Free Thinking

Latest Episodes:

The future of theatre debate Jun 12, 2020

Show notes

Can our theatrical landscape survive financially, and how might it need to creatively adapt to survive post pandemic? As part of the Lockdown Theatre Festival, Anne McElvoy's panel features: Bertie Carvel - actor and executive producer of Lockdown Theatre Festival, whose roles include Rupert Murdoch in Ink, Miss Trunchbull in Matilda The Musical, and Simon in BBC One drama Doctor Foster. Amit Lahav – founder of Gecko, the internationally-touring physical theatre company based in Ipswich. Eleanor Lloyd – theatre producer, whose West End hits include Emilia, Nell Gwynn, and 1984. Roy Alexander Weise – Joint Artistic Director of Manchester Royal Exchange, awarded an MBE for services to drama. The discussion also include playful, thoughtful contributions from theatre makers including Inua Ellams, Tamara Harvey, Emma Rice, Dominic Cavendish, Bertrand Lesca, Tim Etchells, David Lockwood and Selina Thompson and an interview with Caroline Dinenage MP

Production: Jack Howson and Robyn Read

Lockdown Theatre will feature four plays that had their runs cut short: The Mikvah Project by Josh Azouz and originally showing at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, Love Love Love by Mike Bartlett recently revived for Lyric, Hammersmith Theatre, Rockets And Blue Lights by Winsome Pinnock - sadly suspended before its world premiere planned at Manchester’s Royal Exchange, and Shoe Lady by E.V. Crowe - cut short into its run at the Royal Court Theatre - Produced by Jeremy Mortimer, a Reduced Listening production for Radio 3 and Radio 4 and available on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08fw06m

In the Free Thinking archives you can find discussions including Dramatising Democracy with James Graham, Paula Milne Michael Dobbs and Trudi-Ann Tierney https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04yb7k6 Meera Syal and Tanika Gupta on dramatising Anita and Me https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06gt257 Is British Culture Getting Weirder? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000346m

Failure and female friendship Jun 10, 2020

Show notes

How do you cope with a sense of failure? Michèle Roberts has been Booker shortlisted and has 12 novels under her belt but her latest book is a clear eyed account of a year spent rewriting after having a novel rejected. What sustained her in part were her female friends and cooking. Lara Feigel is the author of acclaimed non fiction books and her first novel takes the template of Mary McCarthy's 1963 novel about female friendship and examines the lives of women now set against the backdrop of the publishing world. Alexandra Reza has been thinking about the place of the kitchen in novels such as Maryse Condé’s Morsels and Marvels, Marie N’Diaye’s The Cheffe, Calixthe Beyala’s How to cook your husband the African way, and Sarah Maldoror’s Pudding for Constance. Shahidha Bari presents.

Michèle Roberts's latest book is called Negative Capability. You can find her talking to Free Thinking about smell and her novel The Walworth Beauty https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08n24f5

Lara Feigel's novel is called The Group. You can hear her in Free Thinking discussions about Doris Lessing https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09tml77 and a debate about Fiction of 1946 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07wrq03

Alexandra Reza is a 2020 New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year to turn their research into radio.

Producer: Robyn Read

Dickens Jun 09, 2020

Show notes

Mathew Sweet with Linda Grant, Laurence Scott & Lucy Whitehead. Dickens died on June 9th 1870. In 1948, the critic FR Leavis published the Great Tradition and included only one Dickens novel but that same year saw the film of Oliver Twist by David Lean. Our panel have been re-reading novels including Bleak House, Martin Chuzzlewit and Great Expectations, looking at a form of Dickens fan fiction following his death, the changes in literary fashion and the way his work connects with the present day.

Linda Grant is the author of books including A Stranger City, The Dark Circle and When I Lived in Modern Times. Laurence Scott is the author of The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World and Picnic Comma Lightning. He is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. Lucy Whitehead is at the University of Cardiff studying biographies of Dickens and the art of Graingerising.

You might be interested in this conversation about Our Mutual Friend in which Philip Dodd talks with Iain Sinclair, Sandy Welch, Rosemary Ashton & Jerry White https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0180f5k and a special edition of Radio 3's curated selection of Words and Music featuring readings from Dickens' diaries and letters by Sam West is being broadcast on Sunday June 14th and available for 28 days on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006x35f

Producer: Robyn Read

New Thinking: Tackling Modern Slavery Jun 07, 2020

Show notes

Naomi Paxton looks at the impact of the 2015 Modern Slavery Act, talking to researchers Katarina Schwarz and Alicia Kidd who are trying to measure and improve its effectiveness.

Katarina Schwarz from the Rights Lab at Nottingham University works with the Wilberforce Institute at the University of Hull on a project looking into what makes people from particular countries vulnerable to being trafficked and exploited, including in the UK.

Over the past five years, over 75% of people identified as potential victims of modern slavery in the UK represent only ten nationalities. The top 20 nationalities make up over 90% of referrals to the authorities. Rights Lab and Wilberforce Institute are working on research that interrogates the legal, policy, economic and social situation in these top 20 countries.

The Wilberforce Institute at the University of Hull, together with partners, is working on a project to develop a package of workshops targeted at front line practitioners, businesses, recruitment agencies and NGOs in local areas across the UK. Rather than relying on often dry and theoretical traditional workshops raising awareness on forms of modern slavery, the workshops will be based on real life situations. Alicia Kidd is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute working on this training project.

These projects are part of the work done through the Modern Slavery Policy and Evidence Centre. This episode of Free Thinking is put together in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI as one of a series of discussions focusing on new academic research also available to download as New Thinking episodes on the BBC Arts & Ideas podcast feed. You can find the whole collection here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90

Producer: Robyn Read

Robin Askwith Jun 03, 2020

Show notes

Robin Askwith experienced isolation as a child with polio. In a conversation with Matthew Sweet, he reflects on a career running from the Confessions sex comedies to arthouse cinema working with directors including Lindsay Anderson and Pier Paolo Pasolini. His first film role was playing the schoolboy, Keating, in the film if.... and his most recent TV role has seen him appear on Coronation Street.

Producer: Robyn Read

Revisit: Tokyo Story Jun 02, 2020

Show notes

Actor Richard Wilson, Professor Naoko Shimazu and film critic Larushka Ivan-Zadeh join Rana Mitter to look at this cinematic classic which was one of the 53 films made by Yasujiro Ozu before his death in 1963. Tokyo Story follows an elderly couple who go to visit their busy grown up children and their widowed daughter-in-law. It is being rereleased this month by the BFI as part of their season of Japanese Film – the Ozu collection goes on BFI Player on 5 June (with 25 titles available) and TOKYO STORY is released on BFI Blu-ray on 15 June.

You can find more on their website www.bfi.org.uk/japan You might also be interested in the Free Thinking playlist on Japanese culture which includes discussions about the Kurosawa films Rashomon and Seven Samurai https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0657spq

And if you want more discussions about significant cultural landmarks from The Tin Drum, This Sporting Life and 2001 to novels by Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and George Orwell we have a playlist of landmarks too https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01jwn44

Producer: Laura Thomas

Revisit: Rowan Williams and Simon Armitage May 28, 2020

Show notes

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has written about Auden, Dostoevsky and tragedy. At Hay Festival he talks to poet Simon Armitage about the imprint of landscapes in Yorkshire, West Wales, and the Middle East, the use of dialect words and reinterpreting myths. Chaired by Rana Mitter.

Books by Rowan Williams include Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction and The Tragic Imagination. He is Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Books by Simon Armitage include The Unaccompanied, Flit, Selected Poems, Walking Home, Travelling Songs, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Homer's Odyssey. He is now the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. You can find out more from his website https://www.simonarmitage.com/

A playlist featuring other conversations and in depth interviews with writers is available on the Free Thinking website with episodes free to download as Arts & Ideas podcasts https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04ly0c8 and you can find more programmes from this year's online Hay Festival https://www.hayfestival.com/home

Producer: Fiona McLean

Sarah Perry May 27, 2020

Show notes

Matthew Sweet talks to author Sarah Perry about her gothic imagination, writing about religion, rationalism and disease in novels including The Essex Serpent, After Me Comes The Flood and Melmoth. Recorded from her home in Norwich, Sarah discusses her experience of these times as someone who has an auto-immune condition, her interest in comets and the way she used sewing to overcome a temporary inability to write.

You can hear more from authors in the Norfolk area on the website of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival https://nnfestival.org.uk/

There is a collection of in depth interviews with guests including Zadie Smith, Mark Haddon, Sebastian Faulks, Marilynne Robinson and other authors on the Free Thinking website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04ly0c8

Sarah Perry can be found discussing her novel Melmoth in detail in this episode of Free Thinking called Sarah Perry, Spookiness and Fear https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000kk2 and she discusses the Essex Serpent in this episode Still Loving Victoriana Jokes and All https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b081tkr7

Producer: Robyn Read

Revisit: My Body Clock is Broken May 21, 2020

Show notes

Jay Griffiths, Vincent Deary, Louise Robinson and Matthew Smith discuss our mental health.

How does depression affect our sense of time and the rhythms of daily life? Our body clocks have long been seen by scientists as integral to our physical and mental health - but what happens when mental illness disrupts or even stops that clock? Presenter Anne McElvoy is joined by those who have suffered depression and those who treat it - and they attempt to offer some solutions.

Jay Griffiths is the author of Tristimania: a Diary of Manic Depression and a book Pip Pip which explores attitudes to time across the world.

Doctor Vincent Deary teaches at Northumbria University, works as a clinician in the UK's first trans-diagnostic Fatigue Clinic and is the author of a trilogy about How To Live - the first of which is called How We Are.

Professor Louise Robinson is Director of Newcastle University's Institute for Ageing and Professor of Primary Care and Ageing.

Professor Matthew Smith is a New Generation Thinker from 2012 who teaches at Strathclyde University at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare.

This programme was recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead in 2017 and is being broadcast now as part of the BBC's contribution to Mental Health Awareness week.

You might be intereseted in Sleep;Freedom to Think from the Festival Lecturer Professor Russell Foster https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08hz9yw and another Festival discussion from 2019 looking at how medical staff cope Should Doctors Cry ? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000488q and an interview with Buddhist monk and thinker Haemin Sunim about coping with the pace of life https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08jb1mp

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Anne Fine and Romesh Gunesekera. Jarman's Garden May 21, 2020

Show notes

Authors Anne Fine and Romesh Gunesekera are Fellows of the Royal Literature Society who signed the Register on the same day. In the first of a series of conversations with writers who would have been sharing a stage at a literary festival, they talk to Shahidha Bari. Plus a postcard from 2020 New Generation Thinker Diarmuid Hester on the saving of Derek Jarman’s house and garden - also the subject of Sunday’s Words and Music which you can find on BBC Sounds and here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jdz0

The Norfolk and Norwich Festival which would have featured the meeting of Romesh and Anne has more author interviews on its website https://nnfestival.org.uk/ Romesh Gunesekera's latest book is Suncatcher. You can hear him discussing it in more detail with William Dalrymple and Susheila Nasta in an episode of Free Thinking called The Shadow of Empire and Colonialism https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000c0f7

Anne Fine's books include Goggle Eyes, The Granny Project, The Jamie Angus Stories, The Tulip Touch, Battle of Wills and her latest Blood Family. You can hear her discussing family life along with Tobias Jones, Tom Shakespeare and Professor Sarah Cunningham Burley in a Free Thinking Festival discussion called The Family is Dead, Long Live the Family https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06pswsk

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who turn their research into radio. You can find a series of Essays and postcards from them in playlists on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0144txn

Producer: Robyn Read

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