Free Thinking

Latest Episodes:

Landmark: Laurel and Hardy's The Music Box Jan 08, 2019

Show notes

Lucy Porter, Neil Brand and David Quantick join Matthew Sweet to talk about Cric e Croc or Flip i Flap or even Dick und Doof though, if you're not Italian, Polish or German, it's far more likely that Hollywood's most famous comedy duo will be known to you simply as Stan and Ollie.

Laurel and Hardy to give them their more formal title won the hearts of cinema goers all over the world in the '30s and '40s with films such as Way out West, Sons of the Desert and The Music Box, the sublime short which is the focus of this edition of Free Thinking. With the release of a new film about their life Stan and Ollie - starring John C Reilly and Steve Coogan, and a month long season of their work already underway at the British Film Institute in London - Matthew Sweet is joined by the standup comedian, Lucy Porter, the Emmy award winning writer, David Quantick and playwright and musician, Neil Brand to pay tribute to their achievement and enduring appeal.

Producer: Zahid Warley

Lucy Porter begins a nationwide tour of her show - Pass it On - in February 2019. The BFI Laurel and Hardy season is on now at London's Southbank and runs until 26th January 2019.

Landmark: Watership Down Dec 20, 2018

Show notes

An ecological fable about a perfect society which terrified children when it was first animated. Matthew Sweet reads Richard Adams' classic as a new version arrives on UK TV screens. He's joined by Dr Diana Bell, conservation biologist at UEA; Victoria Dickenson, author of Rabbit, a cultural history of rabbits; Brian Sibley, adaptor of the novel for a radio version and New Generation Thinker Lisa Mullen to debate rabbits both real and fictional.

First published in 1972, Adams' novel follows rabbits escaping the destruction of their warren. Adams said that he told the tale to his daughters on car journeys and he rejected comparisons with the Bible tale of Moses and other religious symbolism. What do portrayals of rabbits in literature and film, from Peter Rabbit to Bugs Bunny, tell us about our own society? Matthew Sweet remembers being scared by the first animated film released in 1978. Now a new one from BBC TV and Netflix features the voices of James McAvoy, John Boyega and Gemma Arterton.

Producer: Harry Parker

What does game playing teach us? Dec 19, 2018

Show notes

University Challenge star Bobby Seagull, writer and critic Jordan Erica Webber, games consultant and researcher Dr Laura Mitchell, and British Museum curator Irving Finkel join Shahidha Bari and others in the Free Thinking studio to get out the playing cards and the board games and consider the value of play, competitiveness and game theory.

Bobby Seagull has published The Life-Changing Magic of Numbers.

Irving Finkel has written Ancient Board Games, the Lewis Chessmen, Cuneiform, The Writing in Stone. He is on the Editorial Board of Board Games Studies and discovered the rules for the royal game of Ur.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Trees of Knowledge Dec 18, 2018

Show notes

Why Are We Here? What is a sentient being? These are questions we don't normally explore using plants but perhaps we should. Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough hears how identifying more closely with living beings who produce our oxygen and store the Sun's energy is a good way of navigating existential angst and have much to teach us about co-operation and mutual support and the unifying principles of life.

Peter Wohlleben The Hidden Life of Trees: The Illustrated Edition is out now Emanuele Coccia The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture is out now Marion Sidebottom: https://www.marionsidebottom.co.uk/ Luke Turner has written Out of the Woods - a memoir about the way Epping Forest helped him deal with depression and his identity which is out in New Year.

Ice Dec 13, 2018

Show notes

Anne McElvoy wraps up warm for an account of life in Antarctica through prose and poetry, how the idea of the North Pole has fired the human imagination for centuries and an artist's interpretation of the Arctic through sound. Also how the spectacular stage effects that thrill panto audiences have their roots in the 17th century and the court of James I and VI - New Generation Thinker Thomas Charlton looks at theatre history.

North Pole by Michael Bravo is published on 14th December.

Ice Diaries: An Antarctic Memoir by Jean McNeil is out now.

Kat Austen's concentration | The Matter of the Soul is available for purchase and download via Bandcamp. She was the 2017/18 Scott Polar Research Institute artist-in-residence.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Linton Kwesi Johnson Dec 12, 2018

Show notes

"My generation, which was the rebel generation of black youth, has changed England and in changing England we've changed ourselves" - the words of Linton Kwesi Johnson - the man who invented dub poetry and used it to chronicle some of the key events of black British history, from the celebrated case of George Lindo, wrongly accused of robbery in Bradford in 1978, to the New Cross Fire and Brixton riots a few years later. Philip Dodd talks to him about the roots of his poetry, his love of music and the way he thinks Britain and black Britons have changed since 1963 when he arrived in London from Jamaica as an eleven year old boy.

Producer: Zahid Warley

Writing and Frankness Dec 11, 2018

Show notes

Deborah Levy, Adam Phillips and Amia Srinivasan join Matthew Sweet at the British Library for a Royal Society of Literature debate.

Why do we read? Why do we write? What do we reveal when we do? A writer, a psychotherapist and a philosopher discuss what we reveal about ourselves through literature and the difference, if any, between non-fiction, novels and the psychotherapist’s couch. Deborah Levy is a playwright, novelist and poet. In her ‘living autobiography’ The Cost of Living, she considers what it means to live with value, meaning and pleasure. Adam Phillips is a practising psychoanalyst and Visiting Professor in the English department at the University of York. Amia Srinivasan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and works on topics in epistemology, metaphilosophy, social and political philosophy, and feminism. She is a contributing editor of the London Review of Books.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Are we being manipulated? Dec 06, 2018

Show notes

Who's pulling your strings - from advertisers and peer pressure to political campaigns and self-deception - hidden persuaders are everywhere. Journalist Poppy Noor, historian Sarah Marks, psychologist and magician, Gustav Kuhn, the philosopher, Quassim Cassam and Robert Colvile from the Centre for Policy Studies join Matthew Sweet to track them down. We're all confident that we know our own minds -- but do we? And if we don't, why not?

Producer: Zahid Warley

Quassim Cassam is professor of philosophy at Warwick University. He is the author of Self Knowledge for Humans and his new book, Vices of the Mind will be published next year.

Gustav Kuhn teaches psychology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His book Experiencing the Impossible : The Science of Magic will be published next year.

Sarah Marks is a post-doctoral researcher at Birkbeck College in London where she is one of the team involved in the Hidden Persuaders project.

Poppy Noor is a journalist and contributes to The Guardian newspaper.

Robert Colvile is the director of the Centre for Policy Studies.

Is there a great divide between the arts and science? Dec 05, 2018

Show notes

Geneticist Sir Paul Nurse, current director of the Francis Crick Institute, and Tristram Hunt, historian and now director of the V&A, debate the impact of robots, the winners and losers in funding, whether our education system has the balance right between STEM and Arts subjects and they reveal their own arts and science hits and misses. Recorded before an audience at Queen Mary University London, the presenter is Shahidha Bari.

Nearly 60 years on from C.P. Snow's 'Two Cultures' lecture in which the chemist and novelist argued that a great divide existed between art and science, this conversation considers the relationship between the two in 2018.

Producer: Craig Templeton Smith

Natasha Gordon. Bessie Head. Rwanda Representation and Reality Dec 05, 2018

Show notes

As her award-winning debut play, Nine Night, comes to London's West End, Natasha Gordon tells Anne about the grieving ritual that binds in the Jamaican diaspora. Nine Night at Trafalgar Studios, London, until February 23rd

On the 50th anniversary of the publication of Bessie Head's first novel, two of her titles, When Rain Clouds Gather (1969) and Maru (1971), have just been republished. Head's influence and creativity are discussed by journalist Audrey Brown and literary scholar Louisa Uchum Egbunike.

Black Earth Rising, Hugo Blick's serial on the Rwandan Genocide and the fraught and fractured nature of justice, is one of the dramas of the year. Zoe Norridge explores the drama's reception within Rwandan cultural politics and Phil Clark discusses his research on the impact of the International Criminal Court on African politics. . Audrey Brown is a South African journalist, curator and cultural commentator based in London Louisa Uchum Egbunike, specialist in African literature, School of Arts and Social Sciences of City, University of London and New Generation Thinker Phil Clark, School of Oriental and African Studies; his book Distant Justice: The Impact of the International Criminal Court on African Politics is out now. Zoe Norridge, Kings College London, teaches Comparative literature. Her current research focuses on cultural responses to the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Zoe is also Chair of the Ishami Foundation. She is a New Generation Thinker

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