Radio column: Intimate snippets of a family life

"Never forget what belly you came out of," cautioned a grandfather to his granddaughter in The Listening Project. The conversation lasted just a few minutes but revealed much about the social and economic shift that had taken place over three generations of one Yorkshire family.
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Time to put a lid on all those not so great British shows

Television is turning into one long Little Britain sketch, says Fiona Sturges
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Book review: How Soon Is Now? By Richard King

To the younger generation of music fans, "indie" is a genre, a ubiquitous term used to describe artfully scruffy purveyors of white-boy guitar pop. In the late Seventies and Eighties, however, it was an abbreviation of "independent", used to distinguish the small, self-financed, artist-friendly record labels - the type started in garages, garden sheds and behind the counters of record shops - from their corporate counterparts.
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Radio column: Hooked on the classics

So, Schubert. He's inescapable, or at least he is on Radio 3. If you're not an admirer but a regular listener, you'll either have to decamp to Classic FM or seek refuge in silence which is, of course, unthinkable.
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TV review: One Night, BBC1

“Everything’s so bloody uphill, isn’t it?” whined kitchen salesman Ted (Douglas Hodge) upon realising that he’d left the charcoal for the evening's barbeque at the supermarket. But the charcoal wasn’t really the problem.
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Radio column: Portrait of the artist

For me, radio drama has always been a special form of torture. There's the tiny shoot of optimism that comes with the opening credits of a new play that invariably wilts into disappointment as the action unfolds.
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TV review: WikiLeaks - The Secret Life of a Superpower

If you’ve ever had that cold, clammy feeling following the realisation that an email, in which you have been less than flattering about a colleague, has accidentally landed in said colleague’s inbox, then you will have experienced roughly a millionth of the pain felt by assorted US government officials in the wake of the WikiLeaks scandal.
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Radio column: Sound and fury

Pity the poor radio presenters required to converse with the public on air. When they wrote "people person" on their job applications, they probably imagined themselves engaging in high-minded discussions with the likes of Niall Ferguson or Germaine Greer, not wrangling with the great unwashed about infinitesimal changes in the schedules.
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Radio column: Anxious Anneka doesn't rise to the challenge

"Well, here I am," said Anneka Rice, espressos lined up on the desk, nerves jangling audibly, at the crack of dawn on Saturday. The time was 6.05am and she was presenting a new breakfast show on Radio 2, taking over from Zoë Ball who, in fairness, is a tough act to follow.
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Radio column: Ships in the night are sleeper hits

If, like me, you have trouble sleeping; if at night your brain starts fidgeting in your skull like a recalcitrant toddler, pin-balling from one deranged thought to the next without a care for the exhausted body that houses it, then the radio is probably your best friend.
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Book review: Autobiography, By Mary Quant

Don't believe the old saw "If you can remember the Sixties, you weren't there". Mary Quant remembers everything and she was the Sixties, having single-handedly created the look – the miniskirts, the hotpants, the PVC macs, the skinny-ribbed sweaters – that defined Swinging London.
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Radio column: By royal appointment

The Art of Monarchy on Radio 4 began with a small black-and-white photograph. In it was a two-year-old girl standing in front of a large ivy-smothered house and staring daggers at the camera.
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Obituary: Whitney Houston

Whitney Houston, who has died at the age of 48, was a dazzling performer who blazed a trail for a new generation of black female singers, from Beyoncé Knowles to Mary J Blige. In her Eighties heyday, Houston became the queen of the power ballad and single-handedly invented the concept of the pop diva. Even the sappy production and anodyne lyrics of her biggest singles couldn't dent her reputation as an artist of unrivalled vocal talent.
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Stay The Night: Castaway Cottage, Whitstable

Fiona Sturges stayed at a stylish former fisherman's cottage and made sure the well-equipped kitchen enjoyed a good rest as well. Read more...

Papa don't preach: Older women still rock

Madonna's Super Bowl show has drawn criticism for nothing other than the material girl's age. Fiona Sturges is indignant
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