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Storming Laugharne Castle

2014-04-28T14:25:04+00:00

Laugharne Castle BBC Production Team

BBC Wales project manager Nick Andrews describes the daunting task of mounting a radio festival in a Welsh castle without touching any of the walls ...

From the 2-5 May we really wanted to commission ‘Laugharne Live’ - a BBC radio festival saluting the stunning works of poet Dylan Thomas. And we really, really wanted to host it in Laugharne castle, South Wales.

But getting into a castle can be tricky. Even for the BBC.

The archaeologists eyed me up and down suspiciously. Could a marquee with full broadcast capabilities really, truly, honestly be attached to the grounds of their beloved Laugharne Castle without any pegs at all? Promise? Breathing deeply I replied: ‘With water weighted rigs, my friends, anything is possible.’

And with that (and some paperwork), we’d semi-stormed the castle.

I say semi-stormed because as well as the grounds being considered an archeologically rich environment, the fabric of the building is too.

The first recce of the castle took place more than five months ago: the team has been meeting regularly ever since. The logistics have been mind-boggling. And we’ve been scheduling, re-scheduling and re-re-scheduling the weekend - a huge amount of work, but worth every complexity!

This week an army of engineers and technical wizards are set to complete the storming of the castle and build our broadcast village. Unfortunately, the portcullis was a little too low for our trucks to squeeze through, meaning that much of the kit will have to be carried in by hand.

And so, here we are, a few days out from ‘Laugharne Live’: access to Laugharne Castle secured. Tickets sold out (almost). And shows, so many, many shows stacked, racked and packed ready for action. Alongside a host of BBC Radio Networks, BBC Radio 3 will be there in force with Ian McMillan presenting flagship poetry show The Verb, and In Tune will be bringing its exciting mix of great music to the castle. Find out more about Radio 3’s Dylan Thomas Day.

It’s set to be a glorious celebration of a wonderful poet. And Laugharne - a setting described by Dylan as a ‘timeless, mild, beguiling island of a town’ - is a poignant backdrop for the event. Laugharne was hardly rest to Dylan Thomas. Nowhere really was, as the bills came in and his marriage disintegrated. But the atmosphere of the estuary which is the backdrop of the castle still carries the atmosphere which certainly inspired some at least of the great writing. This will infuse all of our broadcasting too.

Everything’s in place, so please come along and be part of the experience from our water weighted marquee, Laugharne Castle. Now, where are my pegs ...

Next Week's Guest on Essential Classics: Douglas Kennedy

2014-02-21T10:26:09+00:00

The first thing I noticed about my guest Douglas Kennedy was how energetic and fresh he seemed...could it be true that he had just flown in from America? Here is a person who really knows how to travel, I thought, and he clearly has it down to a fine art. Douglas told me he had slept soundly during his flight: that's the secret, and I admired him for managing to drop off in those slightly surreal circumstances (being surrounded by other people, all wrapped in light acrylic blankets, 35,000 feet up in the air, etc.). He tackled the interview with great relish - so enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the music, so happy to share his experiences of life. He seemed delighted that I'd enjoyed his novel, Five Days, about a brief and life-changing affair. Relationships seem to lie at the heart of his work, and he often writes from the woman's point of view - completely convincingly. We talked about that, and about his desire to create books that are "popular serious novels" or "serious popular novels" - both sides being equally important. And he was very candid about how he's dealt with various ups and downs in both life and work. I left the studio wondering if Douglas Kennedy's novels could ultimately take the place of self-help books...they're certainly not short of solace and sound advice for the troubled heart.

Douglas has commented on his Essential Classic interview with Sarah on his Facebook page. You can read his thoughts at:

https://www.facebook.com/bbcradio3#!/DouglasKennedyBooks

Toulouse Lautrec's Pumpkin Gratin - Yes, really!

2013-11-09T16:16:05+00:00

Michael Berkeley and Martin Gayford

Our guest on Private Passions this week is the art writer Martin Gayford, a man with a passion for painting and for jazz, and with an interest in exploring the connection between the two. His new book is about Michelangelo, and I set him the brief of discovering the musical worlds of some of the painters he’s written about: what was Michelangelo listening to, as he lay on the scaffolding painting the Sistine Ceiling?

The Last Crumbs in the Restaurant La Mie, 1891

As we talked about painting and music, I realised that Martin has another passion: cooking. He loves Elizabeth David, but he’s also been experimenting with recipes from one of the artists he admires: Toulouse Lautrec. He was apparently famous for his cuisine and one of his friends wrote down his dishes – this is one of them. And you can understand why a painter would love the luscious orange of Pumpkin Gratin.

It’s the perfect recipe now, with all those pumpkins still on sale after Hallowe’en, so I plan to make it as I listen again to Martin on this week’s programme. For me, Private Passions is a great accompaniment to Sunday lunchtime in the kitchen: fascinating and surprising people sharing their greatest musical pleasures.

Toulouse Lautrec’s Gratin of Pumpkin

Cut slices of pumpkin half a centimetre thick and as wide as half of your palm.
Flour them on both sides and let them cook in a saute pan with oil, without letting them brown and without putting one on top another. As they are cooked put them aside on a dish and repeat the process several times.
Separately, shred some onions and let them also cook in oil; next treat in the same way some seeded quartered tomatoes, which you will mix, when they have been cooked, with the onion. If you have no fresh tomatoes, you could use some tomato sauce with the onions which have been cooked but not browned.
In a shallow dish arrange several layers of the slices of pumpkin, then the mixture of tomatoes and onions. Salt and pepper each layer moderately and finish with bread crumbs.
Let the gratin brown under the grill for a few minutes.

Links

Radio 3 Camus Weekend - Inside 'The Outsider'

2013-10-30T12:27:23+00:00

(l to r) Producer Karen Holden, Catherine Camus, Andrew Hussey

Professor Andrew Hussey is presenting a forthcoming documentary about Albert Camus's seminal novel, L’Étranger (The Outsider).

I first read Camus - The Outsider, of course - at the age of 16. I wasn't particularly interested in literature but I'd seen references to Camus in the New Musical Express, and that was enough to attract my attention. As soon I started reading the novel, I was gripped - not so much by the story (there isn't one really) but by the atmosphere: Algiers was a steamy city, sun, boredom and sex. And then the mystery of the killing of the Arab. It’s still a mystery and that's the whole point of the book.

Fair to say that Camus changed my life - I began to immerse myself in French literature, much to the surprise of my teachers, and began the journey, via various degrees and travels, that ended with me becoming a professor of French.

Camus has been with me every step of the way. Not just professionally. There is deep wisdom in Camus's philosophical writings that I have always turned to in difficult times. A wisdom and a nobility, too.

It has been an adventure tracing Camus back to Algeria - I have visited Algiers several times and noted how people's attitudes are now softening towards him - there is a new generation of Algerians who, rather than seeing Camus as the colonial enemy, see him as one of their own.

Most startling of all while making the programme was meeting his daughter Catherine Camus. Now in her sixties, she has her father's leonine features and soft eyes. She lives with a tribe of dogs in Camus's old house in Lourmarin. It was an extraordinary and very moving experience to be talking with Camus about her father in a garden overlooking the same landscape that Camus had loved ...

Albert Camus: Inside the Outsider will be broadcast on Radio 3 on Sunday 3rd November. Follow this link for full details.

Radio 3 Camus Weekend

Between the Ears at 20 #3

2013-10-10T11:08:33+00:00

For the next in our series of producer reminiscences, here are some reflections by Alan Dein, award winning broadcaster and oral historian, and a veteran of five episodes of Between the Ears ...

Alan Dein recording on location

'Way back in 1930, Walter Ruttmann, the creator of what surely must be the very first abstract feature designed especially for the radio, announced that for "Weekend", his 11 minute and 10 second acoustic interpretation of an ordinary weekend in Berlin, “everything audible in the whole world becomes material”.

'Well, as I contemplate a remarkable 20 years' worth of episodes of Radio 3’s Between the Ears - a series that I’ve had the pleasure to present five programmes for - I’d argue that Ruttmann’s radio-vision has been well and truly fulfilled in this innovative series crammed with so many wonderful and memorable pieces.

'For me, as an oral historian, with a deep passion for observational documentaries, making a Between the Ears has give me very special opportunities to make the kind of wild experiments and playful forays into stories that most probably I couldn’t realise anywhere else.

For my very first piece for the slot, back in 2002, I made The Singing Postcard with Matthew Dodd producing. It proved to be an unexpected adventure, which opened my ears to the heady possibilities of how we could mould an idea in unexpectedly creative ways. It all began with my mother musing on a 1950s postcard sent home from Rome on her honeymoon as I was intending to explore the heyday of singing picture postcards (which actually incorporated the playable grooves of a gramophone record). Taking on board the Between the Ears ethos, I accompanied our research into the origins of these wonderful old objects, with a slightly unconventional and contemporary twist. We actually designed and constructed a one-off "Between the Ears" stall on Lyme Regis seafront in Dorset! From our makeshift studio, we prompted holidaymakers to reveal choice words and music to create their own individual audio postcards (then put together as a rather poetic finale to the piece).

I laugh out loud as I reminisce about that particular programme, but it’s the adventurous spirit of the series that has enabled me (and I’m certain everyone else who has contributed to a Between the Ears over the past two decades) to do something a bit different, and unexpected, with an idea. I followed up the theme we’d visited in The Singing Postcard a few years later with the experimental Sound Relations. Again, we began with a personal story which were old recordings of my own family, and we then pondered the concept of an "audio family tree" (the sound equivalent on the family photo album) - and the possibilities of how we may inherit our ancestors' voices. For that show we even managed to track down the great-great-grandson of the inventor Thomas Edison, and edited a remarkable sonic line from a 19th-century recording of Edison himself, all the way to his youngest descendant celebrating his 5th birthday party, captured on a camcorder.

'It’s been a delight for me to work on Between the Ears with wonderful radio producers and it was a real privilege to receive a Gold Award at the Sony’s in 2009 for Sara-Jane Hall’s Staring at the Wall. I feel that our study of the immediate periphery of HMP Pentonville certainly ended up the way it did due to Sara-Jane’s beautiful production – and this very unique format we’d been given to work with. Happy 20th to Between the Ears'

Alan Dein presented ‘Between the Ears: The Singing Postcard’. To listen, follow this link.

And the Sony Gold winning ‘Between the Ears: Staring at the Wall’. To listen, follow this link.

Between the Ears at 20 #2

2013-10-08T14:35:00+00:00

In celebration of Between the Ears at 20, here are more words from those involved with the programme including Ian Gardiner who composed the score for the first ever outing in 1993, which won a Prix Italia and Sony Award. First up is Julian May, the award-winning radio producer who has made many Between the Ears over the years and reflects on making ‘On the Rubble of my Home I Played my Flute’ about the musician and cook Guo Yue.

The story of musician and cook Guo Yeu.

'Guo Yue picks up a short piece of plain bamboo, punctured by a few holes. He holds it to his lips and, gently, breathes across it. Joyous, plaintive music fills his kitchen. On the table a long, dark-red pipe inscribed with elegant Chinese calligraphy and hung with silk tassels lies next to a battered, tarnished silver Western flute. Yue loves these instruments, but that bit of bamboo has a special place in his heart. The first flute he ever played, he tells me, was just like this.

'Guo Yue is telling me the story of his life: he relives his childhood in a crowded musicians’ compound in a Bejing backstreet or hutong; growing up amidst a constant cacophony of people practicing, singing, arguing – and cooking. He recalls with relish the early morning cries of hawkers selling vegetables, fish, honey. In the evening he can tell what his neighbours are going to eat - just by listening. Beside his flutes on the table is a chopping board and a cleaver. Yue, getting excited now, demonstrates the variety of sounds made by slicing up cucumbers, chopping cabbage and smashing bones.

'Guo Yue’s story is one that only radio can properly tell: music, noises, silence and his voice - whispering, shouting, singing - all cohere, if appropriate weight is given to each, in a narrative of sound. But conventional documentaries, driven by the mission to explain, upset this fine balance. Between the Ears tends more towards expression, and, like Yue himself, to listening.

'Later, listening to the recording, I hear connections and dislocations, sonic links and assonances. Listening to Yue’s account of his mother being goaded then brutally beaten by Red Guards, I hear, too, the slicing of vegetables, the chopping of flesh, the crushing of bones. So I arrange the sounds accordingly. The programme becomes a reflective work, a piece as composed as any of Yue’s musical works or his delicious meals. Between the Ears has, for 20 years, been the space where this can happen, where a producer can listen, reflect and create.'

Robyn Ravlich - Founding producer of The Listening Room and its executive producer from 1995-2003. EP Music unit RN 2005-2010.

'Daily radio can be a faithful companion and a valued informant making sense of the world but often goes in one ear and out the other. Rarely does radio achieve the potency of the medium envisaged by the noted cinema theorist Rudolph Arnheim in his book Radio which was published in 1930. British poet, academic and broadcaster Sean Street has continued to champion such an approach in his recent book The Poetry of Radio. Radio is very much the art of possibilities that can draw on the companion fields of cinema and music to fashion worlds real and imagined, and that is very much the case with Between The Ears.

Referencing Knoxville - Summer of 1995

'I'm writing this in Kyoto where the traffic lights chirrup and temple floors have nightingale floors which squeak to warn of intruders; my sonic imagination is stirred along with the visual. I'm away from my office and my files that would allow me to detail my rich connections with Between The Ears, but I recall our association began through the Prix Italia where its programmes had been making waves and we sought audition copies to be sent to the ABC in Sydney. Alan Hall's Knoxville programme was a standout with languid location recordings in Tennessee plus literary and musical elements along with local voices all woven together in an evocation of past and present and the spirit of place informing creativity. Unforgettable! And then there was Beethoven's Fifth, a compositional tour de force of great wit and editing skill. And Monument. All made their way into our Listening Room airwaves as there were such synergies in our approach to exploring the radio medium. I visited Alan Hall at the BBC in 1997 when he was one of the BTE producers, and welcomed other visiting producer colleagues to our Sydney office when they were collecting interviews with local radiophonic artist and composer Robert Lolini and performance poet Amanda Stewart.

'"Between the ears" lie reason and imagination. Surpassing The Listening Room's 16 years, Between The Ears has reached it's 20th anniversary. Congratulations on achieving this landmark anniversary so stylishly, and may there be many more!'

Ian Gardiner is a composer for music, film and TV. His work on Between The Ears: Monument (London: 1935-1993) won a Prix Italia and Sony Award in 1994.

Monument - the first Between the Ears.

'Between the Ears celebrates the very rare and special medium of radio art. Not radio drama, not documentary feature, not sonic art, it requires the material of broadcasting itself - the sounds, voices, musicians emerging out of the darkness of the ether into your home. My piece, Monument, the very first Between the Ears 20 years ago, was moulded out of the very stuff of radio - BBC announcers, vox pops, vintage sound effects - and it only really has the right resonance when broadcast.'

Caroline Devine is a sound artist who sent Between the Ears into orbit in a celebration of amateur radio and space exploration in Space Ham (2013).

'For Space Ham, I combined the voices and recordings of amateurs with my original compositions that comprised among other sounds, naturally occurring radio signals in the VLF range caused by space weather and tones derived from data on solar oscillations. I have always considered Between the Ears to be essential listening. When producer, Rose de Larrabeiti approached me to work on this, in spite of my excitement, I found myself wryly considering - which radio slot would I possibly dream of making, once I had made a Between the Ears?'

You can listen to some of the programmes listed in this blog, and other vintage editions of Between the Ears, by following this link.

Between the Ears at 20

2013-10-02T12:23:36+00:00

It’s been 20 years since Between the Ears first broadcast and we’ve invited producers, composers, sounds artists and supporters to talk about their involvement celebrating adventurous and innovative radio. In this first blog, BBC producer Sara Jane Hall, who has won two Sony Awards for Between the Ears programmes, explains why she loves making features for this Radio 3 strand. Producer and writer Tim Dee has worked for Radio 3 and Radio 4 for 25 years; his most recent book is Four Fields, and here he writes about sound art. You can listen to vintage editions of Between the Ears across the 20-year history of the programme, by following this link.

Sara Jane Hall

Sara Jane Hall on location in Norway for a Radio 4 documentary, with Ice Festival organiser, Pal Medhus and presenter Richard Coles

"Sometimes being a radio producer is a very cold job.
I’m standing in light snow, frozen hand and microphone outstretched towards a bundled-up figure, coughing lightly on his roll-up, outside the high prison walls of Pentonville. He’s a man that my presenter, Alan Dein, has just stopped to ask what he thought of the proximity of the prison to residential houses, the idea behind Staring at The Wall. 'I was in there,' he replied, and like the Ancient Mariner (as one radio critic later put it), he was off – a non-stop stream of consciousness – his court case, the judge, his wife, the smell, the sounds … and I knew we had to stay, silent, shivering, sharing the moment, to capture it.

"Behind me I could hear the trains coming and going from the nearby station – my warm flat somewhere down the line. It was one of those moments when you know the idea is going to work – you are tapping into a story, and a voice, you couldn’t make up.

"There is nothing more boring than starting a feature knowing exactly what it will sound like. To make a Between The Ears, however, is exciting because you know you have been given permission to take risks – with sound, with content, with style.
The rules of radio still apply – good stories keeping the listener’s interest.

"Between the Ears offers the opportunity for a bit more flexing of those rules. Its reputation for experimentation, and a dedicated audience in search of sound adventures, means that reality and fiction can blur happily.

"When David Bramwell, presenter of The Haunted Moustache, first pulled out a box containing an unlikely inheritance – a small waxed moustache – I decided not to ask if it was real, or how much of his tale was true. Remarkably neither did anyone else. It was a game between us – don’t ask, don’t tell – and the final programme was a riddle for the listener – soothed by David’s haunting music.

"As we sat beneath a naked, life-size statue of a copulating Pan, a tin of biscuits on the table in front of us, and a psychic from Crawley on the sofa, David joined in his own mystery, exclaiming: 'My left hand’s gone cold!' Sometimes being a radio producer may be cold, but nothing warms you up like finding the sounds you never imagined."

Tim Dee

Tim Dee

"As recently as 20 years ago the idea of sound art barely existed. Nowadays sound artists win the Turner Prize. But for as long as radio has been around, its producers have been making, both consciously and accidentally, many programmes that might also be considered sound art. Louis MacNeice's radio dramas might have counted, so too the radio ballads of Charles Parker and Ewan MacColl, and Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood. But so might some more apparently casual documentaries that eavesdropped on miners coming up to the surface of a pit or the banter of a cattle auction in south Devon.

"We could try to ascertain what links these varied programmes: no one definition will do but I would point to them having being made from stories that are told in sound that is either naturally sourced or written with the kind of lyric compression that harnesses the imagination, neither of which are like the steady and even pace of a more 'conventional' radio programme.

"Step forward then Between the Ears, Radio 3's magical cave of sonic adventure. For 20 years, while the art world outside got interested in the creative possibilities of sound as a new language the programme has been quietly (mostly, with several stops to collect major international prizes along the way) ploughing the possibilities: getting poets to think about machine noise, harnessing the wind, tying microphones to wire fences, collecting old answerphone messages, rummaging around in the unofficial sound archives that almost everyone of us has, enjoying the patina of ages, making people cry with the scratches on old vinyl and on snatches of homemade mix tapes on cassettes rescued from the verges of motorways, believing that god might be audible in a bullfrog...

"Because it gets so thoroughly and adventurously inside the head, Between the Ears is the programme every producer wants to make, the place they might put their deepest most heart-felt ideas, the place where the radio producer gets to be an artist not just the facilitator of clean lines of communication, the place where they are granted their very own director's cut. Not that the programme is as self-indulgent as this might imply, it works within the mixed and highly (and well) managed output of Radio 3, but the minutes awarded to both producer and, if things have gone well, to listener, ought to sound like a ladder let down from the stars and a route map on how to climb back up to them."

Copenhagen - The director's blog

2013-01-10T13:19:19+00:00

Simon Russell Beale, Greta Scacchi and Benedict Cumberbatch in studio

Emma Harding has produced and directed Michael Frayn's play about the controversial meeting in 1941 between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, friends who now found themselves on opposing sides in Hitler's war. Here, Emma describes the concept and the casting ...

I set out to direct Michael Frayn's Copenhagen for radio with great joy - I'd hugely admired Michael Blakemore's original 1998 stage production and Howard Davies' inventive 2002 BBC film version - but also with a great sense of trepidation. How would we turn a brilliant stage play into something that worked as a radio drama? How would I help the actors - and the listeners - navigate some very complex scientific and moral ideas?

But as I read and re-read the play, I began to feel that one of the keys to the piece was Frayn's playful and metaphorical use of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The notion of uncertainty runs through the whole drama - the uncertainty and the unsaid within human relationships, the uncertainty and the contradiction of human memory, and the uncertainty - the unknowability - of human motivation. And, in the foreground, is the still unresolved mystery of why Heisenberg went to see Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941.

But a drama about the uncertainty of a character's motivation presents an interesting dilemma to actors and director, who are more used to asking 'why am I doing what I'm doing?' and making a decision one way or another. Fortunately, I had a terrifically bright and engaged cast - Simon Russell Beale, Benedict Cumberbatch and Greta Scacchi - who were more than capable of taking on these mind games.

It's also critical that the actors are confident with the complex scientific ideas that their characters are throwing around the dinner table. I invited the physicist and broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili along to our read-through, so that the cast could ask him detailed questions about Bohr and Heisenberg's work. As anyone who's listened to Radio 4's The Life Scientific

will know, Jim's a brilliant expositor of mind-bending ideas, so by the end of the session, we all felt we had some sort of grip on the science that informs the drama.

But the play itself isn't about science. Or rather, it is about science, but it's about science in the context of morality, politics and history. These two physicists are working on opposing sides in a global war and they are both very aware of the potential chain reaction - that their work on the atom could inevitably contribute to the deaths of millions of people.

These are big ideas. But Copenhagen is also an intimate, domestic drama about a friendship between two men and a perceived betrayal.

In Simon and Benedict's portrayals of Bohr and Heisenberg, we worked on creating a real sense of a friendship that has become strained, but that was once incredibly close - the friendship between an eminent physicist and his mercury-witted protégé, or between a father-figure and his adopted son. And Greta, as Margrethe Bohr, presents a fiercely intelligent woman, torn between her inherent instinct towards graciousness and hospitality, and her irritation with Heisenberg.

Blogging on ... to the Free Thinking video stream

2012-11-03T12:31:51+00:00

Former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson. Photo © BBC

Radio 3 Listener Blogger Rosalind Porter reports from Free Thinking 2012 at The Sage Gatehead

Once again the foyers and halls are bustling with thinkers and there's a major new innovation to bring more people into the live experience: many of the sessions are streamed live on the Radio 3 website. If you can't be in Gateshead to share your thoughts in person, then you can watch online, and you can let Radio 3 know your impressions - positive or negative - by commenting on this Blog. Does the live streaming add to your enjoyment of the Festival? Does a visual image distract from events which are produced as radio programmes? Does watching the live streams make you more likely to listen to the broadcasts on radio? I'm going to be providing some blogs on both the internet and live experience this weekend and all feedback is very welcome.

Last night kicked off with a live broadcast of In Tune, providing a smorgasbord of contributors who will be sharing their views over the weekend, combined with the usual diverse mix of music and musicians ranging from BBC Radio 3 Young Generation Artists Leonard Elschenbroich (cello) and Alexei Grynyuk (piano) to local folk music maestro Alistair Anderson and his band. Having a live audience adds a certain frisson to any radio broadcast and presenter Sean Rafferty certainly seemed to relish our presence. The excellent Voices of Hope Choir under the direction of Simon Fidler, provided a heartfelt a cappella contribution including a very apt rendition of 'When the Boat comes in' and an intense performance of Bruckner's moving Ave Maria. But my personal highlight had to be the pairing of Leonard and Alexei and their interpretation of Debussy's cello sonata. Several members of the audience around me commented on the impressive fact that Leonard performed all of his pieces from memory, something which wouldn't normally be picked up if we were simply listening at home as usual.

Hopefully many In Tune listeners will have been inspired by the wise words of Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, to listen to her Free Thinking Lecture later in the evening, and there was a real treat in hearing the author Colm Toibin read an extract from his latest book The Testament of Mary, such evocative and musical prose gave an enticing preview to his interview this Saturday morning, which I'll be commenting on later.

The Anglo-Saxons are coming!

2012-10-11T15:21:51+00:00

Producer Beaty Rubens introduces a new, extended series of The Essay on Radio 3 - three blocks of ten episodes stretching in to 2013, the first series beginning on Monday 15th October.

I was interested in the Anglo-Saxons - that wasn't the problem. In fact, I had attended a primary school called King Alfred's, and even today could sketch you the school logo - a wonky little line drawing of Alfred, seated on a throne, wearing a sort of Anglo-Saxon dress and pointy shoes and holding up a book to show off his passion for education. Which is ironic, really, because education - or my lack of it - on the subject was exactly why I felt so unqualified to produce a 30-part series called Anglo-Saxon Portraits.

I knew something about the Celts and the Romans and the Tudors, but the half millennium between the departure of the Romans and the arrival of the Normans was a shocking blank. Perhaps the Anglo-Saxons just weren't much taught in the 50 years after the War, when the idea of Aryan and Germanic invaders wasn't all that fashionable.

The little I did know came almost entirely from that masterpiece of English history, Sellars and Yeatman's 1066 And All That. There are sections of their Test Paper I, which I can quote almost by heart: Question 2, for example, solemnly requires you to: 'Discuss in Latin or Gothic (but not both), whether the Northumbrian Bishops were more schismatical than the Cumbrian Abbots. While Question 8 simply asks: Have you the faintest recollection of: (1) Ethelbreth? (2) Athelthral? (3) Thruthelthrolth?

And all this did was to confirm my ignorant pre-conception that the Anglo-Saxons had a taste for vaguely absurd names and were constantly engaged in ecclesiastical disagreements over arcane matters such as monastical hair-cuts.

Over the last six months I have come to see that the Anglo-Saxons were more subtle, more sophisticated, more human and more important in terms of our everyday lives today than I had ever imagined. My colleagues Sarah Taylor and Mohini Patel and I have commissioned leading scholars and enthusiasts in the field to write and read radio portraits of 30 key Anglo-Saxon men and women.

Barry Cunliffe speaks up for King Vortigern, who has traditionally had a bad press because of his decision to invite in the legendary Anglo-Saxon brothers, Hengist and Horsa, hoping they would protect the country from barbarian attack. Of course his plan of containment failed and the rest is history.

With the sympathy of a man who has been there himself, the departing Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams re-animates the career of St Augustine - just arrived from Rome and feeling his way into his new role as the first ever Archbishop of Canterbury.

Martin Carver poetically details the life and death of King Raedwald, the occupant of the Sutton Hoo ship burial, with a kindly nod to Raedwald's unnamed wife, who sent him off to the next world with his shaving kit and a change of clothes.

Barbara Yorke tells the story of her bafflingly overlooked heroine, Hild of Whitby, the abbess who ran a monastery the size of a small town and was in charge of the education of future bishops until the Church of England decided they couldn't have a woman in such a role, setting a precedent that is only being challenged in the Church of England today.

With fascinating hands-on detail, Richard Gameson tells of Eadfrith and other scribes responsible for writing mile after mile of manuscript - from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to the Lindisfarne Gospel and Beowulf.

The great Seamus Heaney speaks of the hero of the great Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf; while David Almond, author of Skellig and My Name is Mina wonderfully re-imagines the life of his fellow-Northumbrian, Caedmon, the first surviving poet in the English language.

Geoffrey Robinson QC explores the legacy of the Anglo-Saxon law-maker and Clive Anderson talks about King Harold.

Mostly we have focussed on named individuals, but we have also commissioned some 'generic portraits' so as to paint in the lives of men and women whose names are now forgotten:

The peasant farmers, without whose labour, the sight of the classic English village - a cluster of houses surrounded by strips of field - would not be so familiar.

The smiths - black and gold - who once laboured over treasures such as the famous Alfred Jewel or the Staffordshire hoard, uncovered by a metal detectorist in 2009.

And then, right at the end of the era, the final programme of the 30 will be on the embroiderers of the Bayeux Tapestry - the magnificent art-work which so decisively marks the close of the Anglo-Saxon era.

Ask me what I know of the Anglo-Saxons now and I could certainly answer a Test such as that set by Sellars and Yeatman. What's more, there's so much and it's so much more complex and nuanced and exciting than I had ever imagined that I might honestly be tempted to write on both sides of the page at once!

Introducing Free Thinking 2012

2012-07-25T16:00:01+00:00

Radio 3 Producer Tim Prosser reveals the plans for this year's Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival

We're delighted to announce that the Free Thinking Festival will be returning to The Sage, Gateshead in November for a packed weekend of debate, talks and performance (Friday 2 Nov - Sunday 4 Nov) and three weeks of stimulating broadcasts on Radio 3.

This year's opening lecture will be given by Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Now in its seventh year, Free Thinking is a platform for today's innovative and high-profile thinkers from politics, literature, science and the arts, brought together by Radio 3 to debate the ideas shaping our lives. This year's theme is 'Them and Us' and we'll be asking if the world is becoming a more divided place, discussing social inequality, difference and how we define ourselves in relation to others. Key speakers already lined up include Amos Oz, Michael Ignatieff, Philippa Gregory, Tony Harrison, Mona Siddiqui, Colm Toibin, Tom Holland and Lee Hall.

All events are free and we hope you'll want to come to Norman Foster's fabulous concert hall on the banks of the Tyne and join in the debate. Plus there'll be poetry, music and drama. We'll be announcing lots more names in the coming weeks, so do check The Sage, Gateshead website for updates. Free tickets will be available from Friday 17 August.

Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, will be arguing that female leaders are better placed than men to confront the crises of the 21^st Century.

Amos Oz, one of Israel's leading writers, challenges our thinking about the seemingly implacable Middle East divide.

Ian Goldin, former Vice President of the World Bank and now Oxford Professor of Globalisation, questions whether globalisation is a force for good, or the source of an ever more unequal and risky world.

Michael Ignatieff - broadcaster, academic and former Leader of the Liberal Party in Canada, tackles partisanship in politics. Why do politicians treat opponents as enemies, and what needs to be done to restore people's faith in politics?

Mark Pagel, Head of Evolution Laboratory at the University of Reading, explains why we have evolved with so many different languages and cultures. Does the future mean greater diversity, or will humans now evolve to speak a universal language?

Simon Armitage is writing a new drama for Free Thinking to be performed at Baltic and broadcast live on Radio 3.

Irish writer Colm Toibin (Brooklyn, Mothers and Sons) and best-selling historical novelist Philippa Gregory (The Boleyn Girl, The White Queen) discuss their work and ideas in the festival's Books at Breakfast

Muslim theologian Mona Siddiqui and historian Tom Holland discuss what divides Islam and Christianity, and how that impacts upon the world today.

Ian McMillan presents his cabaret of word - Radio 3's The Verb - with guests including Kate Mosse, Don Patterson, and Tony Harrison, who will perform his poem 'Them and Uz'. Plus live music by the Sunderland band The Lake Poets.

The winners of Radio 3's New Generation Thinker Scheme - the search to find the brightest new academic voices with a talent for broadcasting - will discuss their latest research and take part in Speed Dating with a Thinker, where the public can meet them face to face.

Sean Rafferty will host Radio 3's In Tune with live music and guests. Tom Service presents a live edition of Radio 3's Music Matters.

You can book FREE TICKETS from Friday 17 August at www.thesagegateshead.org or call 0191 443 4661. Keep checking for regular updates on new speakers and events. There will be over thirty events over the three days, so plenty to choose from!

To request a free festival brochure email us at freethinking@bbc.co.uk

Listen to previous Free Thinking broadcasts

Welcoming the New Generation Thinkers

2012-06-20T10:13:47+00:00

Matthew Dodd, Radio 3's Head of Speech Programmes, introduces this year's New Generation Thinkers

This week the first of Radio 3's New Generation Thinkers 2012 take to the airwaves. Ten academics, all at the start of their careers, will be making their debut broadcasts on Night Waves in their new role as the station's scholars-in-residence. It's been a stimulating and fascinating journey to get them there.

At the and of last year, Radio 3 and our partners the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) put out an appeal for applications from researchers who wanted to turn their scholarship into programme ideas. Within a month, we'd received hundreds of entries, covering everything from the history of medical science to arctic studies and bilingualism. A team of producers and AHRC staff sifted those down into a group of 60 finalists - who were then invited to attend workshops at the BBC in London and Salford where we made our final selection. You can find out the group and their specialisms by following this link. And so now the real work: listeners get the chance to hear the winners take their first steps as broadcasters.

But this of course is only the beginning. Over the next twelve months producers from Night Waves will be mentoring the NGTs to help them develop their ideas. They'll be making regular appearances on the programme, they'll be writing and presenting their own edition of The Essay, and they'll be appearing in front of audiences at Radio 3's annual festival of ideas, Free Thinking. They'll also be working with our colleagues in television arts to develop ideas for the screen.

The aim of the scheme is to find a new generation of academics who can bring the best of the lastest university research and scholarly ideas to a broad audience. It's part of Radio 3 dedication to commissioning and developing emerging talent in music and the arts - already flourishing elsewhere on the station in the New Generation Artists or World Routes Academy.

I've no doubt that the hunt for these new talents is good investment for the future. In a couple of week's time, the NGT scheme has a mini-landmark when Laurence Scott, a graduate of its first year, hosts a Sunday Feature about neglected Victorian writer George Reynolds. It will be the first full length documentary to be presented by a Radio 3 New Generation Thinker.

We're looking forward to many more.

Find details of the 2012 Thinkers (BBC Press Office)