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Choosing the 2011 Reith lecturer

2010-08-07T08:00:00+00:00

Choosing the Reith lecturer every year is one of the privileges of the job. It is a rather wonderful piece of patronage (for me, at any rate) and poses numerous challenges.

I look every year for something original - and someone who is a good communicator. Topicality can be an advantage, but with some subjects it doesn't matter.

I moved the Reiths to a different transmission pattern a few years ago - to 0900 with a Saturday evening repeat - to increase the audience and the lecturers' impact. It's a big occasion for Radio 4.

So I'm naturally delighted to have seduced Antony Gormley for 2011. We began talking about it a while ago in his Kings Cross studio/workshop. It's a very large edifice and various sculptures at different stages of preparation are dotted around, being attended to by a small group of craftsmen - and women - who must have been tempted to say "look but don't touch" but with amazing politeness restrained themselves. It was a fascinating experience.

Antony Gormley will be the first sculptor to be a Reith lecturer and, for that matter, the first practising visual artist to do so. He has, of course, broadcast before (quite a bit on Radio 3) and has much to say about art and culture. It is a mouth-watering prospect.

Mark Damazer is Controller of BBC Radio 4

The 2010 Reith Lectures were given by President of the Royal Society Martin Rees and you can listen to them all on the Radio 4 web site. There's a useful archive of past lectures too (although, inevitably, it's not complete).
The picture of Antony Gormley was taken by Oak Taylor-Smith.
Read the Radio 4 Press Office's announcement.

Reith Lectures 2010 - lecture four: The Runaway World

2010-06-22T07:20:00+00:00

The 2010 Reith Lectures are now at an end. Four lectures with a science theme by Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society Professor Martin Rees. And for each lecture we organised a live chat here on the Radio 4 blog. Across the four lectures, thousands of people joined in - contributing to the discussion or reading it after transmission.

If you joined in or if you read the discussion while listening to the programmes, we'd be thrilled if you'd take a minute to leave a comment here on the blog: would you like to see more live interaction like this around Radio 4 programmes? Does live conversation of this kind enhance the experience for you? Or does it make it harder to enjoy the programme? And, if you think it works, which programmes should we try it with next? Live discussion, documentaries, drama? Please leave a comment below. Your feedback will help us design more interactive activity for future programmes.

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blogs

Visit the Reith web site to listen to all of the previous lectures and to many from the archive.
Get the Reith lectures podcast here - you can download the lectures to listen to on your computer or MP3 player. It's free and you can keep them forever.
The picture shows a mosaic of pics from the recording of the third lecture, in the Royal Society's lecture theatre.

Reith Lectures 2010 - lecture three: What We'll Never Know

2010-06-15T07:30:00+00:00

The third of Professor Martin Rees' 2010 Reith Lectures was recorded in the Royal Society's lecture theatre in front of an audience of fellows of the society, working scientists, journalists and public figures. Listen to the lecture and join in with the conversation about Professor Rees' big theme - the outer limits of what we can know.

To join in, listen to the programme live, click the 'play' button in the chat window above and type your comment, send an email to thereithlectures@bbc.co.uk or tweet using the hashtag #Reith. We'll publish as many of your comments here as we can during the lecture and, afterwards, once the chat has finished, we'll open comments on this blog post so that you can leave your reactions and ideas at your leisure.

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

Visit the Reith web site to listen to all of the previous lectures and to many from the archive.
Get the Reith lectures podcast here - you can download the lectures to listen to on your computer or MP3 player. It's free and you can keep them forever.
The picture shows the audience for the third lecture, gathered in the Royal Society's lecture theatre.

Reith Lectures 2010 - lecture two: Surviving the Century

2010-06-08T07:20:00+00:00

The second of this year's Reith Lectures, 'Surviving the Century', is now over. You can replay our live chat here in the this blog post. Do so while listening to the lecture itself. Many listeners joined in with the conversation about the lecture and its themes, here in the live chat, on Twitter (using the hashtag #Reith) and in email. Get the Reith lectures podcast here - you can download the lectures to listen to on your computer or MP3 player. It's free and you can keep them forever.

Now we'd like you to tell us what you thought of the lecture and its themes but also of the live chat itself - did it add anything to the experience for you? And if so, should we try this with other Radio 4 programmes - and which ones? Click 'comments' and leave yours. We'll be doing this again for the third lecture, next Tuesday 15 June at the same time (0900). In the meantime, we'll continue to scan the #Reith hashtag on Twitter and remember the Radio 4 Facebook page is also a good place for discussion of our programmes and web sites.

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

Reith lectures 2010 - lecture one: The Scientific Citizen

2010-06-01T07:30:37+00:00

This morning, during the first of this year's Reith lectures, we hosted a live chat about the lecture and the topics discussed here on the blog. Lots of listeners joined in, by typing comments directly into the live chat here, by sending email to thereithlectures@bbc.co.uk and by tweeting using the hashtag #reith. You can replay the resulting conversation below (it might make sense to listen to the lecture while you're doing so) and subscribe to the Reith 2010 podcast. If you joined in, please leave a comment below to tell us what you thought of the exercise. Would you join in again? Would you like to see this kind of live conversation around other programmes? How could we improve it?

And don't forget to join in again next week, at 0900 on Tuesday 8 June. The lecture's title is 'Surviving the Century.'

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

Reith Lectures 2010

2010-05-19T15:35:57+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00729d9

Editor's note: keep up with the lectures and contribute to the discussion on Twitter. Follow @reith_lectures and use the hashtag #Reith - SB

We have just finished recording this year's Reith lectures - given by Lord Rees - or Martin Rees as he prefers to be called. There are four of them - broadly based on the title 'Scientific Horizons.' I've enjoyed them a lot. Martin is President of The Royal Society, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge and Astronomer Royal. Amongst other things...

Martin was a natural for the Reiths - not least because the BBC as a whole is putting in a lot of effort on air this year to make it 'The Year of Science.' The lectures address the role of scientists, politicians, civil servants, journalists and the wider public in creating a more sophisticated debate about science and technolgy - in the hope of achieving more rational outcomes. The audience on each occasion has responded vigorously and there are some good jokes there too.

Lecture three is different - about cosmology and the limits of physics. There was an elegant argument about the notion of a fourth dimension and other life forms and about the different ways different scientists attack problems. In some ways science can be studied as very separate disciplines. You could see the generalists in the audience working hard - but (as with In Our Time) enjoying it hugely. There were lots of scientists there too. It was recorded at The Royal Society - so a home fixture for Martin. David Willetts, the new Science Minister, came at short notice and gamely took a question on funding. Lord Drayson had been at the first lecture - on the night the coalition was formed. The lecture was recorded at the point Gordon Brown resigned and David Cameron walked into Number 10. The audience was captive but Martin had them paying attention. We updated them all at the end.

I moved the Reiths to 0900 a few years ago - with a Saturday evening repeat... Previously they had two evening slots. It seems to me that the Reiths remain a big BBC moment and should be placed in a peak slot. The audience has responded well. I think they will do so this year too.

Mark Damazer is Controller of BBC Radio 4

This year's lectures will be broadcast on Tuesdays at 0900 on Radio 4 from 1 June and will be available as a podcast.
The Reith team at Radio 4 have been taking pictures throughout. There are more pictures, taken at the third recording at the Royal Society here.
Last year's Lectures, on morality and democracy, by Professor Michael Sandel are still available to listen to on the Radio 4 web site.
The picture shows Lord Rees at the lectern for the first of this year's lectures. It was taken by a BBC photographer.

'Multiplatforming' the Reith Lectures

2009-05-25T08:45:00+00:00

This external content is available at its source: http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649

The Reith Lectures are amongst the most venerable of BBC institutions.

Our first director-general famously believed that the corporation should enrich the intellectual and cultural life of the nation.

In this spirit, each year the BBC invites a leading figure to deliver a series of lectures whose explicit aim is to advance public understanding and debate about significant issues. The lectures are both live events, and radio programmes broadcast on Radio 4 and the World Service.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell was the first Lecturer in 1948. A dazzling array of thinkers has stood in his shoes in the subsequent sixty-one years, including JK Galbraith, Marina Warner, Wole Soyinka and Daniel Barenboim.

This year's lecturer is the eminent Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel. His theme "A New Citizenship" builds on a lifetime's work exploring issues around democracy, ethics and what he calls the "politics of the common good".

Professor Sandel is a conspicuously engaging speaker; his Justice course at Harvard has been taken by more than 14,000 students, and will soon be made available online.

(His rather less well-known cultural contribution was to provide the inspiration for Montgomery Burns, ironically the least just character in the Simpsons cartoon).

Given Professor Sandel's topic and own broad resonance, the Reith team has redoubled its efforts to promote the content of the lectures as widely as possible beyond the boundaries of the BBC.

So as well as Professor Sandel's appearance on Start the Week this morning and the usual press interviews, he's recorded an interview with the very popular non-BBC Philosophy Bites podcast, to help us reach a valuable new audience.

And in addition to a Radio 4 site, we've set up a Twitter feed to try and raise the profile and content of this year's lectures.

We can give an insight into the production process, point to the wealth of Reith archive already available - such as an excerpt from that first Russell lecture - and link to other relevant material such as the Philosophy resources from our In Our Time colleagues.

And we can find people already talking about Professor Sandel and Reith (there are more than you might think), and invite them to join us.

The purpose is to build our own online Reith community which can engage with the subjects at the heart of Professor Sandel's lectures, and bolster the debate we hope they will engender.

We are also planning to run some Twitter events around the Lectures.

With the help of the Good Radio Club, an experiment in 'social listening' from Jem Stone and Steve Bowbrick at BBC Audio & Music Interactive, we're inviting people to listen to the repeat transmission of each Reith Lecture on Radio 4 (or to listen via the Radio 4 website) while logged into Twitter, and then to share their comments and thoughts.

We'll be inviting listeners to tag their contributions to Twitter with the hash tag #Reith (and to upload pictures to flickr using the same tag). Using tools like Twitterfall and Monitter participants will be able to follow a global conversation around the lectures while they're on air. Nearer the first transmission you'll be able to read more about the experiment on the Good Radio Club web site and the Radio 4 Reith 2009 web pages.

We've never done anything like this with Reith; it's an exciting experiment which we hope will succeed. I will report back here in a few weeks' time to share the results.

I hope you might join us.

I think Lord Reith would approve.

The Reith Lectures 2009 will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday mornings at 0900 BST starting on June 9, and repeated the following Saturday evening at 2215 BST.

The Lectures will also be broadcast on the BBC World Service starting on Saturday 13 June at 1800 GMT.

It will also be possible to listen again, and download each lecture on the Radio 4 website. There will also be a podcast.

Listen again to Michael Sandel talking to Andrew Marr on Start the Week (the programme will be available indefinitely).
The Reith Lectures archive has clips from historic lectures including Russell and Galbraith.
The conversation about the lectures has already started on Twitter.
The slideshow is from the Reith 2009 photostream at flickr.com