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Edgar Wallace: The Man Who Wrote Too Much?

2015-03-14T12:19:11+00:00

Mark Billingham on Ludgate Hill, at the top of Fleet Street in London.

It’s such a strange feeling walking down a street that you have known in your imagination all of your life. Fleet Street in London is like that. Somewhere that instantly conjures images of newspaper inked pages, and the sounds of printing presses and typewriters in smoky rooms.

As I walked along with crime writer Mark Billingham, even with all the newspapers now gone, the street’s architecture is still quite magical. Along one side there are cobbled alleyways threading down to the ancient Inns of Courts. In other places the buildings loom over you as you approach the Royal Courts of Justice. Mark says that in the 1920s the street was a crime nexus. It was the British Empire’s beating heart of criminal gossip that fed the journalism, and bestselling thriller writing career, of the star of this Saturday’s 4 Extra archive showcase: Edgar Wallace: The Man Who Wrote Too Much?

Mark Billingham on the sometimes imposing Fleet Street.

Edgar Wallace's (1875-1932) life seems the stuff of fiction. Adopted by a Billingsgate fish porter in London, and largely self-educated, he was the newspaper boy who became one of the most famous writers in the world. He sold millions of books, but he was plagued by debts. He left Britain for the United States in 1931, only to die in Hollywood in 1932, aged 56, after writing the original story for King Kong. His body was returned by ocean liner in honour, only to be reunited with an ocean of outstanding bills.

Mark wanted to investigate why a crime writer, whose publisher declared him the 'King of Thrillers', a celebrity superstar whose books sold in their millions, seems to be fading from memory today. Even during his own prolific lifetime Wallace experienced literary snobbery, despite his incredible success. Mark’s search was a London journey. The city was Wallace’s criminal muse. On its streets Mark tracked down some experts that could help with the Wallace mystery, like biographer Neil Clark (Stranger Than Fiction: The Life of Edgar Wallace, The History Press). There’s no Edgar Wallace museum, so Mark and Neil met at the next best thing, the Edgar Wallace pub, just of Fleet Street.

Mark Billingham and Edgar Wallace biographer Neil Clark, outside the Edgar Wallace pub in London, renamed in 1976 one year after Wallace’s centenary.

From the BBC archive we hear some of Wallace best creations, including sleuthing in The Mind of Mr JG Reeder (Radio 7 2007), and comedy in the racing tips of Educated Evans (Radio 4 1996) starring Roy Hudd. We also hear from Edgar’s daughter Penelope Wallace (who sadly died in 1997), talking about her father’s storytelling abilities. And at the British Library’s Sound Archive Mark meets Dr Stacy Gillis, teacher of detective fiction at Newcastle University, who is fascinated by Wallace’s ability to promote himself. Remarkably we can hear Wallace doing just that, in 1928 recording, reading his story The Man in the Ditch.

Mark Billingham, Tom Ruane (British Library Sound Archive) and Dr Stacy Gillis (Newcastle University) at the British Library Sound Archive with the 1928 record of Edgar Wallace.

The final part of Mark’s odyssey sees him arrive at Portland Place, very close to BBC Broadcasting House, where Wallace brought his family, and servants, to live for a time. The house is now part of the Chinese Embassy. On the pavement outside is where Mark met Professor David Glover, from Southampton University author of Wallace’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. When we arrived David was clutching something precious too him, a still brilliantly yellow 1927 edition of an Edgar Wallace classic novel. David Glover’s thoughts on Wallace’s career, and the fate of most popular fiction writers, serve as prelude to the final archive treat: a 1951 BBC radio version of one of Wallace’s biggest successes, a tale of murder and vigilante revenge, The Ringer (1926).

Mark Billingham and Professor David Glover (Southampton University) with his original 1927 edition of Edgar Wallace’s The Strange Countess, on Portland Place, in London.

At one point Mark Billingham asks one of our Wallace experts: “with my heart thumping, is this the fate of the popular thriller author, to largely fade from view and memory?” For a moment I thought Edgar Wallace was in the room with us.

Peter McHugh is the producer of Radio 4 Extra’s Edgar Wallace: The Man Who Wrote Too Much?

• Listen to Edgar Wallace: The Man Who Wrote Too Much? at 0900 and 1900 Saturday 14th March 2015 and BBC iPlayer Radio and on the Radio 4 extra web site.

• Archive Featured: Sweet Tea and Cigarettes (Sweet Talk Production for BBC Radio 4, 2004), The Mind of Mr JG Reeder (Radio 7, 2007), To Keep the Memory Green (Radio 4, 1989), Educated Evans (Radio 4, 1996) and The Ringer (BBC Radio Light Programme, 1951).

The Woman's Hour Collection

2013-12-19T08:14:09+00:00

From Bette Davis to Meryl Streep, Nancy Astor to Margaret Thatcher, Enid Blyton to Doris Lessing, Woman’s Hour has interviewed many of the biggest female names from entertainment, politics, the arts and beyond.

To coincide with the release of the The Woman’s Hour Collection we bring you a selection of the unexpected and delightful moments that have been newly restored to the Woman's Hour archive.

Some of these recordings are very much of their time. It’s interesting to hear how things have changed; the language used and the tone of voice can feel quite different to the sound of Woman's Hour today. Yet, it’s also striking how often the topics being discussed still resonate.

1. A stirring account from 1957 of the death of Emily Davison at Epsom, delivered by the famed suffragette Mary Richardson, who was present when Davison threw herself under the King’s horse. Richardson also describes her own contribution to the struggle – a daring act of defiance in which she slashed the Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery in London.

Mary Richardson explains how she slashed the Rokeby Venus as an act of defiance.

2. Judi Dench’s 1967 revelation that acting was not her first career choice, and a description of how audiences in West Africa found her performance as Lady Macbeth very funny.

Critically acclaimed actor Judi Dench on her career and taking Shakespeare to Africa.

3. An interview with fashion icon Mary Quant in 1971, in which she discusses the craze for hot pants, the lack of fashion rules, and Coco Chanel as a role model.

Innovative Fashion designer Mary Quant on what inspired her to create her iconic styles.

4. Sue MacGregor’s 1986 interview with Winnie Mandela in her Soweto home to the accompaniment of police dogs barking outside, in which she tells of the devastating effect of introducing her daughters to their father for the first time once they turned 16.

Winnie Mandela on her political life in South Africa and her marriage to Nelson.

5. The story of how French and Saunders became a double act and survived being “gonged off” at the Comedy Store, as told to Sue MacGregor in 1986.

Comedy duo Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders (in 1986) on their success and sketches.

6. Jenni Murray’s 1993 interview with Lady Margaret Thatcher, in which the former prime minister argues why women’s issues should not be given special treatment, and reflects on feeling 'sick at heart' after being deserted by her cabinet.

Margaret Thatcher reflects on the betrayal she felt when her leadership was challenged.

7. Martha Kearney, who presented Woman's Hour from 1998 to 2007, “I will always remember a programme of mine in which Julie Burchill let fly at Germaine Greer and we threw away the rest of the running order to let them fight it out.”

Germaine Greer and Julie Burchill go head to head over the politics of the female body.

8. Nigella Lawson and John Diamond appeared on the programme together to talk about John’s illness and how it affects their marriage.

John Diamond and his wife Nigella Lawson talk about how they are coping with his cancer.

Jenni Murray, who has presented Woman’s Hour since 1987, added “Going back through the Woman’s Hour archive, I am reminded of some very special moments I hadn’t thought about in years. I can confess it now that she’s gone, but no-one terrified me more than Margaret Thatcher, and it all came flooding back when I listened to my interview with her from 1993, of which one reviewer said it was the only time his radio had frozen over!”

Alice Feinstein, Editor of Woman’s Hour, adds: “This is our first dip into a huge archive. It has been hard to choose with such a wealth of amazing material, we hope this collection shows the range, the journalism, the personal testimonies, the humour and the glamour that are the hallmarks of Woman’s Hour. We’ll be adding to The Woman's Hour Collection with more interviews and features from the archive soon.”

In a special programme on Boxing Day Jenni Murray is joined by former Woman's Hour presenter Sue MacGregor, looking through the Woman's Hour Collection and discussing their memories of the programme.
Each week during 2014, a specially selected interview from the Woman’s Hour vault will be broadcast on the programme. The interviews will also be available permanently in a collection on the Radio 4 website and will be offered as a free download as part of the Woman’s Hour podcast.
For more archive from Woman’s Hour including the Power List and Cook the Perfect recipes visit the Womans’ Hour site. Every edition of Woman’s Hour since March 2010 is available to listen to on the Woman’s Hour website and each item is available as an individual chapter.

Cambridge Spies

2013-05-22T16:03:25+00:00

Editor's note: A season of programmes relating to the five Cambridge graduates whose treachery shocked the British establishment - listen to Cambridge Spies from Saturday 25th May 2013.

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.

An excerpt from Adventures in the BBC Archive - Stella Rimmington on the Cambridge Spies.

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?

George Mackay Brown and Orkney

2013-04-24T09:40:54+00:00

Editor's Note: Reader in Residence at Orkney Library and Archive, Alison Miller, discusses the life of the Orkney writer George Mackay Brown. Listen to three short stories by George Mackay Brown from 28 April 2013.

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.

Extract from The Wireless Set, a short story by George Mackay Brown read by Claire Knight.

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

Submit the first lines of your memoir to Radio 4

2013-03-06T12:22:34+00:00

Editor's note: What would the first line of your memoir be? Ian McMillan encourages people to submit the first line of their memoir in the comments section of this blog. Listen to Eat, Pray, Write from 8 March

Ian McMillan

I was on the first train from Manchester Piccadilly to Sheffield this morning; the 0545, chugging its way slowly across the tops, from one great city to another. My carriage was surprisingly full: there was a young woman who was wolfing down a bacon sarnie as though she’d not eaten for weeks, a man who insisted to the guard that he wanted to go to Edinburgh this way and not the easy way and a man who’d missed the last train the night before slept in a bus shelter, or so he told the silent woman in the sensible suit.

I thought, as I often do, that I’d like those people to write a memoir, to fill in the details of the lives I’d glimpsed on that early journey. Why did that man want to go Edinburgh via a particular route, and what was that young woman’s first memory of a bacon sarnie?

I wrote my own memoir in verse, ‘Talking Myself Home’ a few years ago; I’d just turned fifty and I wanted to take stock of a life that was as ordinary and unusual as everybody else’s. I wrote about my parents, who’d met as pen pals during the war; I wrote about my teachers, like the gravel-voiced Mr. Brown. I wrote about the jobs I’d had on the building site and at the tennis-ball factory, and I wrote about my life as a man of many words. What I found was that the more I wrote, the more I cast my net into the deceptively calm seas of memory, the more I remembered.

Helena Drysdale and Ian McMillan

Why don’t you have a go at writing your life? You’ll hear examples on the programme of people who took that difficult first step of putting pen to paper (or fingertip to keybord) and you’ll get a little practical help on how to begin.

Think of the stories your family tells; think of how you ended up where you are, how your parents met, who the significant people in your life were when you were young. Think of your teachers and the smells and sounds of the classroom. Think of the first time you saw the sea, the first time you saw a dustbin lorry, the first time you got on a bus. If you’ve kept letters or objects from the past, have a look at them. Look at them for a long time; listen to what they’re saying to you.

Keep a notebook and write things down as you remember them; don’t worry about a shape for the memoir at this stage. A shape will emerge; after all, you’re the shape.

And remember, everybody’s got a story to tell. Everyone’s life is interesting. I wish I’d asked those people on that train this morning to tell me their tales. Mind you, they might be reading this… So if you feel inspired, go ahead, write the first line of your memoir in the comment box below, and you’re on your way.

Listen to Eat, Pray, Write. Guests include Helena Drysdale who teaches memoir writing, and Helena Tym who has written her own memoir.

How to write a memoir

Desert Island Discs now includes programmes from the Roy Plomley years

2012-05-18T17:00:42+00:00

Margaret Lockwood records for the BBC. Her Desert Island Discs programme was made in 1951 and is the earliest download available from the latest archive launch.

John Calver writes about the painstaking proccess in sourcing and restoring 456 programmes and downloads from the Roy Plomley years to the Desert Island Discs site.

The new addition to the Desert Island Discs archive consists of all the complete programmes presented by the programme's devisor and presenter for 44 years, Roy Plomley. These 456 editions range from Margaret Lockwood in 1951 to Plomley's final interview with Sheila Steafel in 1985. Since January this year, a team from Loftus have been working to prepare these shows for streaming on the website and creating downloadable versions, and even in some cases, rebuilding them.

Up until 1976, as a rule the music was edited out of the majority of the programmes and only the speech was archived. In almost all these cases any references to the castaways' choices of record were also cut out and there's no indication where these choices came in the body of the interview. Lost too, in some cases, was any discussion of the castaways' choices of book and luxury.

Of the 43 full episodes we've been able to offer between 1951 and 1975, seventeen are off- air recordings made by radio enthusiasts who have left their recordings to the nation via the British Library Sound Archive. We are grateful to them and to the British Library who offered us programmes from their collection that were missing from the BBC archives.

Where the music choices are missing, we have reconstituted - as far as is possible - the original programmes by adding in extracts of the music, and as far as possible the chosen performance, we know the castaways chose. (All these details are on the relevant Castaway page of the website). However these programmes are not exactly as broadcast.

In the case of circus owner Gerry Cottle's Desert Island Discs from 1984 (source for speech - BBC) and the water colourist Edward Ardizzone from 1972 (source for speech - British Library) we rebuilt the programmes using records from the BBC gramophone library. Listeners will find that the music in these episodes, having been sourced in most cases from remastered CD versions of the original vinyl records, has better audio quality than the surrounding speech.

For Edward Ardizzone we were able to source every single correct version of the eight records. When it transpired that the version of Vivaldi's Four Seasons by The Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields sent to us by the Gramophone Library was from 1975, rather than Ardizzone's choice of from 1970, we sourced the right version from our own collection. So we've paid considerable attention to getting the details right and are confident that, some 40 years on, this is as close to the original programme as possible.

For Quentin Poole, Desert Island Discs youngest-ever contributor in 1970, we were lucky to have an off-air recording sent in by Quentin himself however the audio quality needed improving. In addition, one music choice and the signature tune were missing so these were added back in and made mono to match the original.

In the case of James Mason's 1981 programme, the BBC's copy featured none of the musical choices and no reference to his luxury or book, whilst the British Library had a full off-air recording from an enthusiast but of poorer sound quality. We decided it was best to offer the listener the full programme albeit in less than perfect quality.

For most of the older programmes a certain amount of noise reduction and audio restoration was applied to remove clicks, splats, speed variations, hums and whistles to improve the listening experience, but there is still a small amount of unwanted noise in the final recording.

Looking ahead, if anyone has private copies of past Desert Island Discs in their personal archives, the BBC would be pleased to hear from them via the Contact Us form which can be found on every castaway page on the website.

Archive on 4: After the Dictator

2011-10-28T14:00:00+00:00

Ed's note: Following recent events in Libya this Saturday's Archive on 4 explores what happens after dictators leave power - PM.

Portrait of Chaiman Mao Tse Tung on the wall of the Forbidden City, 2001

Last Thursday at 12.52pm, a BBC Breaking News alert popped up in my email:

"An official in Libya's ruling NTC says ex-leader Muammar Gaddafi was captured as his hometown Sirte fell, though the news is unconfirmed."

A day later, it had been confirmed that Gaddafi was not only captured but had been shot in the head - and around a table in Broadcasting House were sat a team of Radio Documentaries Unit and World Service producers and editors, Radio 4's commissioning editor Mohit Bakaya and BBC reporter Owen Bennett-Jones.

As the news that the dictator was dead sank in, World Service documentaries editor Jeremy Skeet contacted Mohit Bakaya to suggest Radio 4 and the World Service team up and make a programme about what happens when dictators fall.

Great, said Mohit, let's put that out on Saturday week.

Simon Watts, the World Service producer charged with delivering a complex, hour-long documentary in a week, looked a tiny bit tense.

But together we hammered out a central theme to guide the programme: how does the way the dictator falls shape the future of the country they leave behind?

Is it better to kill them quickly - like Gaddafi or Nicolai Ceaucescu in Romania in 1989, or try to try them - like Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic?

What if they face neither fate, but hover in the background for years afterwards, like Pol Pot or Pinochet? Or just die peacefully in bed like Mao and Stalin?

Over the last week, Simon and Owen, assisted by production trainee Leo McGann, have been delivering a programme that attempts an answer to these questions.

They have corralled a huge range of BBC archive, not least from the World Service's 'Witness' programme. Including an interview with an Iraqi who confronted Saddam Hussein in his prison cell.

He recounts having to suppress the desire to kill the newly-captured tyrant there and then, for the good of his country - and how he insisted to himself that Saddam had to be put in the dock instead.

Owen has interviewed historian Richard Overy, foreign correspondents Mark Doyle, Isabel Hilton and Misha Glenny and ex-State Department staffer Nick Burns (with one more historian, Andrew Roberts, to go, as of Thursday lunchtime).

And he's drawn too on his own recollections of reporting from Romania in the immediate aftermath of Ceaucescu's overthrow.

I think, by Saturday evening, we'll have made a clear, sharp account of how the dictator's downfall shapes what follows. Hopefully, if you hadn't read this, you wouldn't know it had taken only a week. And when Simon does his second Archive on 4, he may even get a fortnight...

Phil Tinline is an executive producer in the BBC Radio Documentaries Unit

After the Dictator goes out on Radio 4 at 8pm this Saturday 29 October, as well as on the World Service. A shorter version will go out at 3pm on Monday. It'll be available to listen to online shortly after transmission.

Tears in Perivale - Feedback in the archives

2011-09-23T12:45:00+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006slnx

What is the best way to recapture one's childhood?

My memory is notoriously selective and needs a prod if I am to venture off the well worn paths. Often that is provided by a smell. Whenever fresh tarmac is being laid on a road I linger half-intoxicated by the smell and the memory it evokes of my first day at school aged 4 and three quarters.

I even remember the precise point where the tarmac was being laid, the corner of Norfolk Road, Carlisle, in the year of our Lord 1951. An even more powerful stimulant is sound, which is why I found myself in tears this week in an industrial park in Perivale, Middlesex.

Where once the poets talked of flowing cornfields and John Betjeman lauded the Metro Line there is now the ever present smell of petrol fumes and the frequent noise of planes heading for Heathrow.

Across the Avenue, Perivale's 14th century wooden church, lying on a bank just above the River Brent, is a reminder of gentler days. In the nineteenth century its cemetery was a fashionable place for middle class Londoners to bring their loved ones to lie in rural seclusion.

The BBC's new archive centre is unlikely to win awards for architectural merit. Indeed to me it looks like an aircraft hanger, or a large shed. So why the tears?

Because inside is almost everything the BBC has ever broadcast including those programmes which lit up the rather grey 1950s, Hancock, Educating Archie, and a little later, Round the Horne, and to which I listened with my now dead parents.

Long-dead voices live here, together with those of present-day presenters like the author, whose early ventures into sound are worth forgetting.

At the archive I met Sarah Hayes, the BBC's controller of Information and Archive and Peter Skinner, the head of operations there. Typically I put my foot in it straight away by called their spanking new home a shed.

By the way in Feedback we also played some extracts from the archive including some of your requests. Here they are:

In case you did not recognise them, they were:

Listen with Mother - , Julia Lang
Brown Eyes Why Are You Blue? - The Savoy Orpheans
John Reith
Outbreak of war - Rt Hon Neville Chamberlain, 3rd September 1939
Launch of Radio 1, Tony Blackburn, 30th September 1967
The Falklands War, Brian Hanrahan, 1st May 1982
Brian Johnston and Jonathan Agnew, 9th August 1991

Roger Bolton presents Feedback

Listen again to this week's Feedback, produced by Karen Pirie, get in touch with the programme, find out how to join the listener panel or subscribe to the podcast on the Feedback web page.
Read all of Roger's Feedback blog posts.
Feedback is on Twitter. Follow @BBCR4Feedback.
The picture shows the Savoy Orpheans during an early BBC music broadcast in 1926. It's from the BBC's picture archive.

In Our Time: To download, keep and listen whenever you want

2011-09-14T11:50:00+00:00

I was surprised but obviously delighted when, seven years ago, I was told that In Our Time was to become the first BBC programme to be podcast - but, to be honest, I didn't quite know what it meant at the time. It turned out to mean a very great deal. Thus strikes the law of unexpected consequences once again.

So far it has been only new editions of the programme that have been podcast. But this week we've started podcasting our entire In Our Time archive.

From October 2008: "Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Dante's 'Inferno' - a medieval journey through the nine circles of Hell." Available now as a podcast to download and keep.

To date we have produced 517 editions of In Our Time. All of these are available to be downloaded - and so will every future programme. In brief, you can get hold of and keep the whole collection at home on your own computer to listen whenever you want.

It's become a library of the air.

When we started in 1998, the idea of being of such value was off the radar. The main idea was to survive the first six months with what seemed to be a rather overambitious notion that we could take the cleverest academics in the land, and let them loose on the most recondite subjects available, and hope to gain a respectable Radio 4 audience just after nine o'clock on a Thursday morning.

We underestimated the Radio 4 audience in those first few months - not in their intellectual reach or in their enthusiasm but in their numbers, and as time went on in their loyalty to this eclectic enterprise.

It now seems that we are becoming an encyclopaedia (I say "we" not in the Mrs Thatcher sense of "We are a grandmother" but "we" in the sense of "the succession of producers, researchers and myself"). There couldn't be a much better outcome, could there? We are asking people to come in and talk whose work furnishes the great written encyclopaedias, and who themselves are salami-slicers of encyclopaedias, and they are now being recycled into a soundipaedia. Can we claim that as a new word? The wizards of the website have divided these 500-plus programmes into different categories (science, religion, history, culture, philosophy) so that they're easy to sort through.

When I look at the range and see the way that the work has built up, I can, in an unwary moment, kid myself that there was some purpose at work in the early days. I'm afraid it wasn't so.

The basic idea, among those of us who did it, was to educate ourselves and to find subjects which tested us - therefore we needed to be at full stretch; or baffled us - therefore we were looking for clarity. Others were part of an initially loose but increasingly resolute attempt to lasso areas of knowledge not very often brought to a wider public.

I suppose one of the best examples of that is works from the great Arabic Courts of learning from the 8th to the 14th century, or the outer edges of science, which contain so many rich ideas, opaque to most of us (with very much me included) but available, it seems, through the generous minds of the academics who turn up on Thursdays from all four points of the United Kingdom and give us the cream of their knowledge with quite remarkable concision.

The wonderful thing about it, as far as I'm concerned, is that it is simply never-ending.

We have done quite a few programmes about the history of China, although I'd like to do many more. The same applies to India, while we have barely touched on South America, which we must do more of. We have been reasonably good on philosophy, but I'm glad to say that has spread around other programmes, and so you feel maybe we can move a little more heavily into other areas. The classics, especially the Greeks - well, once upon a time I wanted to call the programme "It all Began with the Greeks", or a phrase to that effect.

It did at one stage appear to be the case, and I was not even daunted when a formidable lady on the front-row pew of a church in Putney, when I was talking about IOT, said that if she heard the phrase "Let's go back to the Greeks" once more she'd lose the will to live. Nevertheless a few weeks later, when we did "go back to the Greeks", she dropped me a note to say she was still with us!

I think at the best these programmes can be thrilling - well they certainly bring a great deal of excitement to me. It's rather an experiment to see if their freshness and vivacity will endure in this sonic encyclopaedia (or whatever the word is) and linger as long as works in some of the great libraries of the past. That's asking an awful lot - but who knows?

Melvyn Bragg is the presenter of In Our Time

In Our Time returns this Thursday at 9am when Melvyn Bragg and his guests will be discussing the Hippocratic Oath.
The In Our Time homepage
The In Our Time podcast page: Get the latest episodes and exlore the In Our Time archive
Sign up for the In Our Time newsletter
Browse the In Our Time archive by genre, date, era and title
Dante's Inferno: The episode of In Our Time featured above

Eliza Manningham-Buller's second Reith Lecture: Security

2011-09-12T16:30:00+00:00

Editor's note: This Tuesday morning Radio 4 broadcasts Eliza Manningham-Buller's second Reith Lecture, Security, at 09.00 BST. It will be repeated on Saturday 17 September at 22.15 BST - PM.

In Security, recorded last week in Leeds, Baroness Manningham-Buller argues that the security and intelligence services in a democracy have a good record of protecting and preserving freedom.

During the lecture, she strongly condemns torture, and touches on the recent allegations about MI6's alleged activities in Libya. Her comments have already attracted a lot of attention, featuring on BBC news, in the Guardian and The Telegraph. Tony Blair told the Today programme on Saturday that he "profoundly" disagreed with her arguments about the post 9/11 world.

After the Tuesday transmission, you will be able to download the programme as a podcast and read a transcript on the Radio 4 website.

Again, as last week, during the broadcast we will be tweeting links to useful relevant content from the @BBC_Reith Twitter account, and will share some highlights via the @BBCRadio4 Twitter account. Thanks to those who have been using the hashtag #Reith to join the debate. You can also share your thoughts and reaction to the lecture here on the Radio 4 blog.

In the meantime, we are still offering a number of "Reith Extra" programmes for download via Radio 4's Documentary of the Week podcast. This week's programmes include a history of GCHQ,a two-part series tracing the Hunt for Bin Laden, and a File on 4 programme from 2007 about the challenges of trying to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

Radio 4 has also recently published the Reith archive, and you can explore more than 60 years of lectures on the Radio 4 website, where you can listen to the programmes and read the transcripts. You can download the previous Reith Lectures via the two archive podcasts 1948 to 1976 and 1977 to 2010.

The most popular downloads so far are Edward Said's 1993 lectures on the Representation of the Intellectual, which you can listen to or download, and the 1986 Reith Lectures by Scottish Judge Lord John McCluskey, Law, Justice and Democracy.

Jennifer Clarke is senior multiplatform producer, Radio Current Affairs

Some summer listening

2011-08-10T15:20:00+00:00

Editor's note: I asked Leigh, Radio 4's interactive editor, to share some ideas about things from the Radio 4 archive that listeners might enjoy over the summer and in particular programmes that they could download, put on their MP3 player or mobile phone to enjoy on their travels - PM.

One of the most highly appreciated services we offer on the Radio 4 website is archive programme collections. You can listen online to everything we broadcast for at least 7 days after transmission but we're able to make quite a number of our programmes available in perpetuity, and have started to build some bigger archive collections.

Highlights from the past year include:

The complete In Our Time archive in audio, dating back to 1998, sorted by subject
The complete Reith Lectures - over 60 years of lectures in audio and/or transcript
Desert Island Discs - the complete castaway choices database was launched in April with over 500 programmes available to listen and download
A History of the World in 100 objects - all 100 episodes in audio and transcript (podcasts here)
Bookclub - the complete archive, browseable by author

And we haven't stopped there. In the last few months, a little more under the radar, we've been building out some other programme audio archives back to around 2007, including:

The range of subjects and guests within these collections is an embarrassment of riches that will fill many happy weeks and months of listening. Radio 4 listeners won't need a recommendation from me to explore them. And there'll be more to come.

One way in which we can make this service even more useful is by making the audio portable. As a rule, more people choose to download our programmes than listen in real time via the website.

The advantages of downloading programmes are several:

the programmes are yours to keep forever
once downloaded you don't have to be online to listen to them
you can transfer them to portable and mobile devices and therefore you're not tied to a computer to listen

And I think that last point is increasingly important for digital audiences.

So we're starting to offer more of our archive content in this way, notably with the 500+ available editions of Desert Island Discs. There's no better holiday listening for speech radio fans so make sure you download some programmes to take with you on your mp3 players this summer.

The Reith Lectures and 100 Objects are also downloadable, as are up to 50 different programmes each week. Next up will be the complete In Our Time downloads in September (by popular request).

If you're new to downloading, it's an easy habit to start - here's an introduction.

Leigh Aspin is Interactive Editor at BBC Radio 4

Here's a selection of Radio 4 podcasts to download and take on holiday with you (find them all here) Ones marked with a * have more than one episode available to download:

Play of the Week (updates on Fridays)
Friday Night Comedy - Currently the latest episode of Chain Reaction. The News Quiz takes over from the 9th September.
Comedy of the Week - A different comedy every week
Documentary of the Week updated on Fridays
Books and Authors* - featuring Open Book, Bookclub and A Good Read. 61 episodes at the moment.
Desert Island Discs* - there are over 540 episodes of DID you can download. The most recent 42 are here and all available episodes can be found here and can be searched in a variety of ways.
Great Lives* - currently 22 episodes are available
In our Time* - currently 42 episodes are available
Material World* - currently 49 episodes are available
More or Less* - currently 23 episodes are available
Reith lectures* - This year's are here; 1948-1975 are here and 1976-2010 are available here.
The Film Programme* - currently 45 episodes are available
The Infinite Monkey Cage* - currently 10 episodes are available
Thinking Allowed* - currently 49 episodes are available
Caption from the archive: "The Archers (R4): 1959 01/09/1959 © BBC Picture Shows: Church Fete in Ambridge in the summer of 1959 - Irene Prador as Madame Garonne(extreme left), Michael Shaw as Charles Grenville (centre), Courtney Hope as MrsTurvey and Harry Oakes as Dan Archer(extreme right)"

Voices from the Old Bailey: Exploring the Old Bailey's online archive

2011-07-25T15:02:59+00:00

Most people, when they go to the Old Bailey Online look for a name, a place, or perhaps a crime.

As the largest collection of transcribed trial accounts on the web, the site is used by thousands of family and local historians searching for lost black sheep, and local villains.

It has also been mined for dramatic stories of fear and loathing, redemption and despair, and has formed the grist of dramas such as Garrow's Law. Australians looking for convict ancestors, dramatists keen to find a narrative arc in the tragedy of crime and punishment; and academic historians searching for the perfect illustrative anecdote, all visit the site in their thousands every day.

Amanda Vickery's new series of Voices from the Old Bailey, which started on BBC Radio 4 this week, forms a new and different way of making these courtroom tragedies speak to a modern audience. And what they are all looking for is the connection to the past that only comes with detail and emotion.

Family historians, for instance, all want a name and an occupation, an age and a physical description, but more than this they want to hear in recorded testimony the voice of an ancestor. And sometimes a single word is worth a thousand pictures.

Radio 4 listeners can explore the darker sides of their family trees by searching for criminal forebears too. If your surname was Burt, for example, you might search simply for the name "Burt" and find Samuel Burt, convicted of forgery. Modern day Burts can read their ancestor's eloquent plea to the court - he was an effective orator, but ended up being transported on the first fleet to Australia.

When I search the old Bailey's 127 million words, I always look for just those few expressions that cross the centuries.

I look for emotions, and when I find them, it seems as if all the fancy dress, and generations of difference immediately fall away in the face a simple feeling. When we were looking for trials that could bring the Old Bailey Proceedings to life on air that was my strategy. I searched for particular kinds of words and phrases: frightened, terror, 'out of my wits', 'shaking with fear', and what came up again and again, were trials in which the harrowing emotional experience of a single crime are described by the people who suffered it.

'Out of my wits', for instance, brings up 25 trials. In the end, we did not use any of these trials in the broadcasts, but among them was the trial of five men for assaulting William Wilson on Salt Petre Bank late one night in 1781. Knives were pulled and the threat was made to 'let his puddings out' - and leave him to die. That phrase, 'let his puddings out' even now makes me tense my stomach just a bit with anxiety. And in its turn 'puddings out', leads to two other trials in which a phrase drawn from butchery, was applied to first a man and then a woman. Word by word, emotion by emotion, and just as easily starting from an ancestor or a place as from a single word, the Old Bailey Online makes it possible to trace a line of continuity through the records from the seventeenth century to the twentieth.

I always say of the Proceedings, that all human life is there. And it is true that lords and beggars, shoemakers and laundresses can all be found among the thieves and their victims, but what I really mean is that every sensation from fear to joy, from pleasure to pain, everything that ties us directly to our predecessors and makes us part of 'human life' is there.

If you're inspired to delve into this criminal archive, start here at the Old Bailey Online homepage. The site includes a video tutorial, Getting Started, to help you navigate this rich source of archive, and a Guide to Searching.

Professor Tim Hitchcock is co-director of Old Bailey Online; London Lives and Connected Histories

You can hear cases from the Old Bailey archives on BBC Radio 4 each Wednesday morning for the next four weeks in the new series of Voices from the Old Bailey. It starts Wednesday 27th July at 9am with a collection of dramatic 18th century riots and continues with sexual subcultures, dastardly servants and an investigation into how just Georgian justice really was.
Visit The Old Bailey Online; London Lives (1690-1800 Crime, Poverty and Social Poverty) and Connected Histories (British History sources 1500-1900).
Follow Professor Tim Hitchcock, Amanda Vickery and BBC Radio 4 on Twitter.
Read Professor Tim Hitchcock's blog: Historyonics.

The great thinkers of the last 63 years - all in one place

2011-06-24T16:07:57+00:00

Rarely if ever can BBC Radio 4's Reith Lectures have caused such a stir as they have this year. What is more, this year the conversation has started before a word of Aung San Suu Kyi's lectures has been broadcast. (On Radio 4 at 9.00am on Tuesday 28 June.) On the Radio 4 website there will be full coverage of this year's series but in addition we have a significant new offer. To coincide with this year's series we have added hundreds of the lectures from the last 60 years.

You can now listen to or download more than 240 previous Reith lectures from the site. The collection includes every lecture from 1976 to 2010 and, apart from 1949 and 1950, there is at least one lecture for every year from the first in 1948. That is not all. We are building the collection of transcripts of the lectures, with only some from the late 1970s and 1980s left to add.

The archive is a journey through the great names and thinkers of the last 60 years. It includes Bertrand Russell, Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Hoggart, AH Halsey and JK Galbraith. At Radio 4 it is always slightly daunting to commission people to follow in such footsteps but in recent years the likes of Onora O'Neill and Daniel Barenboim have maintained the Reiths as one of the UK's most significant intellectual stages. Their work is online too.

There are sadly some lectures for which we have been unable to unearth the recordings. We know occasionally listeners have their own copies. So if you have a dusty tape somewhere do get in touch.

This archive release is an important stage of the plan to give listeners much more of Radio 4 by offering archive programmes online forever. We know how much it is appreciated. The In Our Time archive is one of the BBC's most highly rated sites. Desert Island Discs has already seen over three million programmes downloaded in two months. In addition to these headline strands, every week programmes are added to programme sites or to our collections. One of my favourites is the full set of Bookclubs from the start of the series in 1998. You can also now hear every edition of Great Lives.

We don't intend to stop at this, so look out for more collections in the coming months. You have also told us that you want to be able to take these programmes with you wherever you go so we will gradually be making more archive programmes available as downloads and podcast feeds as we have with the Reiths and Desert Island Discs. Do comment below to let us know what you would like to hear and we will bear your requests in mind as we plan the future.

Aung San Suu Kyi's first Reith Lecture will broadcast at 9.00am BST on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday, 28 June and will be repeated at 10.15pm BST on Saturday, 2 July. The second lecture will first broadcast at 9.00am BST on Tuesday, 5 July and will repeated at 10.15pm BST on Saturday, 9 July. During both broadcasts you will be able to join other listeners in a live blog, here on the Radio 4 Blog.

Andrew Caspari is Head of Speech Radio and Classical Music, Interactive at the BBC

Radio 4 Extra - June Whitfield interviewed: Take It From June

2011-06-02T17:27:00+00:00

As I rummaged in the BBC archive searching for programmes to celebrate June Whitfield's radio years, a thought popped into my head. Should the history of British radio and TV have a special new acronym - TBJ - Time Before June?

As you'll hear this Saturday on Radio 4 Extra June Whitfield jokes that her own CBE award really stands for 'caught before expiry'. Born in 1925, the remarkable fact is that her BBC career spans over 60 years.

Enyd Williams has directed June in many radio dramatisations, notably casting her as Miss Marple in the radio Agatha Christie mysteries. So who better to interview and talk to June about her radio years?

As we were going to meet June at BBC Broadcasting House reception in London, I could not help but think that June would've been standing in that very same grand space in 1947. That was the year she got her first BBC telegram, offering her first radio acting job. Incredibly, when we arrived, June was carrying her enormous, bulging scrapbooks - with that very telegram proudly and carefully placed at the start.

In the programme we follow her across the radio years, from her big break in 1953, when she joined comedy scriptwriting giants Frank Muir and Denis Norden on Take It From Here, helping to create radio's first dysfunctional family; to singing with Leslie Crowther and Ronnie Barker; trying to keep up with Frankie Howerd; jousting with Bob Monkhouse in Punch Line; to Roy Hudd in the News Huddlines and creating Agatha Christie's Miss Marple for the airwaves.

That list alone backs up Roy Hudd's affectionate title for June as the 'comic's tart'.

June's complete modesty is striking in the interview. June has worked with just about every British comedy great in the last 60 years and the overwhelming feeling that emerged as June talked was sympathy. Sympathy for the predicament and the perpetual pressure of expectation placed on the star of the show, which June says, she never was. She gives us an insight into this world when she talks about working alongside the troubled radio legend Tony Hancock.

Though June has had great success on television in programmes such as Terry and June, radio is still her true love.

June tells Enyd about when they tried to transfer The Glums to television but it wasn't the same.

June says radio has such an advantage over television: 'You make up your own pictures'.

Peter McHugh is the producer of Take It From June

Take it From June is on Radio 4 Extra this Saturday at 0900 and at 1900 and you can listen online for seven days after that.
Caption for the image reads: "June and Tony Hancock Hancock : The Blood Donor 01/01/1961 © BBC Picture shows - Tony Hancock and June Whitfield as the reception nurse."
There are more pictures of June Whitfield in the Radio 4 Flickr group.

Choosing your Desert Island Discs

2011-05-23T08:00:00+00:00

One desert island, only eight tracks of music to keep you company. What will you choose?

From today Kirsty Young is offering you a unique opportunity to take part in Desert Island Discs. Cast yourself away and share the eight tracks that you would take with you to a desert island.

All you have to do is go to the Desert Island Discs website, enter your eight tracks and nominate the one track you would save from the waves if the tropical sea threatened to carry off your selection.

Nominations will close at 2pm on Friday 3rd June and Kirsty will then reveal the listeners' choices in a special live celebration of Desert Island Discs on Radio 4 on Saturday 11th June at 9am.

If you search the Desert Island Discs archive you can find the choices of everyone who has been interviewed on the programme since it began in 1942. There are more than 2,850 castaways to search and over 500 episodes of the programme to listen to and download.

You can search by castaway or by music choice so you can check whose choices you share. Will you be like Sir Michael Caine, Elton John and Steve Coogan and choose Elgar's Enigma Variations? Or like Twiggy, Spike Milligan and Antonio Carluccio and choose Yesterday by The Beatles? Or will you choose a spoken word recording like Judi Dench, Noel Coward and Princess Grace of Monaco who all took some Shakespeare?

It doesn't have to be music or poetry - Ann Widdecombe chose the sound of a hippo, Matthew Pinsent chose cricket commentary. What is the soundtrack of your life? The tracks you can't live without - the tracks that will transport your imagination back home or back in time and lift your spirits in your island isolation?

The most popular track with castaways over the years is Beethoven's Symphony Number 9 in D Minor which has been chosen by 97 castaways including Martin Sheen, Paulo Coelho and Dr Susan Greenfield. The top ten most chosen tracks by castaways are all classical recordings. Will the listeners agree?

We also want to know why you've chosen these pieces. What's the story behind your soundtrack? The memories trapped in each track? We'll be featuring listener's stories on the website and in the live programme on the 11th June.

Cast yourself away at the Desert Island Discs website.

Alice Feinstein is the Editor of Desert Island Discs

Go to the Desert Island Discs website to enter your eight tracks and nominate the one track you would save from the waves if the tropical sea threatened to carry off your selection.
Picture caption: "Arena: Desert Island Discs 22/12/1981 © BBC Picture shows - Roy Plomley, presenter of 'Desert Island Discs'. On BBC2, Tuesday February 23 1982, Arena celebrates the 40th anniversary of one of the worlds longest-running series in broadcasting - Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. Here we can see Roy Plomley, who has presented the series since it started, relaxing on his 'desert island', specially built for Arena's programme."