Speech Radio You Have Listened To Lately

[DracoM]

Thx.

[Forget It (U2079353)]

This is good hour long play from 1993
with the beautiful voice of Paul Scofield playing a composer!
Co-starring Samantha Bond.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0013t7m

A journalist seeking a reclusive composer discovers far more than she was expecting. Leo is a reclusive composer.
Pamela is the journalist who seeks to rediscover him.
But in doing so discovers far more than she had expected...

[johncorrigan]

Music that survived the Nazis

I caught this remarkable programme, the second of two, on World Service in the early hours today.

It tells the moving story of how music sustained camp inmates at the many concentration camps in the Third Reich - but, significantly, much also was preserved. I believe it was Krzysztof Kulisiewicz, mentioned in the programme, who surivived the Holocaust, and did so having memorised 700 pieces of music he had ‘collected’ from other prisoners from all over Europe. These he then transcribed after the war, and continued collecting Jewish music.

Thank you very much for this, kb. Just listened to both episodes. So moving to hear these voices and songs. Fascinating and well put together programmes.

[Beresford]

The Coming Storm, a series by Gabriel Gatehouse, explores the origins of the QAnon conspiracy gripping the right in the US. Riveting listening. It's broadcast on R4 on Tuesday mornings, and all episodes available on Sounds.

The final episode (7) has some fascinating insights into the mindset of conspiracy theorists in the USA. Comparisons with the witch-hunt mentality arising after the invention of printing, satanic panic of the 1980's, information liberated from reality by the internet - as it was by printing, the strategy of creating phony enemies, the winner is often the one (politician) who has the best story - regardless of truth, and above all the need of millions of people to find a simple culprit for all their sufferings.

[gurnemanz]

Music that survived the Nazis

I caught this remarkable programme, the second of two, on World Service in the early hours today.

It tells the moving story of how music sustained camp inmates at the many concentration camps in the Third Reich - but, significantly, much also was preserved. I believe it was Krzysztof Kulisiewicz, mentioned in the programme, who surivived the Holocaust, and did so having memorised 700 pieces of music he had ‘collected’ from other prisoners from all over Europe. These he then transcribed after the war, and continued collecting Jewish music.

Thanks for this. I would otherwise have missed it.

[Serial_Apologist]

Start The Week (Radio 4 9am Mondays) has really improved since Andrew Marr moved on to pastures greener. This morning's programme looked at the postwar settlement that gave us the NHS and sustained economic growth for some 30 years, and much else besides, asking do we not, in the wake of Covid-19, need a similar initiative today? There were a few gaps in the positions presented - Peter Hennessy was particularly good in showing the beneficial outcomes absent from politics post-1975, and optimistic that the conditions and collective mindset in the wake of the pandemic are ripe for change; I haven't had cause to take note of him in the past, but this morning I just felt yes, yes, yes about what he was saying: the only gap in thinking, namely the reasons for Britain's relatively low productivity, under-investment, is probably deserving of another programme. This was timely, given that the Barbican's Postwar Modern New Art in Britain, 1945-1965 exhibition, which although entry is £18, I very much want to go to, commences on March 3.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0014x6p

http://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2022/event/postwar-modern-new-art-in-britain-1945-1965

[Serial_Apologist]

Start The Week (Radio 4 9am Mondays) has really improved since Andrew Marr moved on to pastures greener. This morning's programme looked at the postwar settlement that gave us the NHS and sustained economic growth for some 30 years, and much else besides, asking do we not, in the wake of Covid-19, need a similar initiative today? There were a few gaps in the positions presented - Peter Hennessy was particularly good in showing the beneficial outcomes absent from politics post-1975, and optimistic that the conditions and collective mindset in the wake of the pandemic are ripe for change; I haven't had cause to take note of him in the past, but this morning I just felt yes, yes, yes about what he was saying: the only gap in thinking, namely the reasons for Britain's relatively low productivity, under-investment, is probably deserving of another programme. This was timely, given that the Barbican's Postwar Modern New Art in Britain, 1945-1965 exhibition, which although entry is £18, I very much want to go to, commences on March 3.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0014x6p

http://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/...tain-1945-1965

Tonight's Free Thinking on Radio 3, 10pm, is about the above-mentioned Barbican exhibition:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0014y71

[johncorrigan]

I am finding this week's book of the week on Radio 4 thrilling and moving and frightening. 'The Escape Artist' by Jonathan Freedland tells the story of Rudolf Vrba and his friend, Fred Wetzler, who were the first Jews to escape from Auschwitz, making it their mission to tell the world about the death camp and the Holocaust.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0018jzf

[johncorrigan]

Social historian, Emanuel Ringelblum, led a group of writers who secretly chronicled the life of the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto from 1939 hoping that the stories would escape to the wider world. Radio 4 has been playing a series of 15-minute programmes, all available on BBC Sounds - I found it fascinating and horrific. The narrator is Anton Lesser and the cast includes Tracey Ann Oberman and Alfred Molina. This idea of History As Survival is very well portrayed as the listener gets a sense of the day-to-day struggle to exist.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001l94l

[Serial_Apologist]

Free Thinking - Thurs 18 May: Essex

Strongly recommendable chat from yesterday on the over-stereotyped county by an affable bunch of well-informed talking heads, one which captured its subject inclusively, and did so brilliantly:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001lpky

[smittims]

Thanks for the notice of the Warsaw dramas, johncorrigan, which I would not otherwise have heard of. And what a splendid cast! All three actors you mention I much admire.

I expect you've read the book and seen the film of 'The Pianist' . I found the scene where the Nazi officers raid the apartment across the street intensely disturbing and haunting. 'Fascinating and horrific' indeed. Yet it's right that such things should be dramatised. We should never forget 'What man has made of man'.

[Old Grumpy]

Speech programme I have not been listening to recently (or indeed for many years): Radio 4's Today - seems I am not the only one...

[Bryn]

Speech programme I have not been listening to recently (or indeed for many years): Radio 4's Today - seems I am not the only one...

Hmm. LBC, eh? Not listened to it for many a year. A good few decades ago I recall it as a favourite haunt of the then National Front, on the LBC through the night phone-in. So ignorant were the NF callers that they seemed not to have caught on that Adrian Love, their interlocutor, was not exactly Aryan.

[johncorrigan]

I very much enjoyed 'The Lonely Londoners', Sam Shelvon's book about Jamaican immigrants to London in the mid-fifties. There's a five-part adaptation of it on Radio 4 Extra this week. I enjoyed the language of the book very much and great to hear Don Warrington bringing it to life.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03phdbr

[eighthobstruction]

I very much enjoyed 'The Lonely Londoners', Sam Shelvon's book about Jamaican immigrants to London in the mid-fifties. There's a five-part adaptation of it on Radio 4 Extra this week. I enjoyed the language of the book very much and great to hear Don Warrington bringing it to life.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03phdbr

....interesting, bright and immediately listenable - this morning....Windrush: A Family Divided....https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001mlgx