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Radio 4 Extra: Frankly Speaking

2015-03-17T15:50:48+00:00

Frankly Speaking was considered 'risky' and 'unkempt' when it originally aired in the 1950s. Now, as Radio 4 Extra rebroadcasts a selection of high profile interviews from the series, Caroline Raphael sheds light on an archive jewel …

Frankly Speaking, which starts on Tuesday 17th March at 6.30pm.

The interview as a genre courses through modern broadcasting. Morning punch ups to late night hectoring, professional interviewers who are household names, interviewees trained to give the answer they want to give not the one we want to hear, evasive and slippery or prepared to share their deepest sorrows. People talking to each other on the radio hoping someone is listening.

It wasn’t ever thus. On Radio 4 Extra we are repeating Frankly Speaking, which to modern ears may sound frankly old fashioned. But, in 1952, when it was launched on the BBC Home Service it was a completely novel and ground breaking series; novel because instead of the traditional pairing of interviewee and interviewer there were three interviewers. And ground breaking because it was both unrehearsed and unscripted. It wasn’t however, a new idea. Frankly Speaking was based on a French programme, Qui etes-vous? What were then considered unusual and unconventional questions were designed to discover the private person behind the public veneer, to determine through cross-examination, what traits made them successful.

Maurice Chevalier is featured in the first episode, you can listen to a preview clip here

The first issue was this. Would the format work for a British listener? The BBC producer was Joe Weltman and he was very conscious of possible differences between French and British sensibilities. Would his guests feel comfortable with this sort of cross-examination? Would British listeners find it simply rude and discourteous? In the end Weltman took a slightly softer approach, what he described as a “looser, more discursive style which contrasts sharply with the tidy, analytical manner of the French programme…an atmosphere not quite so athletic or tense”. Despite this he still thought in terms of “judgements” and “victims”.

Guests came from far and wide to be interviewed but early reviews of the programme found it a disquieting listen, as Weltman had feared they might. Critics described it as ‘unkempt’, ‘an inquisition’, called interviewers ‘Torquemada’; they wrote of the guest as prey being cornered, quarry being pursued, and called for the end of the unscripted interview.

The Listener magazine described it as “a very risky form. Like violin-playing, unless it is very well done it stirs horribly uncomfortable feelings in the listener.”
The producer of Qui etes-vous? on hearing the English version declared that his questions would have been much more indiscreet.

Conscious of a continuing disquiet Joe Weltman wrote in the Radio Times in 1957: ‘What kind of a person have you got to be – to achieve fame and success? Is it any one kind of person?....Are we sometimes too inquisitive, too personal? Even tactless? Perhaps our ‘victims’ can answer that one. Not one of the many distinguished men and women who have appeared in the programme during nearly five years has ever made such a complaint. Instead, they usually tell us how much they have enjoyed this process of self-revelation’.

Whether it was before or after he wrote this that L.S. Lowry is said to have walked out of his interview after just a few questions saying ‘Oh let’s call it off, shall we?” as he rose to catch the train home, it is difficult to know!

In today’s over-sharing culture where we tell all to everyone all the time without even being asked, Frankly Speaking sounds very much of its time. But the deft speed at which forthright questions are often asked can catch you unaware. In this collection of episodes on Radio 4 Extra, listen to Flora Robson being asked about her looks and consider her honest response. A later episode features Gracie Fields - she is asked several times to consider how she betrayed her fans when she left for America during the Second World War.

If the aborted Lowry is one programme we shall never hear because it was never completed, there are the many others that cannot be heard because as far as we can tell copies have been lost. These include guests such as Coco the Clown, Dr Benjamin Spock, James Thurber, Rebecca West, Walt Disney, Ronald Searle, George Simenon, Joyce Grenfell and perhaps most frustratingly of all, the arch interrogator himself John Freeman. However, he can be heard as one of the interviewers on some of the surviving editions. Radio Times previews of these missing programmes hint at what was spoken of but nothing can quite compare with hearing the cadence of the voice itself, the breath taken, the elongated pause, the laugh, the interruption.

If the format was ground breaking so too was the BBC’s decision to hire often unknown or very inexperienced broadcasters as the interviewers. The first set of three were Stephen Black, a journalist and film writer, Jack Davies, secretary of Cambridge University and Charles Wilmot of the British Council. They all passed their initial test well and went onto present many other programmes in the series. Other notable interviewers, all at early stages of their broadcasting career included John Betjeman, Harold Hobson, Elizabeth Beresford (who wrote The Wombles) and Katherine Whitehorn. Anthony Wedgewood-Benn, as he was billed, took part just once. As that audio is lost we cannot know why he was never asked back or declined further bookings. As the years went on the number of interviewers sometimes went down to two and in one or two instances, for example the Brian Epstein interview, to just one.

The questions are direct and to the point, very straightforward. The inquisitors or interrogators, as they were sometimes described in those not always favourable early critiques of the programme, may have gone onto become personalities in their own right but here it is all about the guest, not them. And in the end the series won over its detractors.

Evelyn Waugh discusses his career in the second episode

The series has been rather neglected but there is one famous edition that is often referred to. It was the interview with Evelyn Waugh, which will be broadcast in full as part of this initial run on Radio 4 Extra. It was considered to be one of the most ill-natured interviews ever put out on air. Waugh later turned the experience into a scene in his novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold with one of his interviewers, Stephen Black, becoming the character Angel who haunts Pinfold in his hallucinations. According to Waugh’s grandson, Alexander Waugh, the writer had been under a lot of pressure at the time, drinking cocktails of bromide and crème de menthe to help him sleep. Evelyn Waugh, who had contempt for many things, particularly loathed the BBC, calling interviewers and journalists ‘electricians with their apparatus’. His grandson recalls that the interview plus the sleeping draught sent him 'rather mad'.

Frankly Speaking starts on BBC Radio 4 Extra on Tuesday 17th March at 6.30pm.

The series will feature the following people:

• Maurice Chevalier (interviewed in 1963 by Penelope Mortimer, Colin Macinnes & Carl Wildman)
• Evelyn Waugh (interviewed in 1953 by Charles Wilmo, Stephen Black & Jack Davies)
• Tennessee Williams (interviewed in 1959 by John Bowen, Peter Duval Smith & John Freeman)
• Dr Jacob Bronowski (interviewed in 1964 by Mary Stocks & John Maddox)
• Bette Davis (interviewed in 1963 by Peter Duval Smith & George Coulouris)
• Dr Mary Stocks (interviewed in 1964 by Audrey Russell & Leslie Smith)
• Brian Epstein (interviewed in 1964 by Bill Grundy)
• Harold Lloyd (interviewed in 1962 by Liam O'Leary & Peter Duval Smith)
• William Walton (interviewed in 1962 by Dilys Powell & Antony Hopkins)
• Flora Robson (interviewed in 1960 by John Freeman & Philip Hope-Wallace)
• Danny Blanchflower (interviewed in 1961 by Roger Bannister & Brian Glanville)
• Gracie Fields (interviewed in 1960 by John Freeman, Harold Hobson & Patricia Brent)

Radio Apprentices: Bringing New Audiences to Speech Radio

2014-02-17T09:53:19+00:00

Six young people have joined Radio & Music Production, the BBC department which makes many of the key programmes for Radio 4. They’re already bringing new ideas and a fresh approach. Can they help attract younger listeners to the station?

Ailish Tucker is 18 and working with the team making the In Touch programme. “For fear of sounding like a hopeful on the X-Factor, I am passionate about radio and for as long as I can remember it has been a dream of mine to work in the radio industry”.

Eighteen year old Edward Jankowski spent a year volunteering at Bolton FM while he sat his final exams at college. He’s joined the Midweek team.

Joel Cox is 28 and is the oldest of the apprentices. He played in a rock band and then taught music in a special needs school while working as a video editor. He’s presently working on The Film Programme.

Sally Garwood is 18 and developed her love of radio while studying for her Level 3 BTEC diploma in Media. “Radio came naturally to me and from the beginning I knew it was what I wanted to do”. Sally is working on Desert Island Discs.

Olivia Cope is 19 and was a Broadcasting and Digital Communication Media student at the BRIT School for Performing Arts in South London. She has joined the team working on Saturday Live.

Nadia Youssef moved to London to work full-time in a tea shop in Highgate. She’s 23 and has joined the Open Book team. “I've wanted an opportunity like this for so long!” she says.

The first task on their two year apprenticeship was to create a podcast for the College of Production which answers the simple question: 'Speech Radio – can young people do without it?'

You can hear all of their podcasts on the BBC’s College of Production website. Let us know what you think.

A history of private life

2009-09-24T16:04:35+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mvfb7

I first met Amanda Vickery ten years ago - her book, 'The Gentleman's Daughter' had just been published, and she gave an interview to our local paper. Something about the interview made me think she would be good on the radio - her liveliness and her sense of fun came across, even in a print interview. I was right - when I called her, and we met for coffee, I realised that her warmth and her quick wit made her a radio natural. It took another ten years before we would work together - meanwhile, I was promoted to a job where I was no longer making radio programmes, and Amanda was winning prizes for her books, appearing as a regular contributor on programmes like 'Saturday Review', and becoming a Professor. When I went back to making radio programmes as a freelance producer, she was one of the first people I called.

I have always been fascinated by the history of domestic life. I often think of my grandmothers and great-grandmothers and their lives at home, the hard labour of it all, but also the real creative pleasure. On my study wall I have framed some of the beautiful miniature dolls' clothes my grandmother made me as a child: works of art. I'm pleased that our series includes a programme on sewing, and values the time and creativity of the many women who spent, and continue to spend, time on sewing, craftwork, decorating their homes. But the series goes much wider than that - it's as much about men as women, and the real pleasure husbands and fathers took in home. It's not fashionable to admit it, but for many men too, domestic life provides the greatest happiness.

The challenge of this big series was to make each afternoon programme a satisfying story in itself, but to join them together in a coherent week for the Friday night Omnibus (2100 on Friday). Each week has a theme, and over the six weeks we move from the 16th to the 20th century. The programmes are all very different: some are funny, some very dark - like the terrible diary of domestic violence from the early nineteenth century. Some have dozens of voices in them, some are just the story of one person, drawn from intimate letters and diaries. I thought of it like constructing a quilt - each piece very different, some plain, some embroidered, but sewn together, a pattern emerges.

As Amanda began to write the stories in the series, and we met every week for coffee to discuss the latest programme, I began to wonder about music. Were there songs which would illustrate our themes? My friend David Owen Norris, a brilliant concert pianist and Professor of Music, put me in touch with a young academic, Wiebke Thormahlen. She began to search libraries for songs about drunken husbands, burglars, housework. And it was extraordinary what she found - a protest song about women's servitude from the 18th century; a comic song about seducing a woman who never stops talking; and my favourite, 'The Housewife's Lament', in which an early nineteenth century housewife describes the unremitting toil of her life, cleaning, cooking, ironing, and imagines a never-ending tide of dirt coming towards her. When I showed this to a young man, he thought it was funny, and it does have a twist in the end; but for me it almost makes me cry (you can hear verses from it in week 1, week 2 and week 4 of the series).

Once Wiebke Thormahlen and David Owen Norris had gathered a pile of sheet music, we found some great singers to bring it to life - these are not songs which have been recorded before. Thomas Guthrie is a baritone and opera director - I'd seen him in Aldeburgh, singing an extraordinary 'Wintereisse' with puppets. Our other singer, Gwyneth Herbert, doesn't usually sing this kind of song at all - she's a singer-songwriter who writes her own material, and appears at venues like Ronnie Scott's. But I'd heard her interviewed on Radio 4, and started listening to her songs, and loved the way she brought such emotional power to her performances. It's a haunting voice.

We recorded the music in David Owen Norris's keyboard room at the University of Southampton one Saturday; it's a large space packed with a variety of instruments so we could move round the room from the harpsichord to the forte piano to the modern piano as the series moved through the centuries. David arranged the sig tune too - a take on the old song 'Dashing Away with the Smoothing Iron', played in the style of different periods. The first week starts with a simple harpsichord - by week 6, the song's moved into boogie-woogie jazz piano.

Any big series like this depends on having the right team. We were lucky enough to be able to book engineer Jon Calver to record the music; and to attract a team of first-class actors - among them Deborah Findlay, John Sessions and Madeleine Brolly - to read for us. The home team at Loftus - Jo Coombs, David Smith and Tobin Coombs - dealt with actors' agents, read scripts, suggested changes, and improvised sound effects. Loftus is a small and highly prestigious production company, who specialise in crafted features and documentaries - and it has been a pleasure working with them.

It's been such a big project - we've been working on it for a year now. You can probably tell what enormous fun it's been to bring the voices of the past to life in such a substantial series. I am really looking forward to hearing what you think of it!

Elizabeth Burke is Producer of A History of Private Life

A History of Private Life, a 30-part series presented by Amanda Vickery, begins on 28 September at 1545.
There are two lovely features about the series on the Radio 4 web site: one by Amanda Vickery about the programme's research methods and one by Wiebke Thormahlen about the music.
The picture is Home Sweet Home, from the Wikimedia commons: a work in the public domain.

Twice Ken is Plenty - the lost script of Kenneth Williams

2009-09-04T16:00:58+00:00

It was thirty-nine pages of green paper, a carbon-copy, in amongst hundreds of scripts and notes I'd bought from a young man in Devon. In late 2005 he'd listed on eBay a framed photograph that his description claimed had once belonged to Kenneth Williams. The starting bid was 99p, there were no bidders. It turned out he was Williams's godson, left £30,000 and fifty-percent of the comedy-actor's belongings when he had died in mysterious circumstances in 1988. To raise money for a snow-boarding holiday, the godson planned to put each item on the site, piece by piece. I asked how much he'd take for all of it and to my delight we did a deal; it felt right that this collection should stay together.

While other teenagers in the nineties were mad for Oasis, I lay in my bedroom listening to cassette tapes of The Goons and Hancock's Half Hour loaned from Manchester's Central Library. For some peculiar reason this love had never extended to Beyond Our Ken and Round the Horne. Yet, as I lay in bed over a decade later, assessing my newly acquired hoard for a new biography of Williams, I began to read the green script. The voices, the sound effects, the jokes, came alive. Headed "Twice Ken is Plenty", the pages only featured Kenneths Horne and Williams. I'd just assumed it was the latter's copy of a Round the Horne episode. Unlike the majority of the other papers it didn't have any of his own annotations, nor did it include the other members of the team (Betty Marsden, Hugh Paddick and the like). Eventually I wanted to hear it for myself, but a call to the BBC archive put me in the picture: "No, it's not one we have listed." I vividly remember thinking this'd make a great radio show in the same style as Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel, another Radio 4 favourite of mine wherein actors re-created old Marx Brothers' scripts.

So, here we are in 2009 with the two best Kenneth Williams and Kenneth Horne impersonators, an audience of hundreds, in the historic Radio Theatre in Broadcasting House, and before my eyes (and ears) it is happening. I imagine in my mind that it's the Sixties, pretending it's for real, which, if you close your eyes, it certainly is. I've since had emails saying as much. Within a few hours one of Williams's friends wrote, "About a third of the way into listening I forgot it wasn't Williams or Horne... it sounded to me like a bona fide 60s episode! Utterly authentic."

And I'm thrilled it hit a right note with his fans, whose appetite for anything Kenneth is insatiable. Why is that? Why does he intrigue us so much? Why, after dozens of documentaries, best of compilations, and his diaries, letters and my own book utilizing all this unseen material, do we still need more? For me, it's the paradox of the broken-hearted clown, the man who was loved by millions but who found it impossible to love himself. Add to that his exceptional talent, his amusing vocal dexterity and his ability to appeal to all ages, all generations, and you have a unique man who is exceptionally hard to forget.

Wes Butters is the presenter and co-producer of Twice Ken is Plenty

Listen again to Twice Ken is Plenty - the lost script of Kenneth Williams.
The pictures show a page from the script and Robin Sebastian as Kenneth Williams and Jonathan Rigby as Kenneth Horne, during the recording. There are some lovely production pictures on the programme's web page.
Twice Ken is Plenty - the lost Kenneth Williams Script reviewed in The Stage: "...the result of their efforts was a joy".

When Harry met Sally at 20

2009-08-28T17:02:42+00:00

Editor's note - Sarah Churchwell is writer and presenter of yesterday's When Harry met Sally at 20. I asked her to tell us more about her subject - SB.

The only difficult thing about writing a script - or indeed a blog post - about When Harry Met Sally and its place in the genealogy of American romantic comedy was having to stop. Even harder was knowing it would have to be edited for time: my original script would have run over an hour, and we were only given 30 minutes, including clips. The response so far to the final programme has been what I hoped: people on email and twitter saying, "I didn't think romantic comedy would hold up to analysis, but it does." And several people have asked for more discussion of Harry and Sally's relation to the older romantic comedies of Hollywood's golden age. So I thought I'd use this opportunity to expand on a few of the ideas that didn't make the final cut.

Harry and Sally harkened back to the classic screwball comedies of the 1930s and early 1940s, the years before the Second World War changed the game, the films that invented the battle of the sexes as we know it. We mentioned the influence of Woody Allen, and the way that Harry and Sally fuse Woody Allen's late 1970s romantic comedies with an earlier classical Hollywood vision, but there wasn't time to say more. Unlike Allen's specifically Jewish-American comic take on romance, which focuses on Allen's psychodramas, the classical Hollywood comedies of the 1930s to the 1960s were generally WASPy in their characters and culture; in the 30s they were concerned with issues of class and social status; after the Second World War they started playing variations on the Difficult Woman theme: taming shrews, melting the frigid, educating the innocent, cutting career women down to size, and very occasionally teaching a straying man the error of his ways. Woody Allen, by contrast, made romantic comedies about Woody Allen.

Director Rob Reiner and writer Nora Ephron consciously and constantly make references to classic cinema and musical standards of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, visual and aural quotations that remind us of where we've come from and suggest where we're going. For example, the film ironically reproduces the famous split screen of the Day-Hudson comedy Pillow Talk, from 1959, thirty years earlier, in which the film wittily suggested that the lead couple, who could not be shown in bed together because of the Hays Code, were actually taking a bath together by juxtaposing pictures of them in their separate apartments while in the bath.

Reiner shows Harry and Sally in bed 'together' using the same split-screen technique, when they are in separate beds and separate apartments, watching the same film, Casablanca, a film they mention and argue about more than once - and by no coincidence it is the great American treatise on romantic loneliness and the consolations friends can offer: Casablanca finishes, after all, with the end of love and the beginning of a beautiful friendship. When Harry Met Sally finishes with the end of a beautiful friendship and the beginning of love.

As Harry and Sally watch Casablanca together late at night, the split-screen suggests not sublimated or displaced sexual tension, as the 1959 Pillow Talk did, but rather the easy companionship of post-coital 1989 'pillow talk,' of a couple in bed together watching a movie, rather than having passionate sex. Compatibility is key, and one of the things that defines Harry and Sally is their refusal to ever take grief from each other. They become friends at the precise moment when Sally finally hits back: "I just didn't like you," she says, "and you had to write it off as a character flaw, instead of accepting the fact that it might have had something to do with you." Suddenly, Sally is smarter, tougher, less of a straight man and comic butt of the joke than we might have thought. This is not a film that thinks women are stupid or passive - or mysterious, frigid, or threatening.

We noted that When Harry Met Sally marks the last time - to date - that Hollywood made a romantic comedy that was pitched equally at both sexes. Today, we dismiss romantic comedy, derisively as 'chick flicks.' Among other things, this reinforces the idea that only women are interested in relationships, as if only they want to see films about them, when of course love, sex, and comedy are, in real life, abiding interests of both sexes. But in films we assign romantic comedy to women: if it's a chick flick then only women care about love. The chick flicks we're getting today reinforce the stereotype that women are the custodians of relationships, and men are commitment-phobic.

But Harry isn't commitment-phobic: he's coming out of a marriage to a woman he loves. He just doesn't know that he loves Sally for a while. That's hardly a high-concept view of relationships. Harry is confused - but in contrast to the men in the so-called Bromance, he's also not a man-child refusing to grow up. He's a functioning, successful professional: both Harry and Sally are grown-ups. Ironically enough, this makes When Harry Met Sally a throwback - and one of the many reasons we still love it.

Sarah Churchwell is senior lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia

Sarah's programme, When Harry met Sally at 20, was broadcast yesterday so you've got six days to listen again.

Being multiplatform

2009-08-12T16:30:00+00:00

It used to be so simple when people asked what I do. "I work for the BBC," I would say. "I'm a radio producer, making programmes for Radio 4." Simple.

But since last summer, it's not been quite such a straightforward question to answer. "I'm a senior multiplatform producer." Cue puzzled look. Producer is fairly self-explanatory. It's the multiplatform bit that confuses.

I'm a member of a small team that's part of Radio Current Affairs. We make a number of long-running series and one-off current affairs documentaries, for, er, radio - mainly Radio 4, Radio 5live and the World Service, but also occasionally for Radio 3, the Asian Network and 1Xtra. (When we're not fending off fox attacks of course).

Our programmes include many Radio 4 stalwarts like Money Box, File on 4, From our Own Correspondent and In Business, along with younger series like More or Less, The Bottom Line and 5live's Donal MacIntyre. Plus lots of specials such as the recent Reith Lectures, the current three-part series on the history of MI6 A Century in the Shadows, and the forthcoming four-part series Robert Peston and the Moneymakers.

Our output is incredibly rich and diverse. And the multiplatform team's job is to make the most of it, and find new outlets for our journalism across the rest of the BBC.

This could involve anything from making a shorter version of a documentary for The World Tonight, or Woman's Hour, setting up an interview with one of our reporters on Today or 5live Breakfast, or liaising with colleagues on the Asian Network, the World Service or Radio 1's Newsbeat to enable them to produce their own pieces from our content.

Despite being a radio department, we also increasingly generate material for television as well. Our reporters regularly pop up on the News Channel to talk about our stories, often accompanied by clips which we have filmed as well as recorded for radio - as was the case for this interview which Simon Cox did with Dignitas founder Ludwig Minelli for The Report

We've also made short television 'packages' for BBC Breakfast - such as this investigation into the controversial Yes Loans company.

It was filmed and edited by my fellow multiplatformer Ruth Alexander, at the same time as the reporter Samantha Washington made a radio 'package' for Money Box and a separate item for Radio 5live's Donal MacIntyre programme, also part of our department. Another shorter version ran in radio and television news bulletins.

Why? The answer is simple. It enables us to get much more bang for our - or rather, your - buck.

And that's before we've talked about the web, which is another crucial platform. As is often the case, the Yes Loans story, was also written up for the BBC news website.

It has almost ten million unique readers in an average week, and so is a supremely important target for our programme material.

We therefore spend a lot of time liaising with our colleagues in the different sections of the news website - especially The Magazine - to try and tempt them to commission articles from our reporters and producers.

We don't just turn our content into written features either. We also make picture galleries - such as this one from a Crossing Continents programme about life in a Mumbai slum.

Our programmes have also generated fantastic audio slideshows, such as this one - inspired by a Radio 3 documentary about Yiddish's struggle for survival.

More slideshows accompanied our 90-part (yes, 90) series for Radio 4 America, Empire of Liberty - all still available online (David Reynolds wrote about the series for the blog).

And that's not to mention the time we spend making sure all our programmes are present and correct across the BBC's digital landscape, be that on the Radio 4, 5Live or World Service websites, or the iPlayer or in the podcast directory. And not forgetting our work with sites beyond the BBC, such as Twitter, which I've already discussed here.

The common thread which runs throughout all this work is that, er, it involves a great deal of extra work. Many of our programmes are made by one producer and one presenter - often the same person wears both of those hats. Asking them to wear an additional multiplatform hat is tricky.

Getting our content onto other platforms is not a copy-and-paste kind of operation. In every case the journalism has to be re-imagined for a different medium and/or a different audience.

Although we always hope to bring people back to the original programme, each separate audience has to be satisfied by the version of the story which they receive - wherever and however they get it.

Our job is to make that process as efficient as possible. To help achieve this, I've spent much of the last year on an extended training boot camp, learning to shoot and edit video, make pieces for television, produce content for the web and more.

Along the way, I've had to get to grips with a frankly bewildering range of different (and often mutually incompatible) systems: from CPS and IPS to APS and PIT, from Jupiter and Q-cut to Premiere and VCS, and not forgetting Top Cat and (of course) Top Cat 2. And no, I didn't make any of those up.

It's been a demanding twelve months, but also exhilarating. So - multiplatform producer. Not a great job title, but definitely a great job.

The picture, Tokyo station platform 9 and 10, is by heiwa4126 and is used under licence.
Jennifer produced the multiplatform activity around the 2009 Reith Lectures and wrote about it for the blog.
Jennifer's multiplatform team worked with Radio 4's More or Less to produce last week's video in response to the Muslim Demographics YouTube hit. Watch the video here. Listen to the programme here.

Who would you like to hear from on the blog?

2009-07-23T09:37:38+00:00

The blog is picking up momentum. In addition to regular posts from our Controller (35 posts so far - about six per month) we've had 128 posts all together, from programme makers, presenters, commissioners, managers and even a handful of outsiders (like yesterday's lovely post by Margie Tunbridge, a 'plinther').There have been lots of housekeeping posts and round-ups and behind-the-scenes photos from me and a really gripping two-month flurry of posts and comments and responses all about the Radio 4 web site's redesign (Doh! I've mentioned it again).

We've tackled some fairly big topics (at least in Radio 4-Land), like the cancellation of Go 4 It, repeats, commissioning (or not commissioning) political drama, pulling a programme at the last minute and giving airtime to controversial figures.

And one of the exciting things about airing these issues on the blog is the breadth and quality of listener feedback that results - I'd invite you to follow the links above and read the comments. I always make sure that the right people at Radio 4 are aware of these useful and well-informed responses: they're important. The biggest topic so far? The web site redesign, by several miles (and especially the size of the pictures). That produced over 500 comments. I've answered (and sometimes failed to answer) dozens of direct questions from listeners, usually by ferreting out the right person at the network and asking them. In this, I think I'm something between a 'listeners' editor' and a customer service rep.

So, I'm just planning the next couple of weeks on the blog and I've already got posts lined up from Food Programme presenter Sheila Dillon, veteran BBC business guru Peter Day, legendary actress Miriam Margolyes and a post about BBC Security correspondent Gordon Corera's new spies programme so it's all looking very interesting indeed.

What I'd like to know from you, though, is who else I should get to write for the blog and which subjects I should tackle? Do you want to hear more from behind-the-scenes at Radio 4? More programme previews and posts from Radio 4 talent? Or would you rather we focused more on accountability and feedback: keeping the network honest? And how about our use of Twitter? Have you tried it? Would you like to see more or less of this sort of thing?

Or should we be doing something else all together? Please leave a comment here on the blog or, if you're that way inclined, send us a message on Twitter. I'll round up responses here on the blog once a few have come in.

The Radio 4 group on flickr has pictures from all over Radio 4.

The picture shows four Radio 4 figures: Kathy Clugston, announcer, with her Ukulele in a Broadcasting House studio, Fran Barnes, producer and beekeeper, with the Farming Today bees, Elvis Costello on Loose Ends and Evan Davis, recording The Bottom Line.

Follow the Radio 4 blog on Twitter for interesting news, reviews, replies and retweets.

This is the last fox post. Honest.

2009-07-21T15:07:40+00:00

And finally, photographs of the White City vandal, the urban fox that trashed the offices of Crossing Continents and The Report, waiting in the RSPCA's special cage, to be taken away and released. Released 'nearby' I'm told. Does that sound wise to you? Given this fox's demonstrated resourcefulness shouldn't the creature have been taken to Exeter or Aberdeen?

Two more pics, taken by James Daniel, an engineer.

Foxes wreck Radio 4 offices

2009-07-20T15:41:42+00:00

Jennifer Clarke (of this parish) and Hugh Levinson from the department that makes Moneybox and Analysis sent me these pics taken in their office on the first floor of BBC White City, the big, grey fortress on Wood Lane (and home to the Director General). A fox gained entry (nobody saw it but it had been spotted in another office earlier) and essentially trashed the place - with a special emphasis on paperwork. Some kind of protest?

Robin Lustig's week

2009-07-17T15:22:06+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/worldtonight

Editor's note: We're trying something new. Every Friday afternoon during the Summer we're going to publish a diary post from an important Radio 4 personality. We're starting with Robin Lustig, presenter of The World Tonight since 1989. If you'd like to hear from a particular Radio 4 personality (a presenter, a programme maker or even a senior manager), leave a comment and we'll see what we can do.

One of the many good things about working for The World Tonight is that you get weekends off. And as someone who spent more than a decade working on a Sunday newspaper, I still find the notion of a two-day weekend a wonderful novelty.

But when I travel, it's different. After a hard week at the studio coal-face (six programmes in five days since you ask, three at the World Service and three at The World Tonight), I was up on Saturday morning for the 10-hour flight to Mexico.

The following day, Sunday, we were straight off into the countryside to start collecting material. I love travelling, and will always leap at the chance to shove my passport into my pocket and head off to some distant location. So I don't really resent the occasional missed weekends (well, not too much, anyway).

When I started as a reporter, long before the days of mobile phones or laptop computers, I was taught that the first thing you had to do when you went out on an assignment was find a public phone box that worked, so that you could phone in your story.

The 21st century broadcaster's equivalent when you're overseas is find a location from which your satellite dish can transmit a signal. More often than not, you end up on the roof of your hotel.

But our Mexico City hotelier wasn't keen on letting us on to his roof - and his car park, which is the usual Plan B, had high walls round it - so we started touring city centre hotels to find one with a roof or a balcony facing in the right direction. Eventually, mission accomplished: sound engineer Jacques Sweeney pronounced himself satisfied; producer Beth McLeod negotiated a special cheap deal on behalf of licence fee-payers, and we were ready to roll.

We do a lot of "multi-platform content delivery" these days. Which means we blog, we write for News Online, and we even pop up on other people's programmes. So after a week of scurrying about for The World Tonight, and a quick chat with nice Mr Humphrys on the The Today programme, we were up at 5am the following Sunday to contribute first to The World This Weekend on Radio 4, and then immediately afterwards to Newshour on the World Service. The joys of working west of the Greenwich meridian meant we were done by 8am, and were able to take a few hours' break to visit the stunning Aztec ruins at Teotihuacan, an hour's drive from Mexico City. (The pictures are in The World Tonight Flickr group here).

I love coming home, of course, but I don't much like 10-hour overnight flights (yes, of course, in Economy). So I was perhaps just slightly grumpy when the BA pilot informed us that it had been raining at Heathrow (rain? In July? Who would have thought it?), and that the airport was in a bit of a mess. We parked about a mile away from Terminal 5 and waited first for the steps and then for the bus to carry us back to civilisation. But I mustn't grumble: I wasn't due back on air till the next day - and I did have a weekend off to look forward to. Jet lag? Don't know the meaning of the word.

Robin wrote a series of posts for The World Tonight blog from his trip to Mexico.
The World Tonight's home page and Robin's World Tonight blog.
Robin's BBC Press Office biography.

Today 'TV'

2009-06-04T14:53:41+00:00

Can radio make good "TV"? For the past couple of weeks on Today, we've been conducting an experiment: filming the goings-on in our studio so that it's now possible not only to listen to the programme, but also to watch some of it

Many radio interviews, of course, aren't done face-to-face, but "down the line" with the interviewee in a different studio. It's fair to say that when presenter and guest are together, it usually makes their encounter a much better listen.

As my colleague Brett Spencer has written regarding similar experiments at 5 Live, the results are making for interesting viewing. Our experiences can be seen on the Today site, among them Sarah Montague's grilling of BBC Trust Chairman Sir Michael Lyons, Labour MP Stephen Pound describing the expenses scandal as "like a slasher-movie", and Michael Horowitz insisting that there is still honour among poets...

Jon Zilkha is Deputy Editor of Today. Continue reading his post and leave comments on The Editors blog...

Bringing old favourites to life: illustrating Radio 4 drama

2009-06-02T09:33:06+00:00

A while back I posted about why we use illustrations on iPlayer for key radio programming (on the BBC Internet blog). In short we want to avoid galleries of largely unknown faces which don't really hook the listener as much as a well-executed illustration.

When we come to illustrate dramas which feature popular and loved characters we are posed with a dilemma - we want to give depth and feeling to the drama without personifying the character too much. The mind's eye is a wonderful thing which conjures up its own distinct image of how Arthur Dent in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or Ruth Archer from The Archers look - it's not the job of the illustration to give a face to the characters, its job is to nod to their characteristics.

You'll have seen two illustrations recently for Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders and The Complete Smiley, both on Radio 4. I'll hand over to my picture editors Javier Hirschfeld and Dominik Klimowski who commissioned these illustrations:

The Complete Smiley (Commissioned by Javier Hirschfeld):

"I thought of the illustrator Swava Harasymowicz since there is something of the classic spy/gangster Hollywood movies in many of her works. I focused on the role of Smiley rather than John le Carré himself. Smiley's a spy who should not be easily recognised by the people that see him so we decided to go with the film noir look and feel to create that classic spy scenario. Below are Swava's drafts and the explanations of them." The illustrator writes:

"The main rough would use 'slices' suggesting blinds with the figure - half-seen, half-not-seen - within them, sort of layered. There may be very faint outlines of cities too, or a close up of a spy-like man with a lighter instead of a gun (apparently he had a favourite lighter). In both cases there would be colour - not monochrome.

"We opted for the blinds option because this would add mystery and this way the character's face will not be as prominent, therefore not identifiable with Sir Alec Guinness or with Simon Russell-Beale. Smiley will be defined by the spy look, the papers and the silhouette, since he is always in the shadows and must never be seen."

Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders (Commissioned by Dominik Klimowski):

Steph von Reiswitz was the natural choice when commissioning an illustration for the 'Rumpole' series on Radio 4. She has illustrated numerous radio programmes for us including 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' and the 'The Complete Ripley'. Her idiosyncratic style fits perfectly with these 'period' dramas and it is further backed up by a knowledge of the material. If there is one thing more reassuring than an illustrator who is keen to research the content we are promoting, it is one who is familiar with it already.

The illustration was made specifically to be generic so that it can promote any of the Rumpole stories. His features, the décor and the props are all carefully considered and I think this is where illustration will always win out. The image has been created from thin air. It does not rely on an actor, or a specific setting or action, all of which would make it too specific and interfere with our imaginations. Instead it is an image as original as the one each of us carries in our mind's eye when we turn on the radio and listen to 'Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders'.

Ashley Stewart-Noble is a Senior Content Producer at BBC Future Media & Technology

Ashley's post from the BBC Internet blog in March.

The Maccabees on Loose Ends

2009-05-26T09:05:48+00:00

This external content is available at its source: http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649

Keep an eye on the Radio 4 group on flickr (there's an RSS feed). Stuff like this shows up regularly. On Saturday at the recording of the evening's Loose Ends, Stan Was took some pictures of the Maccabees. In the Radio 4 group you'll also find some lovely individual pics, like this one (also taken by Stan) of Sir David Attenborough in the studio for an interview, and these pics taken by me in the Today control room last week.

The Complete Smiley

2009-05-23T10:00:00+00:00

About 3 years ago, and very new to the job of Commissioning Editor for Drama for Radio 4, I was walking back from the bank to my office when my mobile rang. It was Patrick Rayner, the Head of Drama in Scotland.

"Jeremy, I know it stretches the definition of classic a bit and it is not Scottish, but what would you think of us doing one of the George Smiley trilogy as a Classic Serial?"

"It's a great idea, and it's classic enough for me." Pause "But why not do all three?" I said.

"Well we could, if you think the Network could stand that much Smiley."

"Yes I do. How many other Smiley novels are there?"

There was a comical interlude where from our collective memories we tried to remember all the other novels in which one of the smartest and most intriguing characters in twentieth century British fiction featured. It was like one of those games you played at drunken parties at university - we both knew there were a lot, we couldn't quite get all the titles in a sequence, but we reckoned we were talking about eight titles, which is about twenty hours of air time. Most Classic Serials run for between two and three hours; twenty hours is kind of uncharted territory.

Now commissioning programmes is quite a complicated process - given that I commission 400 hours of drama a year and am bombarded with programme ideas from every which way it takes a lot of administration, which involves systems and form filling-in, and box ticking and all the other gubbins associated with bureaucracy. But in the end you know it is a good idea or not almost instantly. And this was very definitely a Good Idea.

"Ok lets do the lot," I said.

Patrick, who has delivered over forty brilliant Sherlock Holmes, and was about to direct Paul Temple all for Radio 4, was absolutely the right person to do them, the television versions were ancient, the radio versions equally so (all with different actors playing Smiley), and it was exactly the kind of ambition we were looking for the drama output on the Network. I also thought it would be something of a treat for the audience, a Classic Serial to relish.

I needed to convince my boss (Mark Damazer, the Controller of Radio 4). I casually floated it past him one morning -

"Mark, what would you say to us doing the complete Smiley?"

He paused. His eyes lit up and he launched into a one sentence eulogy about Smiley - albeit a very long sentence, kind of ten minutes long. Well maybe fifteen. We had a deal.

So why has it taken nearly three years to get to air? After all one episode of a Classic Serial takes about five days to record, edit and dub.

I asked Patrick to make tentative soundings about the rights.

In principle they were available.

In practice they were not.

Months - where nothing much happened - passed.

Now I had never met John le Carré, but nothing ventured nothing gained I sent him a letter asking for his help in persuading his secretive American agent to grant us the radio rights. It is the kind of letter you send, and never expect to get an answer to, so when a few days later my assistant told me that John le Carré's wife was on the phone I was astonished. She told me her husband thought the Radio 4 plan was an excellent idea and they would look into securing the rights.

What the combined heft of the BBC Copyright Department, Controllers and commissioners had failed to unlock over months the author himself opened within days.

But that is only the start.

Believe me, turning 2000 odd pages of brilliant prose into twenty hours of compelling dramatisation is not a simple matter. We hired the best writers (Robert Forrest whose version of Resurrection by Tolstoy was peerless and whose Pillow Book rendered a book of ancient Japanese courtly lists into a superb murder mystery) and Shaun McKenna (his To Serve Them All My Days was compelling), had lengthy discussions about whether or not to use a narrator, on who should play George Smiley (well Simon Russell Beale of course, to the part born I say), spent ages working out how to play out the series (in one twenty hour block or threaded across the schedule for a year), on setting up a co-production between BBC Scotland and the London Radio Drama department, etc., etc.

All I had to do was encourage the team - Patrick and Marc Beeby (his co-producer), the two writers, the Broadcast Assistants, the sound engineers and the illustrious and brilliant cast who have done the real graft.

But I think you are in for a real treat.

The Complete Smiley starts this afternoon with Call for the Dead and continues until April 2010.
Mark Lawson interviewed John le Carré at length on last night's Front Row: fascinating.
Radio 4 Controller Mark Damazer welcomes the Smiley season, calling it 'treat radio'.
All programmes tagged 'le Carré'
More pictures of Simon Russell Beale as George Smiley.

Treat Radio

2009-05-22T19:03:26+00:00

So - after years of planning - tomorrow at 1430 in The Saturday Play slot - the great Smiley project begins with Call for The Dead. There have been some rather lovely TV trails for it. And next week at the same time comes A Murder of Quality. We will do all eight of the Smiley novels (he features lightly in one or two) over the next year or so.

Nobody has ever done all the novels in this way before.

The Radio 4 wellspring comes from the head of Radio Drama in Scotland, Patrick Rayner, whose previous works include hefty and successful adptations of Paul Temple, Simenon, Holmes et al. He approached me nearly three years ago and asked whether I might be interested in running all of John le Carré's Smiley novels. I was wildly enthusiastic (I am a fan) but had assumed that we would would never get the rights.

But we persisted - and with the help of le Carré himself - we succeeded. Indeed he has been enthusaistic about the project from day 1 and has been encouraging and helpful. Tonight on Front Row he talks to Mark Lawson about Smiley, his own career in espionage, his feelings about the cold war. It's another one of Mark's terrific interviews and is a wonderful accompaniment to the series.

Simon Russell Beale is Smiley and having heard tomorrow's play (a privilege that goes with the job) I can say that he's marvellous. He does it differently to Alec Guinness (who was so memorable in the early 80s BBC TV version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) but/and superbly. A little faster than Guinness - with terrific clarity. He captures his intellect and forensic qualities beautifully. The whole cast do the novel justice and the adaptation by Robert Forrest is very clever. Listen out for the beginning and the way he deploys George Smiley's wife - Lady Ann Smiley (played by Anna Chancellor).

I realise this blog post is of the gushing variety but I hope you will forgive me. It is treat radio.

And the rest of the Smiley novels lie ahead. Enjoy.

The Complete Smiley starts Saturday with Call for the Dead and continues until April 2010.
Jeremy Howe, Commissioning Editor for Drama at Radio 4, explains the genesis of The Complete Smiley
All programmes tagged 'le Carré'