Free Thinking

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The Radiophonic Workshop Aug 06, 2020

Show notes

The BBC Radiophonic workshop was founded in 1958 by Desmond Briscoe and Daphne Oram. This group of experimental composers, sound engineers and musical innovators provided music for programmes including The Body in Question, Horizon, Quatermass, Newsround, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Chronicle and Delia Derbyshire's iconic Doctor Who Theme before being shut down by Director General John Birt in 1998. Tying into the 2020 celebration of classic Prom concerts, this episode of Free Thinking is being rebroadcast

It was recorded in 2014, as the Workshop prepared to release an album, and tour the UK, Matthew Sweet brought together Radiophonic Workshop members Dick Mills, Paddy Kingsland, Roger Limb, Peter Howell, and Mark Ayres to reflect on the days and nights they spent in the workshop, coaxing ageing machines into otherworldly life, and pioneering electronic music. Also in the programme, producer and former drummer with The Prodigy Kieron Pepper, Oscar winning Gravity composer Steven Price, Vile Electrodes, and Matt Hodson, on the influence the Radiophonic Workshop had on them.

Producer: Laura Thomas

Wole Soyinka's writing Jul 29, 2020

Show notes

Novelist Ben Okri, playwright Oladipo Agboluaje and academic Louisa Egbunike join Matthew Sweet to look at the influential writing of Nigerian playwright and author Wole Soyinka - and specifically at his play 1975 Death and the King's Horseman. In 1986 he became the first African author to be given the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has worked teaching at many universities in the USA, and began playwriting after studying at University College Ibadan, and then at Leeds University and working as a play reader for the Royal Court Theatre.

You can find a playlist of discussions devoted to Landmarks of Culture on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01jwn44 A BBC TV documentary about the African novel presented by David Olusoga is screening in August.

Extract from Death and the King's Horseman by Wole Soyinka features Danny Sapani as Elesin. Produced by Pauline Harris for the BBC. First broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 13th July 2014

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Bernard-Henri Lévy, Stella Sandford, Homi K Bhabha Jul 28, 2020

Show notes

The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy has written a philosophical take on the current pandemic and what it tells us about society. He talks with Stella Sandford, Director of the Society for European Philosophy in the UK and author of How to Read Beauvoir, whose own research looks at sex, race and feminism, and with Homi Bhabha, the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. The Virus in the Age of Madness by Bernard-Henri Lévy is out now. You can find a philosophy playlist on the Free Thinking programme website featuring discussions including panpsychism, Boethius, Isaiah Berlin, the quartet of C20th British women philosophers https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07x0twx You can also find Prof Homi K Bhabha giving a lecture on memory and migration recorded in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0005gt9 Producer: Ruth Watts

Anne Applebaum, Ingrid Bergman, Herland Jul 23, 2020

Show notes

Anne Applebaum's new book The Twilight of Democracy has the subtitle The failure of democracy and the parting of friends. She talks to Anne McElvoy about what happened when she tried to connect up with past friends whose politics are now different to her own. The American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman is most famous now for her short story The Yellow Wallpaper. Will Abberley tells us about her view of fashion and why women should not seek to stand out because a focus on their appearance was counterproductive to them gaining more public power. Gilman conjured a female utopia in her 1915 book Herland. And 2020 New Generation Thinker Sophie Oliver from the University of Liverpool writes us a postcard about the actress Ingrid Bergman and the way she and her would-be biographer Bessie Breuer tried to carve out a different public image for a female star in a novel Breuer published in 1957 called The Actress.

Will Abberley's book is called Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture You might be interested in the Essay Series Women Writers to Put Back on the Bookshelf which looked at Yolande Mukagasana, Storm Jameson, Margaret Oliphant, Lady Mary Wroth and Charlotte Smith https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000fwff and this Essay about another feminist utopia in the writing of Sarah Scott https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b7hrw4

You can find previous Free Thinking conversations with Anne Applebaum to download as Arts & Ideas podcasts on Marxism https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b0x6m0 and Russian Nationalism https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b094f9p0

Producer: Ruth Watts

Dada and the power of Nonsense Jul 22, 2020

Show notes

Subversion in art and writing and a project to re-imagine Dada. Curator Jade French, artist Jade Montserrat, writer Lottie Whalen and 2020 New Generation Thinker Noreen Masud are in conversation with Shahidha Bari.

You can find more about today's guests and their research at https://jademontserrat.com/https://www.jadefrench.co.uk/research http://www.takedadaseriously.com/http://lucywritersplatform.com/author/lottie-whalen/https://www.dur.ac.uk/english.studies/staff/?id=17758

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year to use their research to make radio.

In the Free Thinking archives you can find a playlist featuring artist interviews and discussions https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p026wnjl Radio 3 broadcast a ten part series looking at the life of Arthur Cravan called The Escape Artist https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000djhy

Producer: Robyn Read

Anne Applebaum, Ingrid Bergman, Herland Jul 22, 2020

Show notes

Producer: Ruth Watts

New Thinking:Nature Writing Jul 15, 2020

Show notes

Gilbert White was born on July 19th 1720 at his grandfather's vicarage in Hampshire. His Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789) influenced a young Charles Darwin and he's been called England's first ecologist. Dafydd Mills Daniel from the University of Oxford tracks his influence on contemporary debates about the impact of man on the planet and the beginnings of precise and scientific observations about birds and animals. Dr Pippa Marland from the University of Leeds runs the Landlines project https://landlinesproject.wordpress.com/ and researches the way farming has been depicted in British literature. She has co-edited a collection of Essays for Routledge called Walking, Landscape and Environment. And Lucy Jones is the author of Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild. She talks about research into health and nature and women writers including Christiane Ritter. Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough hosts.

This conversation is part of a series showcasing new academic research which are made available as New Thinking podcasts on the BBC Arts & Ideas stream. They are put together with assistance from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK research and innovation. https://ahrc.ukri.org/favouritenaturebooks/

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC and the AHRC to work with early career academics and find opportunities in broadcasting to share their research. Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough and Dafydd Mills Daniel have both come through the scheme.

The Green Thinking playlist on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07zg0r2 includes a re-reading of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0005gwk and interviews with Elizabeth Jane Burnett about her poems about soil, an Essay about Charlotte Smith and an interview with Chris Packham

Producer: Robyn Read

Magic Jul 14, 2020

Show notes

Matthew Sweet delves into the deep history of magic, its evolution into religion and science and its continuing relevance in the 21st century. Joining his coven are novelist and historian Kate Laity, Professor of European Archaeology at Oxford University Chris Gosden, Jessica Gossling who's one of the leaders of the Decadence Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London and John Tresch, Professor of the History of Science and Folk Practice at the Warburg Institute.

The History of Magic - From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present by Chris Gosden is out now.

Chastity Flame by K.A. Laity is available now.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

How do we build a new masculinity ? Jul 13, 2020

Show notes

Artist and photographer Sunil Gupta, authors CN Lester (Trans Like Me) and Tom Shakespeare (The Sexual Politics of Disability), and Barbican curator Alona Pardo join Matthew Sweet in a discussion inspired by the Barbican exhibition called Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography which has this week re-opened to visitors. They debate whether the old construct of masculinity in our culture is broken? As new ideas and thinking enter the debate, what is essential and what we can do away with as we look to build a new masculinity?

The exhibition now runs until August 23rd.

You can find other Free Thinking discussions looking at identity and masculinity The Changing Image of Masculinity discussed by JJ Bola, Derek Owusu & Ben Lerner https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b0mx Beards, Listening, Masculinity https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0833ypd Jordan B Peterson https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b3fk63 Can there be multiple versions of me https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09wvlxs TV presenter and campaigner June Sarpong, performer Emma Frankland, GP and author Gavin Francis and philosopher Julian Baggini discuss the changing self with Anne McElvoy

The consolation of philosophy and stories Jul 09, 2020

Show notes

The Roman statesman Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy around the year 524 when he was incarcerated. It advises that fame and wealth are transitory and explores the nature of happiness and belief. Former Bishop of Edinburgh Richard Holloway has been wrestling with the way we understand belief. He joins Professor Seth Lerer and New Generation Thinker Kylie Murray in a discussion chaired by Matthew Sweet.

Richard Holloway's new book is called Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe. Dr Kylie Murray, Fellow in English and Scottish Literature at Cambridge who has identified a Boethius manuscript as Scotland's oldest non-biblical book. Her own book The Making of the Scottish Dream-Vision is out shortly. Seth Lerer is Distinguished Professor and as Dean of Arts and Humanities at UC, Sand Diego and his books include Shakespeare's Lyric Stage, Inventing English A Portable History of the Language, Childrens' Literature A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter and Boethius and Dialogue.

You can find more conversations about religious belief from guests including Mona Siddiqui, Karen Armstrong, Richard Dawkins, Rabbi Sachs in this playlist https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03mwxlp And a Free Thinking playlist on Philosophy includes discussions about St Augustine, Nietzsche, Camus, Isiah Berlin, Bryan Magee, Mary Midgely and Iris Murdoch https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000r9b

Producer: Robyn Read

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