Tag Archives: BBC Radio 3

Hello Again

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Things have been a bit quiet on this blog for the past couple of years, mainly because, as my last post indicated, with the publication of Storylistening in November 2021, most of my public activities have been focused around our storylistening work. They are all recorded on the book’s website, rather than here, so please do pop across to that to find out what I’ve mainly been up to for the past 24 months! But after deciding to take a step back from radio broadcasting and other kinds of public activities in 2018 to focus on academic research, I’ve been gradually making my way back out there. Over the past few years I’ve contributed to BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking programmes on the future (as Covid swept across the world), John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, Karel Čapek’s play The Makropulos Affair, the history of dystopias, and Philip K Dick’s weird and wonderful biographical novel Valis. It’s been a pleasure to be back in the studio at Broadcasting House where I always feel so at home. I also very much enjoyed writing and presenting a BBC Radio 3 essay on an author I’ve become slightly obsessed with, Philip Wylie. His life and work is so full of contradictions, he’s there everywhere you look when you start poking around in mid-twentieth century US popular culture, and some of his later books in particular are starkly relevant in today’s climate crisis, and yet very few people have heard of him. Find out more in my essay on him here.

Easing into in person events again in 2022, I also fulfilled a life long ambition of meeting Jeanette Winterson. I’m always reminded of the line in Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary when I am about to meet someone I’ve admired from afar – Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en rests aux mains – but I had nothing to fear in meeting Jeanette. We bonded in the green room of AI UK 22 over our fellow northeness, and I very much enjoyed our interview focusing on her new collection of essays, 12 Bytes, encompassing the future of AI and good BIG questions about humanity, art, religion and the way we live and love! As I told Jeanette, she is (at least partially) responsible for my academic career – I read the word ‘palimpsest’ in Written on the Body, didn’t know what it meant, looked it up in the dictionary, and my PhD and first book were conceived. The rest, as they say, is history. The pages of this website are now being updated to bring the public strand of that history up to date, and I’ll endeavour to keep them so alongside the storylistening page as I enter what feels like a new and exciting phase of that career.

Instant Expert – Penguin Launches New Generation Thinkers Audiobook

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Just over nine years ago, whilst digging a new vegetable path in our Scottish garden and keeping a watchful eye on my 16 month old and 3 year old, I received the news that I’d been selected as a 2013 New Generation Thinker. It was the beginning of a journey that it is no exaggeration to say changed my life. I’d already discovered a love of radio broadcasting thanks to some early work with BBC Radio Scotland for which I’ll always remain grateful. But it was the NGT scheme that led me to BBC Radio 3 and helped me to develop that passion, and learn the skills of a new trade. Interestingly, it was the move to Cambridge not (or at least not directly) the NGT scheme that led me to Radio 4. I was talent scouted by the mother of a prospective student attending my 2014 Open Day lecture, who also happened to be the wonderful Head of Books at Radio 4. She was actually a little disappointed to discover that I’d already made my radio debut and she hadn’t been the one to discover me! There followed many years of joyful, stimulating and exciting radio programme making, from my Radio 4 Open Book Close Reading feature to a series I will always treasure, Literary Pursuits for Radio 3, to my Radio 4 journey to Mars via Arizona! BBC Broadcasting house became one of my favourite places to be, and is still home to some of my favourite people. It was a very hard decision a few years ago to step away from my radio work in order to give more time to my family and release a little of the professional pressure of pursuing an academic career while making radio programmes at the same time.

Having just checked and returned the proofs for my new book, and starting to raise my eyes again to the world afresh after the intense effort to bring it to fruition amongst all the many challenges of the pandemic, I am hit again by the sense of how much I miss broadcasting. So it is with both delight and a little misty-eyed nostalgia that I see Penguin has just launched an audiobook of radio essays by the first 100 New Generation Thinkers. ‘Instant Expert’ gathers together a whole array of brilliant and inspiring journeys of the mind from across the arts, literary studies, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond. My first radio essay features there as Chapter 27, and I remember how much fun it was in the hall at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead to dim the lights and take the audience on a tour of science fiction. All aboard the Wombcraft! With the new book coming out in November, the transition to Professor Dillon at the beginning of October, and a major collaborative research project drawing to an official close in December, it feels like a time of change is upon me. I don’t know what the next year or so has in store for me, but I hope that it includes a return to the airwaves, as well as greater happiness and health for us all.

Literary Pursuits Audiobook!

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I was very sad to walk away from my BBC Radio 3 documentary series Literary Pursuits back in June 2019. Although it was the right decision at the time both personally and professionally, I still miss working with my amazing producer Sara Conkey, the creative and collaborative nature of the programme, and the chance to meet such generous interviewees, like Jean Rhys’ editor Diana Athill (now sadly passed away) and William Golding’s daughter Judy Carver, to name just two.

Sara and I both remain very proud of the series and the episodes we made, so it’s great to see that an audiobook collection of some of the highlights of the series, plus the first episode by the new producer-presenter team, is now available.

BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking – Future Thinking

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As we contend with the uncertainty that the pandemic has brought to our lives, BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking asked me to take part in a programme dedicated to thinking about the future, both under our specific coronavirus conditions, and in general. The programme was one of their first recorded with participants all contributing remotely, huddled in the smallest spaces we have in our homes – although the sound is best if you’re under a duvet, or have at least tried to pad the walls with one, I find that that’s not necessarily always most conducive to clear thinking! But we all tried our best and, despite everything, ended up on a surprisingly hopeful note about what the future might hold…

Time Travelling on BBC Radio 3’s Essential Classics

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woman-3303560_1280I have become a time traveller. Not literally, unfortunately, but in name at least, as I join the team of Time Travellers on BBC Radio 3’s Essential Classics. Time Travellers is a fun feature which goes out Monday to Friday at about 10.10am, in which presenters pique listeners’ interest with a quirky slice of cultural history. I’ve told stories about how Dorothy Parker’s ashes ended up at the Baltimore Headquarters of the NAACP, how one of Samuel Beckett’s ghost stories was rejected for being too creepy, and, one of my favourites, how George Bernard Shaw is responsible for Amazon’s Echo being gendered female, even though she doesn’t know why. More stories from me during the course of 2018; in the meantime, go here for some of the best journeys of the Time Travellers team.

Pursuing the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and My Hyde

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1600px-Dr_Jekyll_and_Mr_Hyde_poster_edit2My BBC Radio 3 documentary series, Literary Pursuits, continues this Sunday with a rollicking investigation into the story behind the writing of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Recording took us from Edinburgh to Oxford and at one point required retracing Stevenson’s childhood footsteps with the help of SatNav! I taught Jekyll and Hyde for many years when at the University of St Andrews, but I have to say that it was only through making this documentary that I fully came to understand all its many layers. People often ask me what the relationship is between my academic work and my broadcasting – the answer is that it’s a symbiotic one. I couldn’t make the radio programmes that I want to make without my academic expertise, but the influence, effect and benefit is never just in that direction. I always learn so much from my radio work, both in terms of new knowledge acquired, but also in terms of that for some reason “dreaded” thing, transferable skills. Radio is through and through both a collaborative and creative endeavour, and my communication, team work, and written skills are so much stronger for it. They’re all skills that us academics could do with strengthening every so often!

John Berger: Ways of Listening, BBC Radio 3

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I’ve just spent a very happy couple of days in Bristol scripting and recording BBC Radio 3’s John Berger: Ways of Listening, a three hour celebration of his life and work to be broadcast on Radio 3 on Sunday 23rd July from 8.30pm. It’s a symphony of delights including conversation with those who knew him well, a broadcast of the 1997 radio dramatisation of To The Wedding (my favourite of his novels), and selections from his best bits on TV and radio. It’s been a pleasure to immerse myself in his work again (and by goodness, is there a lot of it). If you’ve never encountered him before (my Mum hadn’t!), Ways of Seeing is the place to start – all four episodes of this groundbreaking 1972 series are available on YouTube. A shout out here as well, for the unsung heroes of radio – the producers. Tim Dee is putting all this together, a man of wisdom, skill and infinite patience. Go check out his work too.

Literary Pursuits: E.M. Forster’s Maurice

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Photo Credit: PicNik Studios, Cambridge

Photo Credit: PicNik Studios, Cambridge

Literary Pursuits returned to the BBC Radio 3 airwaves in July with Episode 5 on E. M. Forster’s secret book Maurice. With the Forster archives on my doorstep at King’s College Cambridge, I didn’t have to travel far for this one, but the book itself had a remarkable journey from Cambridge to America, passed hand to hand by men risking imprisonment to transport it from Forster to Christopher Isherwood. I start with this journey in order to discover the wonderful and moving story behind this seminal text in the history of gay literature.

Hey Hay!

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On Sunday 28th May, I had the pleasure and the privilege to present a special edition of BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking programme – Writing and Rewriting the Past – live at the Hay Festival, as part of the BBC’s line-up for the 2017 event. Sebastian Barry, Jake Arnold and Madeline Thien joined me to talk about historical fiction in the age of “alternative facts”. It was a deeply stimulating, sometimes moving, discussion, with all in agreement that Madeleine stole the show. If you haven’t read her novel, shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and 2017 Bailey’s Prize for fiction, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, go and seek it out now – you’ll be glad you did. The programme was broadcast on Thursday 1 June at 10pm on BBC Radio 3 and is available here as an Arts and Ideas download.

And so I’m back, from outer space…

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On location, Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Arizona. A rare moment of getting to hold the kit for a photo op as the roof of the observatory is opened.

On location, Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Arizona. A rare moment of getting to hold the kit for a photo op as the roof of the observatory is opened.

After 6 months in solitary academic confinement, and with The Book triumphantly written, the beginning of 2017 has seen me return to life beyond my study with renewed enthusiasm and vigour. I’ve spent the past few months steeped in the Martian imaginings of our greatest writers and scientists for a BBC Radio 4 documentary on mankind’s romance with the red planet, for which I had the great if exhausting pleasure of a weekend trip to Mars’ Earth analogue, Arizona. We visited Percival Lowell’s Flagstaff observatory to learn more about how it all began, and then descended to Phoenix to talk about where we are now, with contemporary Mars scientists at Arizona State University. There may also have been a morning spent barsooming around the Arizona desert – as close to Mars as I’m ever going to get – imagining encounters with magnificent and fearsome six-limbed Tharks. And if that sounds a little frivolous, I can assure you that it was actually very illuminating: standing on red rock, looking across the barren desert to the dust clouds on the distant horizon, it suddenly made sense why that landscape inspired the original literary visionary of Mars – Edgar Rice Burroughs – whose experiences on those plains and encounters with their native inhabitants shaped his Martian imaginings. The programme will be broadcast as part of Radio 4’s Martian Festival at the beginning of March – more details to follow.

I also had the pleasure this week of a stimulating hour’s conversation with SF writers Roz Kaveney and Aliette de Bodard for an episode of Radio 4’s Beyond Belief on religion and science fiction, which will be broadcast on Monday 13th March. And, to knock a little realism into me, next month I’ll start recording my new series of Literary Pursuits by investigating the story behind the story of E. M. Forster’s posthumously published Maurice. Fortunately, neither interplanetary nor transatlantic travel is necessary to get started on that investigation, since a treasure trove of Forster’s papers sits on my doorstep in King’s College Cambridge’s modern archives.