 SAT (b01pcwtf)