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Radio 4 Extra: Corruption Season
Peter Reed, Producer, Radio 4 Extra
Dastardly! Dishonest! Deceitful! Dare we entice you to enjoy 4 Extra’s Corruption Season of comedy and dramas shining a spotlight on unethical or fraudulent conduct.
Posts
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Bollywood: Music, Mystery and Magic on BBC Radio 4 Extra
Radio 4 Extra
Bollywood, India’s popular cinema industry, produces thousands of films that are enjoyed around the world. As the nights draw in and the mercury falls, BBC Radio 4 Extra presents a selection of Bollywood-themed features and dramas filled with warmth, light, music and song. The programmes are introduced by Bobby Friction, Bollywood aficionado and presenter of the eponymous weeknight music programme on BBC Asian Network.
Sanjeev Bhaskar delves into Bollywood’s early history with Lights, Camera, Akshun! (2013), exploring how three of the industry’s key players started out in London. Niranjan Pal wrote a West End play before co-directing The Light of Asia (1925) with Himanshu Rai, who went on to found the production company Bombay Talkies with actress Devika Rani. In Nightingales of India (2013), Yasmin Alibhai Brown looks back at the careers of Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle, the sisters who’ve sung the songs in thousands of Bollywood movies for the past 70 years.
Bollywood Jane...
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#LovetoRead
Jim Naughtie
Jim Naughtie presents Bookclub on BBC Radio 4
Sometimes we’re allowed to indulge ourselves, and as part of the BBC’s #LovetoRead season I had the chance to choose a book that meant a lot to me as a young reader. It was easy to decide on something by Robert Louis Stevenson. But which one? In the end, it was Kidnapped, although of course it was hard to put aside Treasure Island. To add to my happiness we managed to record Bookclub in the Hawes Inn at South Queensferry, just under the girders of the Forth Bridge, which is the very place where Stevenson is said to be started to write the story (in Room 13) and the inn from which the young David Balfour is snatched on the order of his bad uncle Ebenezer, and taken on board a ship bound for the Carolinas. Of course, it is the start of a wild adventure that begins after a shipwreck off the isle of Mull and takes David and his new friend – the Jacobite renegade Alan Breck Stewart – on a perilous journey across Scotland and finally home to Edinburgh, where he claims his rightful inheritance.
It’s a story of adventure, friendship and war. Scotland is divided after the 1745 rising – between Highlands and Lowlands, across the religious schism – and young David is blooded in a country...
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Radio 4 Extra: Corruption Season
Peter Reed
Producer, Radio 4 Extra
Dastardly! Dishonest! Deceitful! Dare we entice you to enjoy 4 Extra’s Corruption Season of comedy and dramas shining a spotlight on unethical or fraudulent conduct. Catch crooks, racketeers, charlatans and swindlers galore:
Rebus: Let it Bleed
Alexander Morton stars as hard-boiled detective, John Rebus in Ian Rankin’s hard-hitting thriller uncovering the dark underbelly of 1990s Scotland. Saturday 29 October, 6.00 – 7.30 5am (rpt 4.00 – 5.30pm)
What A Carve Up!
Robert Bathurst stars in Jonathan Coe's wickedly funny, black comedy, inspired by the immorality, greed, corruption and ambition of 1980s Britain. Adapted by David Nobbs in 8-parts and stripped across 4 Extra’s Comedy Club.
Saturday 29 October – Friday 4th November
Ep 1-6/8 - 10.30 – 11.00pm Saturday 29th October – Thursday 3rd November
Ep 7-8/8 double-ep conclusion: 10.00-11.00pm Friday 4th NovemberFraud
Philip Glenister and Angela Wynter star in Caroline Gawn’s stylish detective story where a daring and amoral female crook pits her wits against a top policeman. Monday 31 October - 10.00 – 11.00am (rpt 3.00 – 4.00pm)
The Loss Adjuster
A flood on a housing estate ends in death and the revelation...
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4 Extra marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Fritz Lang, film director
Radio 4 Extra
Film director Fritz Lang.
Born in Vienna in 1890, Fritz Lang began his directing career in Germany and witnessed Hitler’s rise to power. He fled Fascism to continue his career as an émigré in Hollywood, where he died in 1976.
Lang’s first sound film, M (1931), is among his best known. Based on a true story, it’s set in Berlin where a child murderer is at large. When the intensity of the police hunt interferes with the...
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Book Club: H is for Hawk
Jim Naughtie
Jim Naughtie presents Bookclub on BBC Radio 4
One of our readers at this month’s Bookclub recording with Helen Macdonald, who was talking about H is for Hawk, told a story that brought to life one of the themes of the book. She revealed that she worked with prisoners, and described a programme in which they learn to train hawks. The result? The absorption in the birds, and the discipline of the training, mean that they begin to behave as if they’re no longer in prison: in a strange way, the birds of prey offer them the prospect of release.
Helen asked her if some of the prisoners had read the book. You won’t be surprised to learn that...
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Introducing ADA: a new way of finding Radio 4 programmes
Radio 4
Tagged with:
Radio 4 has an enormous archive of permanently available programmes just waiting to be discovered. While some of these are well known ongoing programmes, many are in short series or one-off documentaries that are difficult to find.
With programme subjects as diverse as Neptune, barn owls, the Russian revolution, Gothic art, Wittgenstein and time travel it wasn’t easy to find a way of grouping...
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Book Club: Don DeLillo
Jim Naughtie
Jim Naughtie presents Bookclub on BBC Radio 4
Don DeLillo’s Underworld is the vast, churning, raw glory of New York turned into words. When he wrote the novel, in the 1990s, it captured the arc of the American story that the post-war generation had experienced and brought it to life in his own city. The story opens with a scene that will stir any true New Yorker – at a famous baseball game between the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951 where we find, sitting together, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover and the comedian Jackie Gleeson. Could anything be a better introduction to the 1950s (even if Gleeson does end up being sick on...
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Miriam Margolyes’ Adventures in Radio: “on radio….you can be anyone….”
Peter McHugh
Producer
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Miriam enjoys a Radio 4 Extra cuppa
Editor's note: Much-loved actress Miriam Margolyes looks back over her radio lives, choosing some of her favourite performances from the BBC Radio Archive in Miriam Margolyes’ Adventures in Radio.
On a sunny Friday morning, Miriam Margolyes was waiting patiently for me in BBC Broadcasting House Reception. Smiling broadly she mentions briefly that she's just been having a natter with the... -
Professor David Cannadine on Prime Ministers' Props
Radio 4
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Editor's note: In Prime Ministers' Props, Professor Sir David Cannadine explores political fame and image by looking at how an object or prop, whether chosen deliberately or otherwise, can come to define a political leader.
In the autumn of 2001, Ian Duncan Smith replaced William Hague as the Conservative Party leader, following Tony Blair’s second landslide victory at the polls, and the Daily Telegraph’s cartoonist, Nicholas Garland, offered IDS some advice about how he should manage his image and his public relations.
What Duncan Smith most urgently needed, Garland suggested, to set the...
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Musicals galore from Radio 4 Extra
Radio 4 Extra
If you love musical theatre you'll be delighted to know that Radio 4 Extra is set to start a five-week Summer run of classic musicals. We've been given access to Radio 2’s extensive – and impressive – back-catalogue of exclusively-recorded works from the mid-'90s including Sweeney Todd, Guys and Dolls, Carousel, Jesus Christ Superstar and Kismet.
