
Breakfast
Felicity Kendal and Gerard Murphy read poetry and prose around the theme of breakfast from Isabella Beeton to Frank O'Hara, with music from Handel, Zappa and Dusty Springfield.
"Dinner parties are mere formalities; but you invite a man to breakfast because you want to see him." Thomas Babington Macauley
Of all the meals we eat Breakfast is the most loaded with possibility - to share a breakfast is to share intimacy, or to sit stubbornly in stony cold silence. It is a defining moment in the day, one of ritual and habit, full of joyous promise, or melancholic wonder. It is a meal to obsess over, to fuss over its constitution, or to ignore and sit in quiet contemplation.
Felicity Kendal and Gerard Murphy read poetry and prose around the theme of Breakfast ranging from the Victoriana of Mrs Isabella Beeton's missives to servants, to the narcotic fuelled orgies of Hunter S Thompson, the morning misery of Frank O'Hara, to the boiled egg obsessiveness of James Bond. Breakfast music is provided by G.F.Handel, Frank Zappa, Gustav Mahler, and Dusty Springfield amongst others.
First broadcast in October 2011.
Last on
Music Played
Timings (where shown) are from the start of the programme in hours and minutes
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Helen Ivory
Breakfast Machine, reader Felicity Kendal
Anthony Trollope
The Warden (extract), reader Gerard Murphy
Dorothea Grossman
I allow myself, reader Felicity Kendal
Charles Dickens
Bleak House, reader Gerard Murphy
Gwendoline McEwen
The Last Breakfast, reader Felicity Kendal
Walt Whitman
For Queen Victoria's Birthday, reader Felicity Kendal
Hunter S Thompson
The Great Shark Hunt (Strange Tales from a Strange Time) [extract], reader Gerard Murphy
Mary Lamb
Breakfast, reader Gerard Murphy
Francis Darwin Cornford
A Montreux Hotel, reader Felicity Kendal
Jack Underwood
I promise when I lift your egg, reader Gerard Murphy
Sappho
It was you Athis who said, reader Felicity Kendal
Ian Fleming
From Russia with Love [extract], reader Felicity Kendal
Heather Phillipson
Dependency on oats, reader Felicity Kendal
Stoddard King
Breakfast Song in Time of Diet, reader Gerard Murphy
Harry Graham
Breakfast, reader Gerard Murphy
Isabella Beaton
The book of Household Management (1861), reader Felicity Kendal
TS Eliot
Morning at the Window, reader Gerard Murphy
William Wilfred Gibson
Breakfast, reader Gerard Murphy
Frank O’Hara
Melancholy Breakfast, reader Gerard Murphy
Jacques Prevert
Breakfast, reader Felicity Kendal
Breakfast in Bed
Hugo Williams, reader Gerard Murphy
Craig Arnold
Meditation on a Grapefruit, reader Gerard Murphy
Broadcasts
- Sun 2 Oct 2011 18:30
- Sun 30 Jun 2013 18:30