Radio 3
The pleasures and perils of talking about art on the radio
‘I like not knowing why I like it,’ declared Fiona Shaw, the actress, about Georgia O’Keeffe’s extraordinary blast of colour,…
The Polish electronic music revolution of the 1950s
It was created in November 1957, a year before the BBC’s fabled Radiophonic Workshop, and was far more influential in…
Can giving voice to the horrors of the past re-traumatise?
It is 50 years since Ronald Blythe published Akenfield, his melancholy portrait of a Suffolk village on the cusp of…
Without Joe Grundy The Archers feels lost
There was something really creepy about listening to the ten-minute countryside podcast released last weekend by Radio 4 supposedly transporting…
What drives Emily Maitlis?
It can’t be easy to find yourself on the other end of the microphone when you’re a journalist of the…
What Mary Wollstonecraft writes about motherhood is still so relevant
Walking into Fingal’s Cave, after scrambling across the rocks to reach it from the landing stage where the boat from…
The extraordinary life of 104-year-old dancer Eileen Kramer
It’s not often you hear the voice of a 104-year-old on the radio. You’re even less likely to hear one…
Why was Something Understood cut?
It was never given the choicest slot in the schedule, airing first thing on Sunday morning with a repeat at…
Is the increasing secularisation of funerals a good thing?
‘You’re thinking these girls all wrong,’ Miss Mai tells Enid in Winsome Pinnock’s play Leave Taking, adapted from the recent…
Scala Radio is a real threat to Radio 2
It’s not surprising given the way that electronic communication has taken over so much of our daily business, minimising human…
Why wasn’t Poetry Please in the Radio Times’s top 30 greatest radio shows of all time?
With the upsurge of listeners to Classic FM (now boasted to be 5.6 million listeners each week) and the imminent…
The story of the River Clyde
It sounds like something out of Dickens or a novel by Thackeray, a classic case of high-minded Victorian philanthropy, but…
How did the BBC’s podcast Unexpected Fluids ever get made?
You may have noticed the flood of podcasts that’s been pouring out of the BBC since the launch of its…
Remembering the 1968 Apollo mission – when the world was reaching to the future rather than drawing in
Take yourself back to (or try to imagine) Christmas 1968; a year full of disturbances, dashed hopes and extreme violence…
It’s Christmas. You don’t want Götterdämmerung. You want a waltz-operetta
Grade: A– 1898: two Parisiennes and a housemaid secretly invite each other’s partners to the Paris Opera ball and… c’mon,…
![British poet Salena Godden presenter of Mrs Death Misses Death on Radio 4. [Photo: Roberto Ricciuti / Getty Images]](https://spectatorau.imgix.net/content/uploads/2018/12/Radio.jpg?auto=compress,enhance,format&crop=faces,entropy,edges&fit=crop&w=410&h=275)
Listening to people talking about death can be strangely consoling
‘Without death,’ says Salena Godden, ‘life would be a never-ending conveyor belt of sensation.’ For her death is what gives…
Is Michelle Obama a secret Archers fan?
I wonder what Michelle Obama, the former First Lady who remade that role in her own image, would make of…
Radio 3 had the most simple yet effective way of reflecting on war’s impact
Amid all the remembrance, Radio 3 came up with a simple yet effective way of reflecting on war’s impact. Threaded…
Why has BBC Radio been replaced by ‘BBC Sounds’?
You may have noticed that BBC iPlayer (for radio programmes) has been replaced this week with the new BBC Sounds…
What are the writers of The Archers trying to achieve with the Freddie Pargetter story?
‘I’m not here to rehabilitate,’ says Pamela, who teaches creative writing to prisoners in Northern Ireland. She doesn’t think of…
Radio 4 brings back the dead
If proof were needed that radio will survive the onslaught of the new (or rather now not-so-new) digital technologies, albeit…
The marketisation of BBC radio is a recipe for creative disaster
There’s been a lot of fuss and many column inches written about levels of pay at the BBC, as revealed…
A warning to those who argue that we live in a visual society
‘Can one person really grasp the significance of what another person has been through?’ asks Dr Rita Charon in this…
Why is Today losing its audience? Because it doesn’t care about its listeners
Headlines announcing that Radio 4’s flagship Today programme is losing its audience while Radio 3’s Breakfast has put on numbers…
Podcasts often have no real interest in those who might be listening
‘Do you ever imagine your audience?’ was a question thrown at James Ward, creator and presenter of The Boring Talks…
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