I always knew she was small but, even so, I'm not quite prepared for how teeny and bird-like Yoko Ono is. Or, come to think of it, how glamorous. The home movies taken by her and Lennon in the 1970s reveal a figure with big, fluffy hair and pensive, wary features. But the woman sitting next to me is smiling broadly and is stylishly clad in dark jeans, tight black sweater and chunky boots. Her hair is cropped and spiky and her signature sunglasses sit halfway down her nose, her eyes twinkling over the top. She is part rock star, part sexy librarian.
Read more...
You only needed to watch the animated trailer for Darkside – that's right, a trailer, with images, for radio. What madness is this? – to know it was going to be totally off its box. A toy farmer stood staring at the skies; giant angle grinders sliced up the earth; a figure sat on a hospital bed with a massive propeller where his head should be.
Read more...
Regular Radio 4 listeners will already know The Reunion, the programme that has been picking at old scabs and offering moist-eyed snapshots of times gone by since 2006. It's about revisiting crowning glories and ghastly calamities of old, with the wonderful, and sometimes awful, benefit of hindsight. Like Desert Island Discs, it has a distinct format: a group of people are brought together to recall a shared moment in their lifetimes. Unlike DID, however, there is more scope for sadness, for joy, or for sheer, red-faced fury.
Read more...
We're now into week two of the mid-summer period known as "the radio doldrums." If you need to know more about this annual event, may I please refer you to last week's column in which I whined at length about holidaying presenters leaving their shows in the hands of imbeciles, and about all the dreadful-sounding programmes I had declined to listen to for fear that I might slip into a radio-induced coma.
Read more...
This is an abominable time of year for the radio listener. Early August is when the big-name presenters pack up and sod off to the Seychelles, leaving their shows in the hands of the unqualified and confused. It's a time when the interns run riot, and when producers press the big button marked "pre-recorded tat" and disappear off for a nap.
Read more...
In his 61 years, Nile Rodgers has endured more than his fair share of trauma. There were his mother and stepfather, both heroin-addicted and given to nodding off mid-sentence; the teenage homelessness that led him to sleep on subway trains; his own addictions to alcohol and cocaine, which prompted his heart to stop eight times; and, most recently, a diagnosis of prostate cancer. Yet only once has he ever wondered whether life was worth living.
Read more...
Nicolas Roeg's book isn't about his rise to fame as one of Britain's most distinctive film directors. Nor is it a confessional on the inner workings of the movie industry, or an exposé on the many stars – among them Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Julie Christie – with whom he has worked. In fact, it's possible that this isn't the tell-all that Roeg's publishers had in mind. It is, however, a gem that offers intriguing and often lyrical insight into the artist at work.
Read more...
"Over the last two centuries, offices have changed the way we live as well as the way we work", it was revealed in Lucy Kellaway's History of Office Life on Radio 4. I'll say. Ten years ago, I worked in an office where I had co-workers and a range of respectable clothing. Now I'm a home worker whose colleagues are feline, and whose sartorial style is best described as "boho bag lady".
Read more...
It's official: the gender imbalance is on radio is real, and it's a problem. Of course, for those of us in possession of both ears and ovaries, this is hardly breaking news. But for the benefit of all the knuckle-dragging nitwits who like their ironing done by someone else and who say we should stop whining because we have Radio 4's Woman's Hour – a whole hour! Every day! Entirely to ourselves! – it's now here in black and white.
Read more...
I love BBC radio as much as anyone but every now and then I wake up and think to myself, "Today is not a John Humphrys day. Neither is it a Victoria Derbyshire day. And if I have to hear Roger Bolton placating another listener aggrieved by a rogue split infinitive on Feedback, I honestly can't be responsible for my actions." On those days, I go online and listen to This American Life.
Read more...
There are times, after a long day's work, when I'd rather not see a woman tied to a bedpost, her skirt fetchingly hitched up around her thighs, being slowly strangled to death. Neither, if I'm honest, do I relish the sight of 19th-century prostitutes lying prone in east London alleyways, their fallopian tubes splattered all the way to The Strand. And forgive me if I am less than joyful at watching a successful working woman being anally raped by her bitter, emasculated husband.
Read more...
There are those, I am told, who believe Saturday Live represents all that is wrong with Radio 4. They say that it is staid and slow moving, a distillation of the station's Boden-loving, middle-aged and irretrievably middle-class values. Specifically, it's a weekend show for the terminally tragic. To which I say, "Pffft! Off you go then, children, to the land of Saturday-morning youth entertainment, with its shouty presenters and ghastly "banter" and guest spots from Rizzle Kicks". Me? I'm embracing middle age and indulging my desire to be subjected to only gentle murmuring from ex-pop star vicars before midday.
Read more...
As a teenager the journalist Viv Groskop dreamed of being a stand-up comedian but life, along with the need for proper paid work, got in the way. Years later, as a mother of three approaching middle age, she set herself a challenge: 100 gigs in 100 days. At the end of it, she would know for sure whether stand-up was a viable career move or merely a pipe dream.
Read more...
When it comes to science it doesn't take a lot to blow my mind. I'm still reeling from what happens when you chuck a load of Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke (if you haven't done it, you have yet to witness one of life's miracles). So I've got a lot of time for the long-running Radio 4 show The Infinite Monkey Cage, a programme that manages to simultaneously expand your brain power while lulling you into thinking you're chuckling away at a panel show for simpletons.
Read more...
I've been putting off listening to Radio 5 Live's Bump Club with Edith Bowman and Colin Murray for some time. You might even say I've been giving it a wide berth (ho ho). Why? Well there's the problem of the name. Bump Club sounds to me like a Cath Kidston-smothered NCT get-together complete with Keep Calm... coffee mugs, a knitted uterus and couples cooing over sinister 3D ultrasound photos. It has an air of wholesomeness and exclusivity about it, a gathering of the ferociously fertile.
Read more...
