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?

Cosmic Rays

Hello

So, I did a programme about physics! I wish I'd been able to listen to that programme about sixty years ago when I was doing physics and got into a state of serious confusion. The way the contributors today talked about the universe made it seem so dynamic and unfathomable and powerful and, above all, vast and in a state of permanent turbulence, and yet they track it through microscopic particles and extraordinary attention to the smallest details. Whoever said that the people who did physics were the clever people was right, I think.

Been a week of skidding around the country. Last Thursday I went to Lincoln and walked up Steep Hill – it is – in the almost blinding rain and wind to go to the cathedral which is vast. I arrived just in time for Choral Evensong. Whatever religion you have or none, these services at five o'clock in all our great cathedrals and abbeys are a unique opportunity to listen not only to great music, beautifully sung, but to understand the strength that tradition can have. Yet, as usual at Choral Evensong, the choir was not much smaller than the congregation, but the music filled the enormous vaults of this cathedral and the small nucleus (reminds me of what Alan Watson said about the nucleus being a person standing in the middle of St Paul's and the whole atom being the rest of St Paul's) was still there.

And about a week later I was in Ely, surely one of the most lavish buildings in the land, this time the choir outnumbered the congregation, but that might have been because it was a foul night once again. I was with Robert Topping, the epitome of the independent bookseller; he not only is bookish and talks bookish but looks bookish, right down to the leather sleeve buttons on his roughly hewn sports jacket.

At present I am the recipient of BBC largesse in terms of being allowed to do programmes that I find it hard to think that any other organisation in the world would take on. There's In Our Time, of course. But I've also just finished a programme on William Tyndale which will be on your screens soon, in June, who was not only, in my view, the primary creator of modern English (i.e. from the 1520s onwards), but in every sense that matters a hero to himself, his faith, but, above all, to the English language.  And I'm setting up films on the two greatest radicals we've ever had: John Ball, the fourteenth century preacher who transformed and inspired the miscalled Peasants' Revolt, and Tom Paine, who was not only a force against the Establishment in this country, but also integral to the American Revolution and the documents which so sublimely mark it, and then there were his efforts in France – no mean efforts at all; he was elected to the French Assembly. It's extraordinary to think that you've been given time to work on such projects.

In Liverpool the other day, talking in the House of Memories. I've been going to Liverpool since the 1960s when I made the first of many films that I've made in that city. It's inspiring to see how well it's pulled itself up after such massive losses to its trade, its prosperity, its very existence at one stage, it seemed. It's a warm city, even though the wind off the Mersey whipped into our faces as we scurried from building to building.

And so into London, this strange hubble-bubble. Still crowded in the West End, pavements totally blocked at times. The weather this week from literally freezing to bright sun. And the first day of the Test at Lord's.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

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Another Rajar day – and another good quarter for Radio 4 in the latest set of figures, which cover January - March 2013. I’m delighted that Radio 4’s unique flagship programmes such as Desert Island Discs, In Our Time and Woman’s Hour are getting record audiences and enticing more and more listeners each week to such brilliant broadcasters as Kirsty Young, Melvyn Bragg, Jenni Murray and Jane Garvey.

Sian Williams and Richard Coles have seen the extended Saturday Live attract increasing audiences. It’s also clear that the twists and turns of The Archers are keeping our listeners hooked on life in Ambridge! 

Congratulations to all our talented teams and keep listening...

Here’s what the Radio 4 Audiences team told me:

Overall it’s another strong set of results for Radio 4 with 10.76m adults tuning in each week – this is the station's 5th highest reach figure since the current RAJAR methodology. We also had a record share of 12.8% this quarter, and with 21% of the population of this country tuning in each week, we’ve started the year pretty much where we left 2012.  Radio 4 Extra also had another solid quarter, with 1.642m adults tuning in each week (down only slightly by -43k on last quarter), and record share at 0.95%. Our listeners this quarter were tuning in for longer, with an average 5.58 hours per listener per week – a new record for the station.

Once again, Radio 4 has the most loyal listeners of any network station with the average Radio 4 listener tuned in for 12 hours and 17 minutes a week in Q1 2013 – up by 13 minutes from last quarter and stable on last year.

News continues to be hugely popular amongst our audiences with 9.2m listening each week (slightly down on last quarter but up on last year) and our drama audiences were up both last quarter and last year at 7m. The Archers saw its strongest weekly reach since the record breaking Q2 2011 with 5.08m listeners each week and Radio 4’s comedy listening remained relatively stable, with 5.7m tuning in.

A number of Radio 4's flagship programmes have seen their numbers grow this quarter with Desert Island Discs getting record reach and share (3.08m and 13.0%), Woman’s Hour and In Our Time both saw record reach (3.66m and 2.26m respectively), and Saturday Live’s 9am-10.30am slot also saw its highest reach since at least Q3 2005 (2.44m).

Gwyneth Williams is Controller of BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 4 Extra

• From the BBC Media Centre: RAJAR Q1 2013: Radio 2 scales new heights as BBC digital stations show long-term growth
• RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research) is jointly owned by the BBC and commercial radio trade body the Radio Centre. Participating listeners are asked to record their radio listening in quarter-hour time blocks for one week.

Tracey Emin, Adrian Lester, Tamara Rojo, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"So what did they choose?" has become a regular question in the Front Row office.

It's aimed at the small team working on Cultural Exchange, the Radio 4 project in which 75 creative minds share their passion for an art-work of any kind.

One of the pleasures of working on the project is the moment when the guest reveals his or her choice – usually in an email a few days before the recording.

Some have offered their own particular take on a relatively well-known work - Tracey Emin chose a painting by Vermeer, while actor Adrian Lester spoke passionately about Bob Marley's Redemption Song. Others decide to shine a light on something usually found in the cultural shadows: Germaine Greer makes a strong case for The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson, an Australian novel published in 1910, which she describes as 'a masterpiece'.

A second pleasure of the project is that each choice has its own webpage, featuring additional related audio clips, quarried from the BBC archives. Some archive hunts are relatively easy - it only took moments to find Chris Blackwell, head of Bob Marley's record label, recalling exactly how Marley recorded Redemption Song, on Front Row in 2009. Elsewhere the archive reveals unexpected treasure: so, for example, you can hear the Australian accent of Henry Handel Richardson, recorded for the BBC in 1944, two years before her death - Henry was a pseudonym used by Ethel Florence Richardson.

One striking trend has emerged from the guests and their choices so far. Many have returned to something they first experienced in their formative years, which has shaped their view of the world or their entire choice of career. It's a trend which links guests as diverse as Meera Syal, Melvyn Bragg, Bernardo Bertolucci and Tamara Rojo.
 
The deep impression left by a teenage cultural encounter is something which affects our listeners too. A couple of weeks ago, listener Katy Limmer contacted us after hearing a Front Row interview with dramatist Howard Brenton. Katy recalled 'babysitting in the 1980s without parental control of the telly' – and coming across an atmospheric post-watershed drama with an:

'improbable central role played by a severed head in a container. I've thought about it often, wondered why it's never been repeated, tried to figure out how I could search for something with so little information to go on; I'd even begun to wonder if I had imagined or dreamed it. So you can imagine how delighted I was to learn... not only that it had existed, but that I can see it again.'
 
The drama was Howard Brenton's 1986 TV series Deadhead, now released on DVD after 27 years. We don't yet know whether Katy still finds the series so compelling that she would nominate it, if asked, for Cultural Exchange.
 
We do want your suggestions. We have space at the end of the series for some additional choices, so do make your case in the space below. What would you choose?

Explore the Cultural Exchange website, which features interviews, galleries, clips and a free download of the series. 

BBC Arts and Culture

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Icelandic Sagas

Hello

It seems that although the original male population of Iceland was pretty much Norse and mostly Norwegian, a lot of the women were Celtic. They came over, or were brought over, from the Western Isles and particularly from Ireland. This led one of the contributors to say that perhaps the saga tradition and the poetry tradition came from that Irish connection, with its great history of poets at court and poets being such famous figures there. This Irish connection was not particularly well-received by the other two contributors. I'm not naming names for obvious reasons.

I was very diffident about making the connection between the West Cumbrian dialect and Icelandic and mightily relieved that I was more or less ushered through on that one. Sometimes I think that I'm remembering a contemporary folk tale, but not so. It did happen. Cumbrians and Icelanders, after a fortnight or so, can talk each other's language – if the Cumbrian talks the Norse dialect, that is.

So yesterday the State Opening of Parliament, which for various reasons I did not attend, but happened to find myself down beside The Mall as the procession was going back to the palace. A thin crowd along The Mall and not a huge number in front of the palace itself. Possibly the British public is 'royalled out' after the fantastic crowds that have turned up to greet the Queen and her royal party whenever there's been a royal party. But still, it was lovely to see all those black horses and all those breastplated men with shiny helmets and red plumes or white plumes, one white-gloved hand holding the reins, the other holding a sword upright, in perfect order, trotting gently down The Mall, with coaches carrying the Queen and her relations and, I presume, top members of state to the palace for, I hope, a bit of a beano, or at least a lunch.

I wandered into Green Park as I had half an hour to kill after a quick haircut, and as I sat there the horses came up Constitution Hill, all of them walking.  Their hooves on the tarmac sounded like rain on a corrugated roof and the slow procession of this phalanx along the side of the park was somehow moving, not only as a representation of what had been but as the confirmation of what continues. Or maybe it's just remembering toy soldiers and being unable to eradicate the boy.

For your information, I have just stood up as the Speaker of the House of Lords has walked past and you are supposed to stand up, but the gentleman opposite me at this table says he didn't even see her, so there you are! Or the Lord opposite me at the table said that!

I was walking back to Hampstead through Regent's Park the other day and passed a royal parade of cherry trees in full blossom. A bit like guardsmen, all lined up, present and correct and at attention. A gentle mile and a half up the hill on Hampstead Heath there's scarcely any blossom out at all. But there are people out in London. It is massively peopled by students who flow along the pavements six or seven deep. Oh dear. Am I going to say again: what happened to the crocodile?

On the train to Lincoln for the start of what could laughingly be called a tour of the various literary festivals, from now – at a steady rate – until November. That is to say, not all of them, not by a long chalk, but many in places I want to go to again. The two advantages of going to a literary festival are that you meet readers and you see places you might not otherwise see, or see again places you want to see. I want to see Lincoln Cathedral again for many reasons, not least because Paul Morel took his mother to visit it in Sons and Lovers and there's something that closes a circle about that today.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

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  David Pownall and Mike Greenwood

"Turn right into the village street, there's a big tree by the cottage. If you get to the castle, you've gone too far"

My journey to interview the writer David Pownall took me to a village perched high above the Wye Valley with its ancient castle of King John. His house betrays something of the journey he's made here from his roots on Merseyside: wooden sculptures from his time working in Africa; some of his many awards for stage and radio plays hanging next to photographs of the Severn Estuary by his wife, Alex. In the stone-flagged kitchen, the sound of a baroque choir betrays his passion for music and his love of sound.

Pownall is one of the most diverse and prolific writers working today, producing a stream of novels, short stories, stage plays and over 60 radio plays – a medium he has made his own. Many plays are characterised by a fascination with creativity – particularly the lives of composers (he's written two plays about Elgar), an intense preoccupation with History, a tough sense of humour and memorable characters. Now to mark his 75th birthday, Radio 4 Extra is re-broadcasting a selection of his plays specially written for radio.

We talk about family life on wartime Merseyside – his hard-drinking grandfather, the death in action of his father in North Africa, the impact of power and politics on the lives of ordinary people. Much of this appears in plays like Under the Table. So too, does his early love of radio: family listening to Tommy Handley was the inspiration for the surreal comedy Blitzma where Goebbels tries to produce a Nazi version of the popular BBC show ITMA.

He reminisces about his time working in personnel management in the copper mines of pre-independent Zambia – a great laboratory for observing the quirks of human behaviour and his first chance to write plays. Forty five years later, Africa features again in one of his radio plays – Nyama – a comic tale of a whale preserved in formaldehyde exhibited round the continent.

Returning to England he became immersed in theatre – first with the Century mobile theatre, then with the newly established Duke's Playhouse in Lancaster where he worked with actors like Harriet Walter, and the company he co-founded to produce his own work, Paines Plough (a title derived from the beer at a local pub).

His passion for history seeps into his work and our conversation: Pownall is amused that an early play about the uses and abuses of history, Richard III Part 2, has been given renewed relevance by the rediscovery of the King's corpse in a car park in Leicester. Flos, an epic story of a medieval stonemason and Hard Frosts in Florence, a powerful monologue about Michelangelo starring Paul Scofield, both feature in 4 Extra's season of plays.

David Pownall with the Director, Martin Jenkins, and the late Paul Scofield.

Above all what emerges is his inventive and mischievous exploration of sound theatre on radio, exemplified by a play like I want to go home. Taken to its Anglo Saxon roots, the phrase becomes a family of individuals – Ich, Willa and  their children Hame and Gang – suffering trials and tribulations as language and history evolve bloodily together.

Less of a retrospective, more of a report on progress, the season celebrates the work of a man who continues to pour his passion for words and sounds into new work.

Further details of plays featured as part of the David Pownall Season can be found here and also via the Radio 4 Extra Schedule.

David Pownall

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Gnosticism

Hello

No sooner had the mics closed down than "what about the Cathars?" said Caroline Humfress. "And what about the Bogomils?" said Martin Palmer. "It's very rarely that anybody gets a chance to talk about the Bogomils. They were Gnostics too." "And what about Philip Pullman?" said Alastair Logan. "His Dark Materials has many Gnostic strands to it." "And what about The Matrix?" said Martin Palmer ...and what about, of course, a series of programmes on every subject we do? I'm all for it.

It appears that in China the Gnostic tradition allows women to be treated as the equals of men. Caroline also pointed out that in the Gnostic Gospels uncovered in 1945 was one book called The Thunder, Perfect Mind, which she describes as being completely beautiful.

Out into the streets this last week. Passed a children's playground, primary school, rainbow-coloured. All the children rushing around playing tig. High-pitched screams of joy. England's future.

Along the South Bank on Saturday. Such a mass walking in organised slowness. Reminded me of the crowds at wakes weeks in Blackpool in the 1950s. The same flow, the same ice-creams, the same dazed cheerfulness. And there was the Thames, flowing softly as ever, and the Wobbly Bridge that can take you over to St Paul's, and down from there into Fleet Street to seek out yet again the house of the incomparable Dr Johnson and just look at it and think what a mind once lived there.

Had deep dental work on Tuesday and thought I might not make it this morning. Not cosmetic. Essential, heavy lifting on the back beggars. Now face a regimen of pills: eight of these a day, three of those a day. Hate all pills. Try not to take a pill for anything. Pills tend to make me feel ill. Dilemma. And drink – when? How much? I don't do much but when it is forbidden fruit ...speaking of which, I was wandering round the area south of Regent's Park and looked down Weymouth Mews which I hadn't been down for years. Passed the Dover Castle pub with the, by now, usual collection of young people outside it, standing with their glasses of beer. I used to drink there when I was a trainee at the BBC in 1962-3. With the great old producers of the day: Laurence Gilliam, Louis MacNeice, René Cutforth. Heroic days. Tom Morris, the producer of In Our Time, drinks there now. Plus ça change.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

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Gillian Clarke

We took Bookclub to Swansea for this month’s programme, and met Gillian Clarke, the national poet of Wales.

We spoke about her collection Ice, but of course it was also a conversation about poetry in general – her attraction to metaphor, to the music of words, to the Welsh bardic tradition. That came to her rather late in life, because when she was a child her mother didn’t want her to speak Welsh. She admitted that, having discovered and learned the language as a grown-up; it came to have a special power for her – the oldest tongue in these islands and one with a particular musicality.

Memory for Gillian is important. When talking about the poems in this collection which play with the idea of winter and the dark, cold season, she was back in an instant to her own childhood and a polar bear rug that appeared on the floor one day, and became her friend. Did she play with it, I asked. “I fed it!” she said.

We were in the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea, a natural place for a Bookclub, and of course readers wanted to discuss their favourite poems in Ice and reveal what it was about poetry that attracted and moved them. Gillian joined in, recalling early inspirations and particularly one teacher, a Miss Tierney from Dublin, whom she thanks for opening the door for her. It was from her that she learned the love of words. We all have one teacher who did that, I like to think, and in the course of our conversation we all found ourselves recalling childhood verses and favourite poets who managed to take us out of the here and now and into another world.

As we spoke, and listened to Gillian’s mellifluous readings, I reflected on the happy state of poetry. No doubt there are too many writers who find that if they manage to sell a handful of poems they should consider themselves lucky, and there are many publishers who still won’t give poetry the time of day, but I’d assert that there is more poetry being heard in schools these days than was the case half a century ago. Gillian has been the Welsh national poet for a number of years and is an important figure in the community; in Scotland Edwin Morgan for many years and now Liz Lochhead have had the same role (the “Makar” for Scotland) and I’d suggest that Andrew Motion and his successor Carol Ann Duffy have done a huge amount for the business of poetry: we all know their voices.

Personally speaking, I was lucky enough when I was a student to catch the tail-end of the Scottish renaissance, kicked off in the 30s by the cantankerous, infuriating figure of Hugh MacDiarmid, and in the early 70s Norman MacCaig, Iain Crichton Smith, George Mackay Brown and others were still carrying the torch, in much the way that Seamus Heaney does today. Listening to them read was an education, and often a riot. It was invigorating in Swansea to be in the company of a poet who has such a natural commitment to her work as Gillian and emits such a glow when she talks about where her poetry comes from, how the ideas form. The secret, incidentally, is that she is always listening.

I hope you enjoy listening to her.

Our next programme, on the first Sunday of June, is with a poetic writer of prose – Jim Crace, who’ll be talking about his book Quarantine, a truly remarkable novel.

Happy reading

Jim

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  Machynlleth's Hollywood-style sign

A year ago Radio 4 Extra's Comedy Club went to the Machynlleth Comedy Festival, a small festival with a stellar line up on the outskirts of Snowdonia National Park. We were promised something out of the ordinary and we weren't disappointed. A weekend of experimental and intimate comedy performed in spaces where you'd least expect it.

Machynlleth

Arthur Smith was smitten. We all were. The locals welcomed us with open arms, the scenery was lush and there was a sense of fun and mischief that is perhaps lacking across the increasingly corporate comedy festivals of other towns and cities.

Arthur Smith

The Comedy Club at the West Coast tent

Technically it was challenging; Driving down the A458 has a touch of the WRC about it and the Wi-Fi in our hotel was intermittent at best, meaning we were delivering our interviews dangerously close to the transmission time (in 4 Extra terms at least...). But as soon as we left we knew we wanted to go back this year.

Unfortunately, since last year's festival Machynlleth has been in the news for different reasons and when it came to light that the court case would be starting this week, we questioned if it would be appropriate for us to cover a Comedy festival in Machynlleth at this time. However, Henry Widdicombe, the organiser of the festival, has worked closely with representatives from the community over the last 6 months...

"We wanted to ensure that the town wanted the comedy festival to take place in the town this year, and the continued support we've felt locally for the event has been overwhelming. The town of Machynlleth is such a special place and we feel extremely proud to be part of that wonderful community and that they've taken the festival to their hearts. The town is proud to host the comedy festival, and that is something that is extremely important to us."

We also discussed the issue with our colleagues at Radio Wales who we worked with last year and we both came to the same conclusion; If the town want the festival to happen, we want to be there to support it.

The question then became 'how are we going to top last year's life drawing class and boat trip?'

Life Drawing Class:

Boat Trip:

We've been promised some intimate comedy gigs in sheds, an event in a sweet shop and a trip on a steam train. We'll also be recording a special Comedy Club for Saturday night, presented by Isy Suttie, in front of an audience at Machynlleth Bowling Club. The same venue will also play host to a stand-up show featuring Pappy's and Lloyd Langford amongst others. There'll be two versions of the programme, one on Radio Wales at 9.30pm on Saturday and one on 4 Extra on Monday just after 11pm.

I hope that over the course of the weekend we'll be able to convey the warmth of the people in the town and the infectious sense of fun that the festival delivers. Just as long as the hotel Wi-Fi holds up...

Love, War and Trains The tale that I tell in Love, War and Trains has been a family story of ours for as long as I can remember; in fact we told it to each other across kitchen tables and in back rooms with murmuring TVs in the background for so long that in the end it stopped being remarkable, it became ordinary, like the fact that I had four uncles called Uncle Blood, Uncle Terror, Uncle Passion and Uncle Thunder wasn’t too unusual. I’ll come back to the uncles later, perhaps.

The facts are these: my dad was from a place called Carnwath in Lanarkshire and my mother was from Great Houghton near Barnsley. My dad joined the Royal Navy in 1937 and my mother was called up to the WAAFs at the start of the war and they wrote to each other as pen pals in a scheme organised for the services at the time. They wrote for a while as my dad sailed the world and my mother worked in signals at RAF Blackbrooke near Wigan. They met a few times and the letters got more and more passionate. Eventually they got married on a 48-hour pass: my dad got a 48-hour pass, anyway, and sent a telegram to my mother saying GET LEAVE NOW. She couldn’t get leave but he chugged up to Peebles, where the wedding was, on a slow train, not knowing this. She eventually decided to go AWOL and climbed the fence and got on a train and just got to her wedding in time. They had one night together in the Tontine Hotel on the High Street in Peebles, my dad went back to the war, my mother went back to base and got arrested and chucked in the glasshouse for two weeks. Arrested for love: the height of romance.

When I told Gary Brown this story he said I should write it as a play and not only that, I should write it as a rhyming play. I wasn’t sure how that would work but I had a go; he also said that I should be in it as a narrator, with a different kind of rhyme-scheme. So I narrated in rhyming couplets, my dad spoke in quatrains, and my mother spoke in a special way that I invented for her, a six-line stanza that rhymed abc/abc, reflecting the more reflective (!) way she spoke.

After lots of drafts during which Gary and I wrestled with the dilemma that we all knew the ending (or I wouldn’t be here) and we tried to get some jeopardy in and I tried all kinds of new rhymes I’d never thought of before, we recorded the play at Media City in March. Billy Boy and Verity May Henry were fantastic as my parents, and I did a passable job of being me, although I don’t normally talk in rhyme that much.

And the Uncles? One was passionate, one was loud, one liked a scrap and one was scary. That was Terror. His real name was Norman. Of course.

Listen to Afternoon Drama: Love, War and Trains

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Montaigne

Hello

It was generally agreed after the programme that the English particularly had taken much more keenly to the works of Montaigne than the French. This, it was explained, was because the French, resting their last few hundred years of civilisation on Reason, did not like him because he was too ill-organised for them. The English liked him especially because he was ill-organised.

I'm glad the idea of the two towers in the chateau was brought in. It's always seemed to me that this would be the perfect arrangement: a tower at one end of the house and a tower at the other end of the house and a vast middle space, though not necessarily occupied by either a mother or a mother-in-law. On the other hand, who could get a house like that?

It's been a very busy week indeed. Went to see A Doll's House at the Young Vic last week. I have never, ever, seen a better production of an Ibsen play. The Young Vic is in such furiously good form. It was such a wonderful production; so brilliant in its conception. Everything from the way the stage was managed to the way the choreography was arranged and particularly the way that the text was, as it were, updated, without, in my view, taking away one iota from the force and poetry of Ibsen. The performances were all extraordinary and in one case beyond praise. What a roll it's on at the moment.

Wandering around London a lot. Over the wobbly bridge in the sun, walking towards St Paul's across the river, feeling as if you're walking across the Sea of Galilee. The South Bank Show now going out on television every week and fussing over the programmes every day – are they getting enough attention, the right sort of attention, what's the reaction ...David Hare exceptionally articulate, Tim Minchin remarkably witty and eclectic ...the interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury in the House of Lords on Monday in front of about 150 of their lordships. We did it in the Queen's Robing Room. An intriguing mixture of candour and total conviction. His modesty is both disarming and deeply clever. His candour is charming and very engaging. The certainty of his beliefs and his sense of mission are to be deeply admired.

Very difficult to keep out of the parks in these few days of real spring weather. Is it the older you get that the more wonderful the blossom seems to be? St James's Park is a-blossom. The geese look more sparkly. The French children (it is always French children) are more animated and exuberant. It is almost impossible to walk on the pavement in the area of Westminster because they are so crowded, so a lot of us are taking to walking on the road. Cars will soon be banned.

To the Royal Society on Thursday evening to talk about – among other things – William and Lawrence Bragg and the work that they did in various universities: Adelaide, Leeds, Manchester and Cambridge, to push forward some of the most important discoveries in twentieth century science. Lawrence Bragg also went to the Front in the First World War, spent four years there and invented a system of detecting the German big guns, which, historians now think, was one of the factors which allowed the Allies to move forward as effectively and as early as they did.

And now to Cambridge with Tom Morris who is producing a programme on the Braggs, to that great crucible of scientific thought over the centuries and to the Cavendish itself, once attended by William and then his son, Lawrence Bragg – both of whom did work a hundred years ago which led to their being awarded a Nobel Prize together, the only father and son to have that distinction.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg (some sort of – very distant – relation)

PS: In London, I'm afraid, spring is signalled not so much by blossom as by crowds. It is a time when literally hundreds of young people stand on narrow pavements outside pubs, clutching glasses and jostling against each other as tightly as if they were in an old scratching shed at a Third Division football ground in the 1940s. Is there anywhere in the world where the youth of the country who can afford a drink after work stand in such uncomfortable places, in such numbers, to enjoy themselves on a spring evening?

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Gwyneth Williams

The Controllership of Radio 4 is undoubtedly one of the best jobs in broadcasting. After all who else could say of their job that “What I have to do is to put on the air, in the most enjoyable and brilliant way possible, the best that has been thought and said in the world”.

Those were the words of the present incumbent, Gwyneth Williams, who has been in the job for just over two and a half years. The job is well paid as well. Ms Williams’ total annual remuneration (as of June 2012) is £189,600. Of course if she did a comparable job in television she would earn more.

Broadcasting House

On the other, hand hers is a most demanding audience, which is not reluctant to remind Controllers that they are temporary custodians of Radio 4, and criticise the output of a network its members care for passionately.

The audiences remain high, there is no serious competitor in sight, and it must be tempting for Controllers to make a minimum of changes. After all, no BBC Director General wants demonstrations outside Broadcasting House from ever so polite but lethally determined members of the Radio 4 audience. Yet the network needs to evolve, not least because it needs to attract new, younger audiences.

Some Controllers have settled for a quiet life, perhaps because of what happened to their predecessors.

Michael Green, who held the job for ten years in the 80s and 90s summoned the courage to move Woman’s Hour from the afternoon to the morning, against the formidable opposition of the programme team and much of the audience. He was proved right, listener numbers increased, but the effort was exhausting.

His successor, James Boyle, nicknamed Mac Birt, made the largest number of schedule changes, and in a sort of “Big Bang”. He soon returned to Scotland somewhat bruised, though, in retrospect, his successors like Helen Boaden, now Director of Radio, acknowledge that he got a great deal right and made their jobs easier.

Gwyneth Williams seems to be an unlikely radical, always praising her existing programmes and warmly encouraging those who work for her, but she knows how to wield the knife. Arguably she has changed more than most, and done so while having to cut costs.

She extended the World at One to 45 minutes, in the process cancelling series like “The Choice”.

She also extended Saturday Live by half an hour, eliminating Excess Baggage.

Perhaps most obviously she has increased significantly the coverage of science and foreign affairs, and has now turned her attention to the arts.

Earlier this week she came into the Feedback studio to answer questions and criticism from some of her listeners, who talked directly to her about the coverage of Mrs Thatcher’s death and funeral service and many other issues.

Here is our discussion

Feedback is now off the air until June but please keep phoning, writing, emailing and tweeting. We read everything, and our agenda is whatever you want it to be.

May the sun shine upon you and your ears be filled with the joyous sounds of spring! Alternatively, do keep listening to the radio.

Roger Bolton

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Westray - Orkney. Photo by Kirsteen Cameron.

“It is the word, blossoming as legend, poem, story, secret, that holds a community together and gives a meaning to its life.” George Mackay Brown, An Orkney Tapestry, 1969

The earliest settlers here in the islands left a myriad of prehistoric monuments scattered all over, telling us that Orkney lay at the heart of the neolithic world. During Norse rule there were Viking earls, one of whom, Rognvald, built a great red cathedral in Kirkwall to honour his uncle St Magnus.

Hundreds of Orkneymen travelled to the North West of Canada in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to sign up with the Hudson’s Bay Company. One, John Rae, became a brilliant Arctic explorer, discovering the last part of the North West passage. And in two World Wars, Scapa Flow was vital in the defence of the British Isles.

All this because, as George Mackay Brown wrote, ‘Orkney lies athwart a great sea road,’ and this position has determined its story throughout the ages. It was a rich inheritance for a man who hated travelling himself, who preferred to stay in his rocking chair and set forth only on mind voyages.

A familiar figure round his native Stromness, the Hamnavoe of his stories, George would walk dreamily along the street that ‘uncoiled like a rope’ and absorb the old secrets and legends. Every morning after breakfast he would clear away crumbs, move the marmalade aside and settle down at his table with pad and biro to write. It was this discipline that saved his life, for in his youth, devastated by the news that he had TB, he sought solace in drink. No-one expected much of him then.

But he turned his life around and became known and loved the world over for his poetry and novels as well as short stories. And if he didn’t travel himself, his words brought many travellers to his door. Among them was the distinguished composer, Peter Maxwell Davis, who with others inaugurated the St Magnus Festival held every year at midsummer in Orkney.

Many years ago, home from university for Christmas, I caught a bus to Maeshowe, the 5000 year old burial chamber in the heart of neolithic Orkney. You have to crouch low to get inside. As I straightened up and grew accustomed to the dimness, I realised there were other folk there. One was George Mackay Brown. He wrote:

“I suppose it only happens once in a decade — a clear south-west horizon on the afternoon of the winter solstice ... The sun made a cloudless descent. The interior of the chamber was full of crepuscular whispering figures. Then the sunset flowered on the stone — the last beam of light of the shortest day — and it glowed briefly on a wall that at every other time of the year is dark.”

Somehow the man that walked among us wove the story of Orkney for us all and cast it abroad into the world.

Listen to George Mackay Brown Stories 

Alison Miller: Reader in Residence at Orkney Library and Archive 

The Natural History Unit Radio Office is always alive with a strange twittering; a buzz about birds, especially at this time of year when spring finally heaves itself out from under the blanket of winter and our feathered friends begin to sing to mark their territories and attract a mate. It starts with our resident species, birds like the Great Tit bellowing out “teacher, ,teacher, teacher,… “  the Blackbird (arguably the best songster in town) and the robin. Then we wait with eager anticipation (especially this year) for the migrant birds like the Chiffchaff, Willow Warbler and Blackcap and before you know it, there’s a babble of song it seems from every wood, hedge, tree and roof top aerial and the air is filled with sound.

Even though many of us wouldn’t describe ourselves as keen birdwatchers, twitchers or ornithologists, who doesn’t enjoy hearing birds in their garden? But don’t you often wish you knew who was singing? For centuries birds have been inspiring writers and musicians from Beethoven to Britten, Vivaldi to Vaughan Williams. After all, birds are composers; they were making music long before us.

So given that there are well over 500 species listed as British birds, our Natural History Radio team struck on the idea of a series which featured a different call or song on every day of the week, and Radio 4’s ‘Tweet of the Day’ was born.

Brett Westwood, producer, presenter and naturalist extraordinaire set about the task of allocating our British birds, first to months in which we’re most likely hear them and then each bird to a day. Meanwhile I hauled bag after bag of recordings from the Natural History Unit sound library up several flights of stairs to my ‘eyrie’ office and listened to over 1000 recordings to see which we might use. Amongst them were wonderful old recordings by one of the pioneers of wildlife recording, Ludwig Koch, but there were also gaps … lots and lots of gaps! So we recruited a team of superb wildlife sound recordists; Gary Moore, Geoff Sample and Chris Watson and set them the task of capturing sounds for the series, (as well as raiding their own archives!).

Then Brett started writing the scripts. We wanted the programmes to be short – like a snatch of song  - a tweet – just 90 seconds; opening with the song or call followed by a story about the bird. And there’s no shortage of stories; everything from fascinating ornithological facts to fanciful folklore, and from astounding feats of endurance to tales of theft and fraud.

Sir David Attenborough agreed to narrate the first month and everyone swung into action; microphones to the ready, the recordings began. We’re making this series as I write; the whole team is involved with the programmes and website, blogging and tweeting. So far from a mild twittering in the office, there’s a great orchestra of sound; as we capture the calls and songs of more than 260 British birds!

Tweet of the Day - full details

Tweet of the Day - presenters and recordists

BBC Nature

All imagery has been provided by the RSPB

The final episodes of the series describe humans as being overwhelmed by noise in modern life, painting a picture of a world in which there’s no getting away from noise and where there is limited time and space to think.

Imagine, for example, what World War I might have sounded like with the constant battery of gunfire and loud explosions. We’ve probably all seen movies and read books and poems set at the time depicting the horror, so often intensified by the overwhelming noise of it all. 

In Shell Shock, Prof David Hendy takes us on a journey into the noise of war and the psychological damage it did to so many of the soldiers involved, through the work of army medics such as Charles Samuel Myers and W. H. R. Rivers.

Interestingly, these are the same two gentlemen who accompanied Alfred Cort Haddon on the first British anthropological expedition to the Torres Strait in 1898, resulting in many ground-breaking sound recordings which offer a hint of the sound of life of Torres Strait aboriginal communities.

The argument goes that it was during this time of intensity that modern humans developed sensitivity to noise. It was also during this time that the radio as a source of sound became woven into daily life delivering news, information and, perhaps most importantly, entertainment.

Epsiode 27: Radio Everywhere 

Thus, with the rise of radio, records, CDs, ipods, TVs, muzak, motorized cars, amplification and a loud array of industrialized noises, sounds became a permanent complement to our lives.

Episode 28: Music While You Shop, Music While You Work 

Add to this the ubiquity of personal computers and mobile devices by which we access information 24/7 and we have an overload. This is described by Prof Hendy as a tipping point – when we started talking of noise as pollution and we began to run for cover with quiet zones on trains and double glazing in our windows. 

Episode 29: An Ever Noisier World 
Episode 30: The Search for Silence 

We have also begun to realise that certain sounds are being drowned out or, indeed, are becoming extinct: certain animal sounds, certain acoustic musics, certain indigenous sounds.
 
What this series shows us most of all is that noise is all around us and it’s changing all the time. It’s what we do to manage that sound and to preserve the noise we risk losing which will dictate how the sounds of our age are remembered.

Download Noise: A Human History

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