On 8th December 1980 the former Beatle John Lennon was shot dead outside his apartment building in New York. For many of his generation it was as big a shock as the assassination of John Kennedy nearly two decades previously. As with the Kennedy killing, many people, especially those now over forty, can remember exactly what they were doing when they heard Lennon had been murdered.

This year during the week of the 8th December, Radio 4 remembers that day, hears how people felt about the news and looks at Lennon's legacy. On the day itself there will be a series of short items consisting of archive material, music and memories from listeners and Lennon fans both well-known and not so well-known. If you would like to contribute your memories and thoughts feel free to click on the link below and email us your story. Here are some recollections from some regular Radio 4 presenters who remember that day twenty five years ago only too well:

Send your John Lennon memories to: johnlennon@bbc.co.uk.

In 1980 I was living on the upper West Side of Manhattan and about 7.30 on the night of December 8th my husband Peter Koenig and I walked from our apartment to the Dakota building for dinner with my friend Pauline Pinto. As we checked in with the doormen I wondered, as I always did when visiting Pauline, if I'd see John Lennon. I'm sure my carefully casual insouciance never fooled the doormen - they must have known how much I, like most visitors, desperately wanted to run into him. I'd managed not to stare at Lauren Bacall when we passed through the courtyard gates together, but for someone of my generation she wasn't the prize.

Pauline was giving the dinner for our friend Robin Wilkerson, visiting from Boston. We had a great meal prepared by Pauline's Columbian cook Maria - a real treat for two badly paid journalists just beginning to find our feet in the New York media world. We left the apartment about 10.45 and walked home along Broadway. We'd only just got into our apartment when the phone rang. It was Robin. She said that Lennon was dead, that he'd been shot as he returned to the Dakota just after we'd left. She and Pauline had been sitting in the dining room overlooking the courtyard and had heard shots and screams. There was panic she said, police everywhere. Who'd done it she didn't know.

It seemed impossible, totally unreal, mad, some sort of awful peculiarly American insanity. It was the same feeling I'd had the night we heard John Kennedy had been shot, and when Bobby Kennedy was shot, and when Martin Luther King was shot. But because John Lennon was one of ours it seemed even further beyond the bounds of sanity that he could have met the same fate. That voice, that charm, that wry Scouse take on the world, gone. It took weeks for the reality to sink in.

I was working in the York University sociology department and everyone there felt so bad about John Lennon's death that the very next night we hired Jack and Jill's, the local discotheque, and held the party to end all parties.

These seriously indistinct pictures were taken on that night. I'm the one in the green corduroy suit and red carnation. In the first shot I appear to be eating a cigarette butt whereas in the second I'm merely a passive spectator as the crowd of lecturers and students raise their fists in the air for another chorus of what must surely have been 'Power to the People'.

We were possibly more affected than some communities by John's sudden death because for several years we'd used members of the Beatles family as a novel way of injecting a little extra romance into our colleagues' and friends' biographies. So, as I recall, my friend Andy Tudor (beard, brown corduroy jacket, jeans and medallion) was George Harrison while Doctor Ron Gutteridge (not pictured) was Ringo and Professor Gerald Bute (also not pictured) was Paul.

I'd love to be able to say unequivocally that I was always John but I'm afraid that claims to this identity were also made from time to time by Tony Sparrow (not invited, let alone pictured). Wives and partners were also allocated Beatles identities We had a Cynthia Lennon and a Yoko Ono and even a Jane Asher (the blond head in the foreground of my cigarette butt picture). But the saddest role was played by Geoff Duckworth, a slightly anarchic lecturer who joined the department for one term but was then denied tenure by the university. He was, of course, forever Stuart Sutcliffe.

These do seem remarkably jolly pictures for such a solemn event. I suppose we must have made a collective decision that John would have wished it that way. Either that or somebody had spiked the Tetley's bitter.

I was working at LBC in Gough Square in London which at the time was a fairly rowdy place to work. I was a phone operator on the evening phone-in programme. Earlier in the day, in the control room, somebody had put up a poster of John Lennon, at the piano, probably from the Imagine album, and someone from the newsroom had drawn targets around his head. It was very dark newsroom humour. There was woman editor who was quite a rock chick and who'd been rumoured to have had a fling with David Bowie. She came in to edit the bulletins, saw the poster and ran out in tears during the news.

I was sad actually. Sad and shocked. Lennon had always been my favourite Beatle even though I wasn't too keen on Yoko Ono in that phase of his life. I didn't go into hysterics when I saw the poster but was certainly sad. There was definitely a hush in the newsroom before the dark humour kicked in.

I remember the day well as I was presenting the morning show at Radio London at the time, and so had to read the first news reports out as they began to come in - and then do interviews about the story whilst being very affected by it myself as a teenager of the sixties and an absolute Beatles fanatic.

My teenage years in fact coincided exactly with the rise of the Fab Four and their changing the world. So I collected all their LPs and bunked off school with my pals the day Sergeant Pepper came out - so we could go to Harry's house and listen to the latest master-work all day long.

With that kind of background, my response to Lennon's shooting was going to be sad. But even so, being a professional journalist - it was very rare that reading a news story over the air ever affected me personally. That changed with John's death. I could hardly believe it even as I was saying the words into the microphone - and I had to keep almost shaking myself into keeping going as I was so stunned. And when the listeners started to get in touch I knew that that reaction was a common one.

A slight memory in the scheme of things perhaps - but a vivid one for me!

Most of these remember-where-you-were things I'm no use for because I've a ropey long term memory. But Lennon: absolutely clear - it was during the one term I spent in a hall of residence during my time at Edinburgh Uni. Lots of late nights. No early mornings. Except December 9th: suddenly wide awake around 5 or 6am and for some reason immediately put on radio - and there was the news. I'll skip the bit about how it made me feel because millions of us all had different permutations of the same sense of something being torn away that had always been part of the fabric of our lives, but what I do recall - and I can still feel some of the anger after all these years - is a scrawled banner that appeared next day hanging from a top floor window in one of the other student blocks. Dallas was the big TV show at the time, it was just after the cliff hanger about who had tried to kill off the main character, so the banner read: "Who shot J.L.?" I'd like to say I scaled the building and tore it down, but I just felt a little more sickened. My only other recollection is telling myself to not to take note of the name of Lennon's killer because doing so would give him an immortality he did not deserve.

I had not long split up with my first wife. My mother was ill. She died a couple of months later. A friend rang and told me to brace myself for some bad news. Expecting to hear something awful about either my wife or my mother, I sat down and braced myself. 'Lennon's dead.' 'Thank God for that,' I said.

Friends continued to call on and off for the next week or so. I had been the world's greatest Beatles fan, so they assumed I would be very upset. I wasn't, not just because of the perspective provided by my personal life but because, thanks to a series of bad albums, my enthusiasm for Lennon had worn off a bit since the break up of the Beatles. Though once undoubtedly a singer and songwriter of superhuman powers, he'd fallen victim to drugs, Yoko and increasingly misguided haircuts.

Like many people, I regarded him as a close friend who'd been at my side throughout adolescence helping me enjoy the good times and consoling me in the bad. But I was never quite such a fan as to confuse that kind of celebrity friendship with the real thing and thus found the scenes of public grief - the scenario repeated on a much grander scale when Princess Diana died - slightly shocking.

At a party a couple of days later somebody put on 'Imagine'. A silence fell. I don't think anybody actually held aloft a cigarette lighter or snivelled, but there was a frisson which I found deeply embarrassing. I may have said something reproachfully tasteless and possibly obscene, but justified myself with the knowledge that John would have done exactly the same thing.

I never liked 'Imagine'. 'No Reply', that's what I call a Lennon song. Or 'Polythene Pam'.

When I heard about it, it was 1980 and I was thirty. I'd just moved in with my now partner of twenty five years (obviously) and we heard it on the news while we were cooking supper. I remember us just going absolutely silent and looking at each other as if we couldn't believe it. And I remember having exactly the same feeling about Kennedy - this can't be true! And we went straight away - we'd bought the \Double Fantasy album which I think came out about a month before he died. And we played it through and there was that song Beautiful Boy about Sean and we'd read that Lennon had just started to appreciate being a father. And in the words of that song, I don't know if you remember it, he sings 'every day in every way it's getting better and better… beautiful boy…. darling Sean'….and there's one line it which is 'life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans' and I just sat and sobbed and I can still listen to that record and remember how I felt at the time. I was thinking this great hero's gone and he was just falling in love with his son. This is so terrible.

Generally speaking, the impact was huge. The first record I ever bought was 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand' when I was 13 or 14 I suppose. The Beatles were just it, they were the revolution, they were just everything. I have to say John was not the one I had on my bedroom wall - I was a Paul girl (you were either a Paul or a John girl) - but as I grew older I really began to appreciate what wonderful songwriter he was, and I followed his mad antics with Yoko like taking his clothes off and the stupid films. I just found him immensely interesting and amusing. Just part of my generation's cultural background, that's what the Beatles were. And he was gone just like that. I thought, why did you ever go to NY you silly man? You would not have got shot in Liverpool.

We and our friends rang each other after we heard the news saying, 'Have you heard? John Lennon's dead'. We were just beginning, I suppose, to be grown ups. We were thirty, turning that corner into proper adulthood, settling down and starting our families. His death was the sign that somehow our youth was gone.

I was working on the Today programme in the days before breakfast television when the Radio 4 Today programme was the thing that really told you what had happened in the rest of the world's time zones during the night. And the most extraordinary electric reaction of shock went through the office. We were very used to shocking stories on the programme; there were seizures and wars and all sorts of things going on. But somehow - I think because we were that generation in our twenties and early thirties, we were the Lennon generation, we'd grown up with the Beatles, we'd felt a bit offended when he moved to NY with Yoko Ono - there was a feeling that this was a personal shock to us, as if it were a relative. The whole office became really quite deranged. Everyone got on with their jobs of finding people to talk to, speaking to the New York police, everyone was scuffling around, we were getting our scripts ready for the programme and so on, but there was just a sense of people being more thrown with this one shocking thing than they normally would have been.

The particular memory I've got is of the song 'Imagine' which has the most ridiculous lyric and the most beautiful tune. All that 'imagine no possessions' coming from this millionaire living in his great big mansion. It's a title that's very attractive to people of that generation who are in fact quite rich and prosperous but would like to think that they are really hip and creative. There was one of our night editors who kept on playing the record of 'Imagine' down the phone to his wife having woken her up at home to tell her the news. Obviously it was their song from way back. And you'd just sit in the corner of the office and notice that every time he had a spare minute he'd play Imagine down the phone to his wife again. I have never been involved in a news story where people got into such an unaccountable state about it.

Nevertheless the shock was warranted because it was the sudden assassination of somebody you don't expect to be assassinated in a million years. It was like the killing of Jill Dando which hit a lot of people very hard because it just underlined the randomness of life. It's like that great line from Sir Thomas Browne: "It is in the power of everyman to kill us and we are beholden to everyone we meet who doth not kill us". It brings it home that anyone could be killed at any minute. It seemed such a lunatic thing. I think also everyone suddenly remembered how much pleasure those clever wry dry sour romantic Beatles lyrics and tunes had given us all. We all realised that it was the landscape of our youth being swept away by one loony with a gun. Mind you I'm not sure I would have woken up my husband to play 'Imagine' to him down the phone. Possibly 'Love Me Do'.