#bbcradio4 — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #bbcradio4, aggregated by home.social.
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Oh, well, since YOU put it like THAT, this guy sounds COMPLETELY REASONABLE! 👍
interview 2026-09-07 1310ish
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(well, this was shit. will listen to the repeat later and decide if my assessment was fair.)
#BBCRadio4 #BBCStartTheWeek
#FrancisFukiyama #GordonBrown #BronwenMaddox -
(yet another look at UK education)
Comps
Archive on 4Financial Times columnist turned teacher Lucy Kellaway takes a personal journey through the education revolution launched fifty years ago to replace grammars and secondary moderns with comprehensives. The ambition was noble: the same opportunities for every child. But the story of Comps suggests that when lofty ideals collide with reality, things don’t always turn out as planned.
Lucy visits two very different models of comp trying to reconcile the history and their local demands and priorities, and speaks to three of the most influential politicians responsible for shaping today's state secondary school system - Lords Baker, Blunkett and Gove. She also discovers the deep roots of the tensions and challenges facing today's comps in a journey through a rich archive that charts the evolution of the comprehensive system in the last fifty years.
Producer: Jonathan BrunertShow less
57 minutesOn air
Today
20:00
BBC Radio 4
More episodes -
Writing Our Mothers
Archive on 4‘Mothers have such a weight of idealisation and expectation landed upon their bodies and their minds and what women writers can do is to take that apart and explore
its underbelly,’ says feminist writer Jacqueline Rose.Whether worshipped or vilified, treated as lifetime confidantes or rarely trusted, the mothers we meet when we write them are re-inventions. Some may be closer to the
truth than others. Many of them will have roots in the life experiences of the daughter-writer. Virginia Woolf, who lost her mother at the age of 13, said she was obsessed with writing her mother. Eventually she also argued that it was ‘the occupation of the woman writer to kill’ what she called ‘The Angel in the House’ – the perfect, self-sacrificing mother – who may well have been her own maternal influence.Drawing on interviews with Maya Angelou, we hear how for her to write her mother was to ‘write about a hurricane in its perfect power’. She describes how the influence of a mother who ‘abandoned’ her as a child forced her most urgent examinations of class, race and, importantly love. In another frank interview with Marguerite Duras from 1968, she describes writing as a search for connection with her raging and ‘mad’ mother. For Sylvia Plath, the process of writing about becoming a mother herself in the 1950s produced work of a psychic intensity rarely seen before.
What the archive ultimately reveals is that a mother, whether present or absent, loving or cruel, might be as formative an influence on a writer’s work, as in life. ‘When I read about motherhood, I want to be shaken loose from whatever limitations I have when I think about what that means,’ says the writer Siri Hustvedt.
With contributions from Susie Orbach, Jacqueline Rose, Kit de Waal and Siri Hustvedt, and narration from Amaka Okafor.
Produced by Sarah Cuddon
A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4Archive sources:
Desert Island Discs with Arundhati Roy (2017)
A Chance to Meet ... Edna O'Brien (1971)
Sylvia Plath, Peter Orr interview (1962)
Audre Lorde, Pacifica Radio Archives and Academy of American Poets www.poets.org
Maya Angelou, BBC News (1985)
Jeannette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (BBC, 1990) and Face To Face (BBC, 1994)
Marguerite Duras, Worn Out With Desire To Write (1985)
Toni Morrison, Brief Encounters (BBC, 2001)
Jackie Kay, Book of the Week (The Waters Company for BBC R4, 2015)
Elena Ferrante, Lying Lives of Adults (BBC, 2020)
Available now57 minutes
#ArundhatiRoy #EdnaOBrien
#SylviaPlath #AudreLorde
#MayaAngelou #JeannetteWinterson
#MargueriteDuras #ToniMorrison
#JackieKay #ElenaFerrante -
Mr Jefferson's Library (5 part series)
Michael Goldfarb visits the Library of Congress and Thomas Jefferson's home at Monticello in Virginia to see how Jefferson's reading shaped the beginnings of American history.
#MichaelGoldfarb
#LibraryOfCongress
#ThomasJefferson
#Monticello#BBCRadio4 #BookOfTheWeek #BBCBOTW #BBCBookOfTheWeek
(15 minute episodes) (very fast reading presentation style)
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BBC "In Touch" #BBCRadio4 #BBCInTouch #BlindMastodon
Online Safety Act - verification services for those with vision issues
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@davidallengreen Actually…
The fabulous BBC Radio 4 series Cabin Pressure has the definitive answer on this https://youtu.be/yl22NCgg_CU
#CabinPressure #BBCRadio4