Radio 3's New Generation Thinkers

[french frank]

I'm not sure what to make of this - a competition to find the 'best' young academics ... Anyway, it's taken place and ten winners have now been announced.

It will be interesting to listen to the resulting broadcasts. (I suppose the most marketable ones will end up on television making various programmes about everything except the subjects they know about )

" ...each night from Tuesday 28 June, and for nine subsequent editions of Night Waves, a New Generation Thinker will talk about an idea inspired by their research."


Ha! that's starting tonight on Night Waves, 10pm.

[french frank]

Alexandra Harris, Department of English, University of Liverpool
A Brief History of Being Cold
Journeys through English art and the elements.

Corin Throsby, University of Cambridge
The History of Fan Mail
A look at how fan letters provide insight not only into how 19th century authors such as Tennyson and Browning were read in their time, but also into the emerging culture of celebrity.

David Petts, Durham University
The Commercialisation of British Archaeology
The story of radical changes in British archaeology over the last 20 years.

Jon Adams, London School of Economics
Rat Cities and the Bee-hive Worlds: Space and Numbers in the Modern City
An examination of how arguments about the effects of crowding on human behaviour have influenced city planners and architects during the 20th century.

Laurence Scott, Kings College London
Desert Space
The image and significance of the desert in modern culture.

Lucy Powell, University College London
Mind Forg'd Manacles
A literary exploration of prisons.

Philip Roscoe, University of St. Andrews
Investigating the Moral Work of Economics in Everyday Settings
How economics affects the moral landscape of internet dating.

Rachel Hewitt, Queen Mary, University of London
Britain in the 1790s: The Age of Despair
An alternative narrative of Romantic-era Britain, told through the projects that failed to succeed.

Shahidha Bari, Queen Mary, University of London
The Arabian Nights
A voyage of discovery around the Arabian Nights, both their interpretation in Western literature, and also the stories themselves and why they tell us about notions of Arab identity.

Zoe Norridge, University of York
The Testimony of Place: Cultural Responses to the Rwandan Genocide
How the memorial landscape and geography of Rwanda have affected writers, directors and journalists seeking to represent the genocide.

[cavatina]

the 'best' young academics ...

Actually, they didn't make any bones about looking for people who "have the potential to turn their ideas into fascinating broadcasts"; "good radio" [...]"for the general public" by those "who are passionate about communicating modern scholarship to a wider audience".

Given that, I hardly see the point of expecting this series to be something it's clearly not. If you already know they won't be to your taste and/or up to your standards--and if the Free Thinking Festival lectures are any guide, I hardly see how they could be--then why listen at all? Sigh.

Perhaps you'd find it more enjoyable to join me in downloading real university lectures. Surely you could find something of interest here:

University of California, Berkeley--complete university course lectures online

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php

Right now, I'm working my way through "Dynamics of Romantic Core Values in East Asian Premodern Literature" (Fall 2009) and "Existentialism in Literature and Film" (Spring 2006). Good stuff!

[french frank]

Given that, I hardly see the point of expecting this series to be something it's clearly not. If you already know they won't be to your taste and/or up to your standards--and if the Free Thinking Festival lectures are any guide, I hardly see how they could be--then why listen at all? Sigh.

As I'm the only one who has contributed to this thread so far, this is presumably addressed at me. Why you should have thought I meant anything other that what I said, I don't know. "It will be interesting [sic] to listen to the resulting broadcasts."

My point about the most 'marketable' ones is that they would be quickly poached by television as new young faces to be regular 'serious' presenters à la Brian Cox. The word 'best' was in quotes because it was (misremembered) from the press release, namely 'the brightest academic minds'.

[cavatina]

Sorry to be opaque--my point was everyone ought to know this is more about finding people who make entertaining radio for a general audience than it is a return to serious Third Programme-style intellectual discourse, so there's no point in bashing it.

And by "Third Programme-style intellectual discourse", I mean broadcasts like this:

THIRD PROGRAMME, 1948: Fr. Frederick C. Copleston vs Bertrand Russell - Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BWFpBTqSN0

I'm dead certain neither of these fellows would have made the cut.
By "interesting" I thought you were being a bit arch, but I suppose it was just me.

[aeolium]

I wouldn't mind a few New Generation thinkers if they also had some Old Generation thinkers as well, such as Eric Hobsbawm. After all, they have plenty of old musicians along with the New Generation Artists scheme.

[french frank]

By "interesting" I thought you were being a bit arch, but I suppose it was just me.

Yes, it was just you.

In fact, I have expressed the view that the BBC/R3 should look to the academic world to find 'new' (by which I didn't necessarily mean 'young' - whatever that means in terms of academics these days) expert presenters. I think the speech programmes have already done this quite well. The only reservation I have is that it probably serves R3 better to develop people who will become regular presenters - but that almost inevitably means they will cease to concentrate on their areas of expertise.

The likes of Copleston* and Russell may be long gone though I would relish a rerun with Rowan Williams and Richard Dawkins, a programme to last as long as it takes ...


*I have a leather-bound copy of Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ which belonged successively to A.E, F.S., F.C. and E.R. Copleston

Edit: aeolium has also made the point about 'old' academics!

[Lateralthinking1]

I listened to the first of these, "A Brief History of Being Cold : Journeys through English art and the elements" by Alexandra Harris, Department of English, University of Liverpool.

It was essentially a straightforward literary review, with focus on The Wanderer, Gawain, Coleridge and Auden. Pleasantly presented, and not wholly without interest, it offered little that I hadn't heard before.

Throughout the piece, I asked myself "what is the new thinking here?". The nearest I came to finding an answer was in one of the final sentences "imagination keeps us warm". That was never vividly illustrated and I'm not sure that the thought in itself was imaginative enough for me.

I do agree that "new thinking" is not necessarily "young thinking". And much as I enjoyed being at university many years ago, it just might be that academia, from which these short essays are all likely to emanate, could mean a too conventional approach.

The Jonathan Meades television series "Magnetic North" and "Off-Kilter" covered some similar ground and very much more. He had more time for exploration but his method of putting ideas together is truly original and it challenges assumptions.

[aeolium]

Actually I would rather listen to people who can provide 'good thinking' rather than 'new thinking' - we can get too obsessed with the new for its own sake. I agree with Lat1 that that need not mean listening to academics (I too like Jonathan Meades' eclectic approach). I was trying to think of the people whose talks on R3 had made a strong impression on me at the time and for some time after and the names were invariably of people in their sixties or seventies (or even older): Russell, Hans Keller, George Steiner, Isaiah Berlin, A J P Taylor, Christopher Ricks, Neal Ascherson to name a few.

I'd suggest as a follow-up to the New Generation Thinkers broadcasts a series of lectures each of which is about some aspect of life today given by older people who are intellectually, temperamentally (and officially) detached from the 'establishment' - establishment thinking after all dominates politics and the media so it's right to give others a chance. As to who might be invited to give the lectures, how about these for starters (open to suggestions): Eric Hobsbawm, Richard Mabey, Richard Ingrams, John Carey, Michael Morpurgo, Mary Midgley?