Original production photographs for WNYO production of The Sleeper

It started with an opera, my dystopia. And there aren’t many dystopias that can claim that. The central idea for The Sleeper came out of various conversations in Cardiff bars between the composer Stephen Deazley and me. The two of us had been brought together by Welsh National Opera to develop a new piece for its youth company WNO Max. We were given free rein, but the more we talked, the more our ideas circled around dystopias. I believe there is a growing appetite for dystopias in films, books, games and even news bulletins at the moment. Maybe we need them to warn us where we are heading? Or maybe we need them to tell us we’ve already got there? (I’ve explored some thoughts on this in an introductory talk for the season.)

Maxine Peake ( Harper) and Jason Done (Davis) star in The Sleeper

Whichever way you see it, drama doesn’t come from ideas. It begins in character and story, and the ideas come from them. So we decided to tell a story set in a parallel present Britain, but we would change one thing. No-one sleeps. This would be a society driven to breaking point by its loss of the gift of sleep. What would this Britain be like? And what would happen if one sleeper, a teenager, suddenly appeared? Would they be hunted? Worshipped? Lynched? The Sleeper was performed by WNO Max in 2011, and when Radio 4 commissioned us to remake it as part of a Dangerous Visions season, focusing on dystopian visions, we leapt at the chance.

For both of us, the transition from opera to radio drama was not so much an adaptation as a reinvention. Opera’s power comes from the interior world being made exterior, but radio works the other way round. Radio drama works most powerfully through intimacy, as the voice in the character’s head, or the listener’s head. I rewrote the opera entirely as a radio drama, introducing a narrator and a new strand to the story (played by Maxine Peake and Jason Done holding a series of secret meetings in Room 210 of a seedy hotel). Stephen then reworked his music for the opera to function as the radio equivalent to a film score. Director Susan Roberts and her team in Salford assembled a great cast and performed their alchemy to bind these disparate elements into a radio drama with a full life of its own, drawing on its roots in opera, but amounting to something unique to radio.

Listen to clips about The Sleeper

Discover more Dangerous Visions

Michael Symmons Roberts

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For those who break into a light sweat unless they have the answers taped to the inside of their jumper sleeve, some time codes have been provided for full programmes... Just don't let the invigilator see you...

1. What is said to be the first anguished cry broadcast on British television?

2. How many affluent households are there in China?

3. In its emergency planning, how many meals from anarchy does the MI5 consider the UK to be?

4. How did Einstein make decisions?

5. What does Pam Ayres like to put in her unique West Country version of the classic cocktail Singapore Sling?

6. If you could store all the world’s information on artificial DNA, how much space would be needed?

7. Which guest on Loose Ends told Clive Anderson about their drink being spiked with LSD?

8. Can life be measured?

Cheat's Corner: 1. From 06:20; 2. 04.01; 3. 6.36; 4. 19:46; 5. 07:38  8. Time code cannot be measured.

Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussed Prophecy. As always the programme is available to listen to online or to download and keep.

In Our Time: Prophecy

Hello

One characteristic of Thursday's programme was the scholarly calm with which the three contributors discussed what, for many people in many parts of the world, is an explosive subject. Religion. A new factor in our programme is that people tweet us as we go along, and Tom Morris can somehow produce the programme in the adjoining booth and bring in tweets at quarter to ten. A couple of these tweets were from self-described atheists who asked us why were we discussing this subject? Why bother? It was all so irrelevant. It is almost impossible to think of a subject more relevant to so many aspects of life on the planet at the moment than religions. The Islamic movement in its most extreme form is driven by extreme reactions to, and interpretations of, the Qur'an. Issues such as gay marriage are being challenged by reference to the Old and New Testament. The Old Testament plays a major part in the current tension in the Middle East. It bewilders me that people who call themselves atheist – for wholly understandable reasons of not believing in a God, a Resurrection, a Virgin Birth, a Trinity – think that this gives them the right to dismiss a massive body of knowledge which has informed people for almost two thousand years, led to some of the greatest artefacts mankind has ever seen and, for better and for worse, has to be taken into account if we think at all of the past in terms of morality, history and art.

Put that aside. Mona called the Muslims the 'People of the Book'. I thought that that phrase – 'People of the Book' – had been pre-claimed by the Jews. And then later on, in the early seventeenth century, when the Presbyterians from Britain went to the east coast of America in order to worship through their own form of Protestantism, they too became the 'People of the Book'. The Qur'an, Mona said, was the nearest you get to God. The Bible does not fulfil that function, I think, in Christianity and Judaism, but it certainly has been the nearest you get to a revelation of faith.

It's been a switchback week. First seeing the programme on Tyndale go out and being met by – well, more than usual positive reactions. We also managed, on BBC Two, to pip BBC One, which gives childish satisfaction to we arts programme makers. Though it's worth pointing out that neither of those programmes at nine o'clock in the evening on television came within reach of the audience for In Our Time at nine o'clock in the morning on Radio 4. Then switching from the documentary on John Ball to Thomas Paine, we started to film on a wonderfully sunny day in London on Saturday. The Guildhall, Clerkenwell, Westminster, Cecil Court with its bookshops – still the most attractive street in London – and on the way to our second radical. On Monday we went to Lewes, where Tom Paine came of age as an intellectual writing for the local newspapers and forging his early reputation through being a Customs and Excise officer. He led a raw life on the high seas, tackling smugglers, setting up a business, running a tobacconist's (badly), and all the time filling every spare minute with learning.

It's a bit busy at the moment so I won't bore you with the rest, but it did include going to Sheffield, to the great documentary festival where I was talking about arts programmes, and was stunned when I came out of the station at Sheffield by the splendour that those who run Sheffield have made of a town which seemed at one stage to have everything going against it. It looks like a modern European city from the moment you come out of the railway station and this documentary festival is magnificently organised.

And on we go. Next stop Derry, City of Culture, and then Paris to film more of Tom Paine, who was elected to the French Assembly in the French Revolution, who was integral and perhaps even essential to the making of the American Revolution, and who was imprisoned for sedition in London. In Lewes the local brewery, the famous Harveys, there since 1790 in the hands of the same family, has a fine strong ale called Tom Paine. His great patron Benjamin Franklin said beer was invented by God to show that he loved us. They must have had fine evenings together when Franklin got this pugnacious young man over to Philadelphia.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

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Last week I was rafting down the Grand Canyon in Utah, one of the few remaining places in the world where a mobile phone does not work. I left my watch behind as well. We rose with the sun and lay down as it set, lulled to sleep by the sound of the Colorado River. Shooting stars and satellites flew across the sky with unparalleled brightness. We drifted by rocks billions of years old, swam through the gentler rapids and held tightly on to our craft  as we crashed through the rougher ones. The hand of man was nowhere visible, except for the occasional deserted mud huts of some earlier native American civilisation. Herons, long horned sheep, rattlesnakes and turkey vultures appeared occasionally, indifferent to our presence. Mosquitos were blessedly absent.

Every day the skies were cloudless and temperatures were soon in the upper 30s. It was a life changing experience.

But of course none of this compares with the pleasures of presenting Feedback!

I returned to so called civilisation to discover that the BBC has just wasted £100 million pounds of your money on a digital project which has had to be abandoned. The BBC Trust is angry and embarrassed, and the former Director General, Mark Thompson, has been summoned back from his new job in New York by a parliamentary select committee which believes it has been misled about the DMI project.

This one will run and run.

So it is timely that the Trust has updated the Corporation’s complaints procedures and this week it published the results of a survey of licence fee-payers views of their effectiveness. In the first Feedback of the new series, I talked to BBC Trustee Richard Ayre about that survey, and about the DMI fiasco. Here is our feature.

By the way, you can write to Feedback about any BBC matter, programmes, policies, or finances. You set the agenda, not the BBC, so do get in touch.

Roger Bolton

PS I am glad to be back, honest!

Listen to this week's Feedback or download it as a podcast

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Radio 4 has always sought to bring listeners the best and most engaging science stories possible, with a range of programmes, from news and documentaries to discussion programmes and debates. Central to our science offering for a long time has been Material World, the weekly science strand ably presented by Quentin Cooper for the last 13 years. While we will continue to have a half-hour science strand running 52 weeks a year, we have decided the time is right to make some changes to ensure the programme meets the demands and expectations of the Radio 4 audience into the future. We have been evolving our science offering over the last few years as we move beyond celebration of science to a deeper understanding of it. Among the programmes we have introduced are The Life Scientific, The Digital Human, Inside Health and The Infinite Monkey Cage. Inside Science – the programme replacing Material World – is part of this evolution.

Presented by Dr Adam Rutherford, Inside Science will be an authoritative, in-depth and enjoyable guide to science and the way that it is changing our world. It will keep the audience abreast of important breakthroughs in science, explore in depth some of the news stories that can get oversimplified elsewhere and work through implications of scientific discovery for society at large. It will mark significant developments within the various scientific disciplines and try to help the audience better understand the scientific process. The show will also share the wonder, passion and excitement of science by telling some of the great science stories that are out there. 

Professor Alice Roberts and Dr Lucie Green will share presenting duties with Adam, hosting some programmes later in the year. The presenter team continues Radio 4's commitment, following Brian Cox, Jim Al-Khallili and Mark Porter, to presenters who work inside science and medicine. The new title reflects this, allows the programme to be more easily located online and brings it into line with other science programme titles like Inside Health.

The new programme will be pre-recorded on the day of transmission to give the production team more flexibility in order to get the best guests and experts from the scientific community and present the most important material to listeners. From 4th July, Inside Science will air on Thursdays at 4.30pm and will be repeated at 9pm the same evening.

I would like to thank Quentin for his years of dedication to science on Radio 4 and look forward to working with him on other projects in the future. In the meantime, I would like to welcome Adam, Alice and Lucie on board. I hope you enjoy the new programme.

But where next? That’s where you may come in.

Radio 4 have teamed up with the BBC’s Digital Lab, which formed earlier this year to drive digital marketing innovation and together with BBC experts and those from the industry we want to tackle some of the big challenges of how Radio 4 can do more for new audiences via digital communication.

We will be hosting a one-day hack-style event, held on BBC premises, employing the talents of both internal and external experts. It will be a great opportunity to meet senior BBC staff and to learn a bit more about how the BBC and Radio 4 operate.

At the start of the day teams will be presented with three exciting digital challenges; how to encourage new audiences to discover R4’s digital offer, how to create greater advocacy amongst listeners and how to start building daily listening habits. Teams will choose which challenge they want to work on – and then present ideas to the BBC judging panel at the end of the day.  The winning idea will be chosen with the aim to implement it in the coming months.

The event takes place on Friday 12th July from 8:30 – 17:00.  This event is open to professionals and we anticipate high demand for the day. To secure your place please tell us how you would answer the following challenge in no more than 100 words:

How can we use digital communications to either encourage new audiences to discover R4’s digital offer, to create greater advocacy amongst existing listeners or to start building daily listening habits?

Please send your answers or any questions about the event to the Digital Lab natalie.charlton@bbc.co.uk. If you are planning to participate as a group we ask that you put together a team of no more than 4 people and inform us in advance of names and area of expertise. Closing date for entries is Friday 28th June.

And as with any event like this – here’s the small print: If selected to participate in the event you will be subject to BBC terms and conditions which will be provided upon your confirmation as an attendee. Each selected participant will be entitled to a nominal fee for their attendance details of which will be provided upon your confirmation as an attendee.

We hope to see you there!

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Relativity

Hello

Well, I got through it. People who know more about physics than I do (most of you) will have realised again and again how thin the ice was on which I was attempting to skate. Nevertheless, once again, those who contributed to the programme were not only a safety net and a cradle, but considerate enough to let me say a few words along the way. Martin Rees said afterwards how difficult it was to do this sort of programme without illustrations. "That's why we kept waving our arms around," he said. He also spoke about the number of letters he gets from people who are very interested in physics who sometimes begin "Even Newton was wrong..." Roger Penrose's letters include those that begin by saying how much they admire his books, but then attempt to explain why he's wrong. As a young man apparently Einstein was very dapper and beautifully dressed in the annus mirabilis of 1905, when he produced four papers while not working inside a university or a scientific community – four papers which changed the understanding of the universe. As an older man, the scruffy and bemused-looking mop top (the model for the first Dr Who?). He could have been a refugee from the Marx Brothers. Both Roger Penrose and the producer, Tom Morris, had personal anecdotes transmitted to them down their respective families that although Einstein loved to play the violin, especially in string quartets, and his name commanded only the best people to play with him, he had one grave fault. He couldn't count.

Ruth Gregory said that four dimensions were nothing like as complicated as we thought they were. When we came across a crowd of people and worked out how to navigate our way through them, we were using four dimensions. Martin said that the reason why Einstein's greater theory lay dormant for about forty years at the beginning of the twentieth century was that there were only very crude ways of testing their veracity. They could only come within 10% of establishing the truth. Now they can come within 1/100,000.

Doing this from the train, on the way to Carlisle, to give a talk about my novel in the town in which I was born. The event is being laid on by Gwenda Matthews, an independent bookseller, valiantly and, I hope, successfully continuing in her increasingly lovely occupation. I think it's 400 independent bookshops that have closed down over the last two or three years.

Tunnel, tunnel, tunnel... back in the light again. When I was at a grammar school I used to go into Carlisle sometimes to traipse around the independent bookshops. There was one second-hand bookshop, dug into the castle wall, which was wonderfully ripe for looting, with an extremely benevolent bookseller practically giving them away. Anyway, good luck to Gwenda Matthews and all who share her determination to stay independent.

It's been a John Ball week - filming a BBC documentary on this extraordinary fourteenth century preacher who helped inspire and amplify what has too long been miscalled the Peasants' Revolt. We've been whirling around Kent and Essex; at a wonderful sheep market in Colchester which has been there since at least the twelfth century, to abbey ruins which again – the abbey, that is – date from the twelfth century. Into Chelmsford for an unusual lunch break (i.e. not a sandwich in a car park), beside a river, and young Chelmsford folk wandering in the sunshine while cricket was being played nearby. In and out of churches beside the Essex Marshes, England past and present delighted by the appearance of the sun and leaping out to lap it up.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

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The BBC College of Production recently made a film about the role of producer on The Now Show. Unfortunately the least telegenic bit of the job – where I sit with an engineer in an edit studio all day – was also the part Hugh Dennis thought most important. So here’s a bit more about editing The Now Show.
 
The show records in the BBC’s Radio Theatre on Thursday nights between 8pm and whenever it’s done - you can apply to be in the audience through the BBC Tickets site. I usually come away with about an hour of show and the team retire to a nearby pub at the end of a long week’s satire.
 
Cut to 9am Friday morning. Today’s job is to digitally assemble the programme, edit in retakes, add extra music and sound effects and cut last night’s recording down to 28 minutes for broadcast at 18.30. Between the Friday night, the Saturday repeat, iPlayer and podcast, nearly 3 million people will listen to this week’s show, so no pressure.
 
Audience comedies like The Now Show have the advantage of being punctuated by laughter and generally you can edit “to the laughs”. I mark laughter and applause on my script while we’re recording, so can look down a page and see how it flew with the audience. If it got a laugh it stays, if it didn’t it goes - I understand this approach is common amongst comedy producers, with only a few real mavericks daring to do the opposite.
 
A listen through the edit involves cutting wherever possible, lulls, lines where the audience already got the joke, small tightens of pauses and often removing applause breaks. Why waste valuable seconds of the show on too much clapping?
 
There’s no such thing as “canned laughter”. It’s possible to take better laughs from elsewhere in the same recording to make a joke sound like it got a warmer reception, but if the three hundred Now Show fans in our studio audience didn’t find the joke funny then I’d be inclined to cut it.
 
If I really believe in a particular joke and think the studio audience are just plain wrong then I prefer not to add fake laughs on the rationale that I quite enjoy being the only person in a comedy club who gets a joke. But if everyone’s laughing uproariously and I don’t get it I’ll feel alienated and if it’s on the radio I’ll probably switch over.
 
Gags which may be considered in poor taste have to pass a higher comedic threshold to justify the potential offence to listeners. If you’re funny enough the Radio 4 audience seem happy to go along with you. If you’re not as clever as you think you are, you’re about to make a dirty joke at a stranger’s dinner table, quite probably in front of their kids.

The edit’s our last chance to get editorial issues right before broadcast and yet another opportunity to get them wrong. A carefully worded monologue may not feel as balanced when the caveats are cut for not being funny enough. It’s a final chance to fact-check and run additional legal and editorial referrals - all things more usefully done before the recording, but often a news story changes or a gag’s added to the script at the last minute.
 
By mid-afternoon we’ve usually managed to pare the show down to about the right time. Our edit system means we then have to record it into a single audio file by doing a real-time playback, on which the show’s executive producer sits in, so they can give any final notes and sign the programme off as fit for broadcast.
 
I sit making my own final notes of any expletives, brand names or other issues that will need detailing on the compliance form. Listening on headphones because the show’s success as a podcast means that over 400,000 people will be potentially doing the same, so a duff edit’s going to get noticed.
 
The day ends with me uploading the finished show to Radio 4’s computer system, checking it’s been received and scheduled, and heading for the train home, where I can watch Twitter’s live review of my week’s work: #BBCNowShow

Radio 4 - The Now Show

College of Production feature on making The Now Show

College of Production feature on Colin Anderson, The Now Show's producer

Radio 4 - Comedy

I put it to Jim Crace when we met in Stratford-upon-Avon with this month’s readers that it was a bit of a risk to write a novel set in the Judean desert and featuring Jesus, engaged in the 40-day fast. Many writers would run a mile from the thought. But he is quite relaxed about it – not just because he says that if he wrote about his religious views it would be a short pamphlet, not a book, but because he is an undemonstrative character. He’s not a grandstanding writer, though he is a highly serious one, and celebrated for the poetry of his prose. That approach, and his interest in dealing with settings that readers don’t know (like a Middle East desert 2000 years ago) means that he welcomes the adventure of a story, and is never scared by it.

He told a vicar friend that when he had begun the story, Jesus seemed to pop up and became a natural and central part of the story. His friend suggested that this was Christ at his shoulder. No, Jim told us, it was just “the imp of storytelling”. He spoke revealingly about his meticulous technique, and also about why he enjoys the business of creating a story. “The whole joy of this thing is you bring craft, and you bring an ability with words, and making sentences and all the technical side, to do something which is bigger than you which has got wings and powers of its own. That for me is the great fun - listening to the suggestions the books make.”

The story involves relatively small group of characters, and paints some fairly violent relationships in the loneliness of the desert, which is wonderfully portrayed from the first page to the last. I won’t spoil the story for you, but reading Quarantine for the first time in preparation for the programme, I found it gripping in a strange way. The characters are figures on a remote landscape and from a remote time but in Jim’s hands they take on powerful personalities. We had one reader – she described herself as a practising Christian but emphatically not “fanatical” in her beliefs – who found the Jesus character disturbing, and a touch offensive. Jim took the opportunity to explain that although he is an atheist by conviction, and finds that his certainty is getting stronger as he gets older (he’s 67), he has no interest in campaigning atheism. That is certainly not what the book intends to be.

Instead, it is a book about the optimism that survives in human beings, even when things go badly wrong and there seems to be no hope. The nastiest character in the book is called Musa, who is successful and relatively powerful, and who abuses the women around him. But his victory isn’t complete. Jim told us, “The two women in the book went through horrible privations at his hands.  They were raped - both his wife and Marta - but they went off in sisterhood.  I hope that people felt that.  The optimism of the individual, I think, survives.   Even though it isn’t as great and as powerful as Musa’s merchant success, nevertheless these small victories do matter.”

We met at the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford and it seemed an appropriate place to talk about fine writing. Because Jim Crace is a novelist of great elegance and power, with a deceptively simple style. He describes it as a solitary craft, in which he’s searched for a rhythmic kind of prose, but one in which he’s also found great satisfaction. “I think if you don’t make too many decisions before writing a book, and leave yourself open to the suggestions that narrative itself will make, then you will have great fun in this lonely profession of writing.”

I hope you enjoy our discussion. And for next month why not prepare for the best-selling Audrey Niffenegger by reading her hugely successful The Time Traveller’s Wife?

You can hear that programme on Sunday July 7th.

Happy reading
Jim

Listen to Quarantine on Bookclub - available after broadcast on 2 June

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Wilko Johnson acknowledges the applause of the audience at Maida Vale Studios.

When Wilko Johnson had the hugely enjoyable experience of recording Mastertapes he was only six weeks into his diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer.

Since then he has continued to enjoy a renewed enthusiasm for life, declining any chemotherapy, and as yet is showing no signs of the onset of the disease. He is currently in Japan for his third holiday there this year.

Shortly after recording Mastertapes, Wilko began a farewell tour. Such was the desire to witness one last time his uniquely raw and energetic performance that all the venues sold out within an hour of tickets going on sale.

Happily for the thousands who could not get tickets (or would not pay the touts the £200 they were demanding) the two London shows at Koko were filmed for a live DVD, to be released early in the summer.

It was unfortunate that the last two shows of the tour, in Wilko's birth town of Canvey Island, had to be cancelled – not due to the cancer but to that particularly virulent flu virus that was doing the rounds.

Although Wilko has said that he does not want to tour any more, he has been working on a studio album to be released later this year.

Wilko was recently photographed by Rankin for his deeply moving exhibition Alive: In The Face of Death, being held at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. This is a celebration of life in portraits of people who have received a terminal diagnosis, who have faced a near death experiences or who have lived against the odds. The project was filmed by The Culture Show for transmission on BBC2 in June.

Such is the interest in his history, influence and positive response to his diagnosis that, as well as the daily flow of goodwill messages and interview requests, there is even talk of a stage play based on his life.

It seems that after a 40-year career which many felt did not receive the recognition it deserved, Wilko is now becoming something of a national treasure – and this is surely reflected in the warm, lively and enthusiastic response he enjoyed in the Mastertapes sessions.

Queen Zenobia

Hello

You never cease to wonder how people got inspired to do what they do in the first place. I think we've cracked this one with Edith Hall. As a teenager in a guesthouse near St Andrews where she was making a vacation living, she worked in a place called The Palmyra. Undoubtedly that sowed the seeds of her characteristic, wonderful exuberance and waterfall of information which flooded through this morning's programme. Equally enthusiastic was Kate Cooper – in fact, at one stage I thought either one of them could have done the entire programme by themselves without pausing for breath – but Richard Stoneman stood his ground. I was a bit miffed that Kate stole in before me to say that the reason Zenobia is not well enough known is because Shakespeare did not write a play about her! I should have got it in earlier. Richard was a bit miffed (in the way that academics are academically miffed) by not getting in the fact that when Aurelian went back to Rome he built a temple of the sun, the Unconquered Sun, Sol Invictus, and named as the sun king's birthday the 25th of December. Christianity was soon to become the official religion of Rome.

There was much about women in ancient history, including the ten Amazonian archers on horseback who took part in Aurelian's great triumph in Rome and the cohort of women whose place has yet to be properly recognised in ancient as in modern history. Kate, after the programme, wanted to talk about the Mary Magdalene television programme I did, saying that she hoped I didn't associate Mary with the Gnostics and, as she put it, "weirdos", but Mary Magdalene was central for the whole enterprise. Which is what I thought I'd said in the programme.

Well, away we go, filming John Ball and the misnamed Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Down to Rochester in the teeming rain of late May, that fantastic ruined fortress which still seems formidable and clambering all over it were French children, excited and speaking perfect French! I could have been in St James's Park. But, blow me down, a couple of days later I was in Canterbury at the place where the rebels offered John Ball the archbishopric (he turned it down) and scampering all over the rain-sodden grounds were – yes, scrums of eager, young, French children! Is it me? Is it them? Is it half term? Is it places which were built by the Normans which attracts them?

I think that all our political leaders should go to Canterbury Cathedral at once in order to learn about visions for the future. The cathedral was begun in the late eleventh century and only completed two hundred years later. Now that’s a vision for the future. That's what we need. I didn't know that the actual stone to build it came from Cannes (yes, film festival Cannes)*. It was brought round by sea, then up the river and then on horseback. All that stone! AND when they need to repair it or replace stone they go back to the original quarries at Cannes.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

* [EDITOR'S NOTE]  Thanks to the listeners who've pointed out that the stone at Canterbury in fact came from Caen, not Cannes!

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Vanessa Whitburn

In anticipation of Vanessa Whitburn’s retirement after nearly 22 years as Archers editor, we asked her to select some of the storylines of which she is proudest.

Elizabeth and Cameron

This was the first big story under Vanessa’s editorship. They are getting on well in this clip. But Cameron Fraser was soon to prove a fraudster and abandon his pregnant girlfriend. Elizabeth felt she had no option but to have an abortion.

Save the Ambridge One

Having been forced to assist her brother Clive who was on the run, Susan Carter is arrested and imprisoned for seeking to pervert the course of justice. Vanessa says: ‘This caused a national outcry, campaign and debate, with excellent ripples into real life. The Archers at its best.’

Racism in the countryside 

During Usha’s first few years in Ambridge, she was subjected to a campaign of intimidation by a gang of thugs. Young and impressionable Roy Tucker was one of them, although this attack (in which he did not take part) made him realise his mistake.

John’s death

Movingly acted by Colin Skipp. John’s death still resonates across this family to this day.

Tom trashes Brian’s GM crop

Vanessa says: ‘A controversial subject for us to tackle but one at the heart of the countryside. In the end Tom was found not guilty, using the same defence later used in real life by Lord Melchett'. This episode set in the jury room is, we believe, the only one to feature no regular Archers characters.

The Grundys evicted

A poignant  story which went on for many months and showed the real economic struggle for our much-loved tenant farmers.

Brian and Siobhan

As with all these stories, we could have picked many crucial scenes. In this one, we borrowed from Shakespeare. Brian’s handkerchief proves to Debbie that her father is an adulterer.

Fortress Brookfield

Vanessa says: ‘I was very proud of the Archers team during the terrible Foot and Mouth epidemic which unfolded over several months in 2001 and devastated farmers and the countryside in the UK. For many months we had to operate almost like a newsroom, changing our story to respond to fast-moving real life events. Eventually we decided to tell the story of how Brookfield responded to the threat of the disease.

Who’s the daddy?

Barry Farrimond and Philip Molloy (Ed and Will Grundy)

...as the press dubbed this popular story. Will marries Emma but she is really in love with brother Ed. She gives birth to Will’s son but thinks it is Ed’s. A blood test reveals the truth but by then a rivalry has developed between the two brothers which could last a lifetime.

Jack’s  decline

We received many awards and accolades for this story, as we charted the progress of this heart-breaking illness over several years.

Lilian and Paul

And we come right up to date with this story. What seemed like a simple fling has become a nightmare for Lilian, as Paul turns out not to be the uncomplicated, kindly man he initially appeared.

Marmalade Wars

Marmalade

Vanessa chose a selection of the biggest stories which have been  threaded through the programme over, in most cases, a large span of time. They tend to have a big impact on the community and are life-changing for the characters. But she also has a particular affection for the story in which we portrayed the gentle rivalry between Jill Archer and Ruth’s mum Heather Pritchard.

As Vanessa says, that was also The Archers at its best, but in a completely different way.

We wish her the best in her retirement.

Keri Davies is an Archers scriptwriter and web producer.

• Read the full Marmalade Wars story
• Discover more about major Archers characters with our Who's Who
• Stephen Fry's introduction to The Archers

What do Marcus Brigstocke, Sarah Millican, Peter Kay, Russell Howard, Nina Conti and Alan Carr all have in common?

Well, apart from the choice of vocation (stand-up comedy), all of these successful comedians and many, many more have taken part in the BBC New Comedy Award.

(Watch our launch film, starring 2012 winner Lucy Beaumont below.)

In its most recent guise (the award was resurrected in 2011 after a five year break), the award has had its semi-finals and final broadcast to the nation on BBC Radio 2, relying on its expansive web site to chart the progress of the talent search through videos, blogs and social media.

However, thanks to the amazing team at BBC Radio 4 Extra, in 2013 we’ll be able to broadcast every heat to the nation – meaning that all 80 comedians who make it through to the first round will be broadcast on digital radio, many for the first time in their careers.

If you’re a budding stand-up and have less than three years’ worth of experience gigging on the comedy circuit, we’d be really keen to receive your entry. All you need to do to get our attention is upload five minutes of audio to Soundcloud and fill in a short online form. Then, if you’re one of the 80 entrants who make us laugh the loudest, we’ll invite you to one of our eight heats across the UK.

Not a performer, but still a comedy fan? We need you too!

We’ll be asking you to vote for your winner during the live final, broadcasting on BBC Radio 2 in December. Last year’s ‘wildcard vote’ will also return, allowing voters to grant a second chance to two runners-up: your 2011 wildcard Angela Barnes, whose ‘second chance’ was a spot in the semi-finals, went on to win the competition, and 2012 wildcard Tommy Rowson sailed through his semi-final to place in the final six – proof that being a BBC Radio New Comedy Award runner-up should never be referred to as a consolation prize.

Here’s host Patrick Kielty talking to The Comedy Club’s Tom Wrigglesworth about the competition.

If you think you're up for the challenge, head over to our entry page now!

Frankie Ward is the Interactive Producer for the BBC Radio New Comedy Award 2013 and will be producing films, blogs and more over at bbc.co.uk/newcomedyaward for the duration of the talent search.

Tube hug

A couple of years ago I was having a very hard time. I was on the tube on my way to a gig and suddenly I found myself crying so hard that I couldn't stop. I got off the train flustered and embarrassed and on the platform something happened. A woman of about fifty ran over to me, actually ran, and asked if I was alright, and then because I couldn't really answer she just grabbed me and gave me a hug. She held onto me and said "it's ok, it's going to be ok". After what must have been a couple of minutes, which is no time at all and also all of the time in the world she said "do you need me to stay with you?" and I said no, thanks and that I was ok, and she got onto a train.

It was such a brief encounter, but it meant a lot to me. It is really unusual in London for someone to intervene like she did. Out of nowhere she was really kind to me, and full on, too. It was needed and it made me feel better. I never found out her name and I wouldn't recognise her if I saw her again.

I remembered this little meeting while I was thinking about how to describe Short Cuts. It was an unexpected thing on an otherwise normal day and it was a very fleeting thing, too. Sometimes very small things can take on a lot of significance.

Here's a taster from the latest series of Short Cuts - the games that teachers play...

• Short Cuts on BBC Radio 4
• Josie Long - official website

 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites

Two of the 'Cambridge Five' - Anthony Blunt & Donald Maclean.

“Cambridge Spies“ is in many ways, a misleading title.

George Blake wasn’t strictly a part of that particular set. John Profumo certainly had no connection, he was to some extent just unlucky.

Yet the phrase sums up the contradiction at the heart of the matter. As a concept, espionage is always presented as an intrusion. Enemy agents breaching borders, slipping through defences via subterfuge and false identities.

Perhaps what shook this perception was the idea that 1930s Cambridge, the very image of a venerated English institution, could be home to the ‘enemy’. More than that, the enemy itself was home grown. Some would say the apparent betrayal by Burgess, Maclean, et al wasn’t part of some insidious plan to topple the country. It seemed born of a sincerely-held belief that communist Russia was the best alternative to fascism.

If you’re not familiar with the Cambridge Five – Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess (a confession by ‘fifth man’ Cairncross came some years later) – then the paradox is even more striking. A group of almost textbook flamboyant, eccentric Englishmen (diplomats, art history professors, even sometime BBC radio producers) who were nonetheless apparently willing to pass information to the Soviet Republic during wartime. It certainly flies in the face of conventional spy imagery.

Guy Burgess and Kim Philby

Not that this information would emerge until the following decades. In fact, it was November 1979 before Margaret Thatcher made a clear admission about Anthony Blunt’s role. Those who hadn’t defected had long since confessed in exchange for diplomatic immunity. A very human reaction. A long way from the steely cold resolve of secret agent cliché.

It’s this conflicting, human dimension which we’ve sought to capture with a season of programmes under that moniker – the Cambridge Spies. It takes in others caught in that uneasy era of revelation (Profumo, Blake) and a variety of styles (features, comedies, dramatized accounts). Hopefully though, it reflects the lack of easy conclusions on offer when it comes to Blunt and company.

Anthony Blunt

Listen to the Cambridge Spies season:

Sat 25th May - Rebels : Guy Burgess – Spies investigated: Guy Burgess according to people who knew and worked with him, including brother Nigel. From October 1984.

Sat 25th May - An Englishman Abroad – Spies in decline: what did the agent say to the actress? Burgess meets Coral Browne. Stars Michael Gambon and Penelope Wilton.

Sun 26th May - Another Country – Spies in the making: the childhood of young Guy Bennett could well have a major impact on his adulthood. Stars Tom Hiddleston. 

Tue 28th May - Blunt Speaking – Spies reflecting:  Sir Anthony Blunt considers his life and the shame of his exposure. Written and performed by Corin Redgrave.

Wed 29th May - After the Break – Spies unchained: George Blake’s daring defection made headlines. But what about life behind the Iron Curtain? Stars Jack Klaff. 

Thur 30th May - The Reunion: Courtauld Institute - Spies revealed: Brian Sewell and other former students discuss the impact Anthony Blunt had on the worlds of art and espionage. 

Thur 30th May - Lost, Stolen or Shredded  - Spies pursued: Rick Gekoski attempts to track down diaries and effects of Kim Philby. Are they as elusive as their former owner?

Friday 31st May - The Archive Hour – Spies examined: ex-head of MI5 Stella Rimmington explains the long-term impact on her own life of Burgess, Maclean and others.  

Fri 31st May - Radio Active : Probe Round the Back – Spies parodied: The team's investigators are on the trail of the 'Fifth Man'. Starring Angus Deayton. From September 1987.  

Saturday 1st June - Iron Curtain Call – Spies lampooned: how else would you commemorate Burgess, Maclean and team but with an all-singing, all-dancing spectacular?