Ö÷²¥´óÐã

America is so vast that almost everything you say about it is likely to be true and the opposite is probably equally true.

That's how the late Irish-American novelist summed up the intriguing complexity of the United States. I have found this to be a very useful quote. It covers just about everything and gets me out of a tight corner if I am accused of misrepresenting the country which has been my family's adopted home for the past seven years.

I am also reminded every day that it happens to be true on so many different levels. For instance two of my daughters attend a Church school but they are not allowed to celebrate Christmas. Compared to Europe America is devout, but the separation of Church and State - a brilliant move dreamed up by the founding fathers - continues to be an article of faith.

Two thirds of practising Christians believe in the Second Coming but roughly half the country describes itself as agnostic or atheist, a number which is rising. America has the reputation of being a melting pot but to me it often seems more like an archipelago of tribes living separated from each other in a country with space to spare.

Visitors get their thumbprints taken and their retinas scanned when they enter America but it is estimated that as many as 15 million migrants from Latin America live and work here illegally by walking across the 2000 mile long border with Mexico.

The list of contradictions is practically endless.

America suffers from an epidemic of obesity but the slim foods and diet industry is one of the fastest growing and most lucrative in the country. American news media can be hopelessly parochial and yet , the , my local paper, the or the provide a nuanced and detailed eye on the world.

The Iraq war continues to be unpopular but the military is more revered here as an institution than in any other democracy. Baseball games kick off with a salute to the troops; supermarket chains offer special discounts for all military families and even our staunchly liberal neighbours, who regularly give money to the hang out a huge Stars and Stripes flag on .

Oh, and by the way, in this country "liberal" tends to be an insult.

And yet beyond these contradictions I have witnessed the tectonic plates of America shift while we have lived here. We arrived a year after 9/11 when the world's most powerful nation felt vulnerable and fearful. Vengeful grief at home morphed into muscle flexing abroad and - at times - arrogance. The agony of Iraq and the shock of Hurricane Katrina triggered a period of introspection.

The 2008 Presidential race reignited political engagement and turned the internet into a shrewd electoral tool. The election of an African-American President showed America the scope of its ambitions while the implosion of the economy hammered home the limits. The country that had learned to distrust big government was prepared to crawl to it for salvation.

Has the crisis changed America's love affair with money? Is America seriously ready to re-engage the world at a time when there is plenty to worry about at home? How many compromises will the exercise of power force upon a President who stormed to office on the promise of change? Can America still inspire with the power of its ideas or is it hinged more to the idea of power? With all these questions should Uncle Sam check in with a shrink?

Americana hopes to answer these questions by telling you what America is talking, arguing, fretting, laughing and, yes, dreaming about. We hope to surprise, entertain and inform. And by letting America itself do most of the talking we promise never to be dull.

Matt Frei is Anchor of and presenter of Americana

• Americana starts this Sunday 31 May at 1915 on Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4.
• airs weeknights at 7pm & 10pm ET on .

Keep an eye on the on (there's an ). Stuff like this shows up regularly. On Saturday at the recording of the evening's Loose Ends, Stan Was took . In the Radio 4 group you'll also find some lovely individual pics, like this one (also taken by Stan) in the studio for an interview, and taken by me in the Today control room last week.

The Reith Lectures are amongst the most venerable of Ö÷²¥´óÐã institutions.

Our famously believed that the corporation should enrich the intellectual and cultural life of the nation.

In this spirit, each year the Ö÷²¥´óÐã invites a leading figure to deliver a series of lectures whose explicit aim is to advance public understanding and debate about significant issues. The lectures are both live events, and radio programmes broadcast on Radio 4 and the World Service.

The philosopher was the first Lecturer in 1948. A dazzling array of thinkers has stood in his shoes in the subsequent sixty-one years, including , , and .

This year's lecturer is the eminent Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel. His theme "A New Citizenship" builds on a lifetime's work exploring issues around democracy, ethics and what he calls the "politics of the common good".

Professor Sandel is a conspicuously engaging speaker; his at has been taken by more than 14,000 students, and will soon be made available online.

(His rather less well-known cultural contribution was to provide the inspiration for , ironically the least just character in the Simpsons cartoon).

Given Professor Sandel's topic and own broad resonance, the Reith team has redoubled its efforts to promote the content of the lectures as widely as possible beyond the boundaries of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã.

So as well as Professor Sandel's appearance on Start the Week this morning and the usual press interviews, he's with the very popular non-Ö÷²¥´óÐã podcast, to help us reach a valuable new audience.

And in addition to a Radio 4 site, we've set up a to try and raise the profile and content of this year's lectures.

We can give an insight into the production process, point to the wealth of Reith archive already available - such as an excerpt from that first Russell lecture - and link to other relevant material such as the Philosophy resources from our In Our Time colleagues.

And we can find people already talking about Professor Sandel and Reith (there are more than you might think), and invite them to join us.

The purpose is to build our own online Reith community which can engage with the subjects at the heart of Professor Sandel's lectures, and bolster the debate we hope they will engender.

We are also planning to run some Twitter events around the Lectures.

With the help of the , an experiment in 'social listening' from Jem Stone and Steve Bowbrick at Ö÷²¥´óÐã Audio & Music Interactive, we're inviting people to listen to the repeat transmission of each Reith Lecture on Radio 4 (or to listen via the Radio 4 website) while logged into Twitter, and then to share their comments and thoughts.

We'll be inviting listeners to tag their contributions to Twitter with the hash tag (and to upload pictures to using the same tag). Using tools like and participants will be able to follow a global conversation around the lectures while they're on air. Nearer the first transmission you'll be able to read more about the experiment on the and the Radio 4 Reith 2009 web pages.

We've never done anything like this with Reith; it's an exciting experiment which we hope will succeed. I will report back here in a few weeks' time to share the results.

I hope you might join us.

I think Lord Reith would approve.

The Reith Lectures 2009 will be broadcast on Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4 on Tuesday mornings at 0900 BST starting on June 9, and repeated the following Saturday evening at 2215 BST.

The Lectures will also be broadcast on the Ö÷²¥´óÐã World Service starting on Saturday 13 June at 1800 GMT.

It will also be possible to listen again, and download each lecture on the Radio 4 website. There will also be a podcast.

• Listen again to Michael Sandel talking to Andrew Marr on Start the Week (the programme will be available indefinitely).
• The Reith Lectures archive has clips from historic lectures including Russell and Galbraith.
• The has already started on Twitter.
• The slideshow is from the at

The Farming Today bees are getting their own blog over on the Farming Today web site. While they're finishing off the design, Chris Impey and Fran Barnes, producers and trainee beekeepers, bring us news from the hive:

When Fran and I started this project we thought it would be an age before we started on the honey-making process - and that we'd be lucky to get a single jar in our first year. But if all goes well, our mentor Clive has assured us, we'll soon be rolling in the sticky stuff.

We've now put a 'super' on our hive. This is essentially a second storey on top of a mesh which allows the workers through but not the queen with her larger body. It means the honeycomb cells are only filled with honey - and not brood. When I checked after two days of it being on there was already some honey in there - but only enough for a teaspoon.

When we'll be able to start collecting honey depends on the weather. It's turned a bit cooler and wetter meaning the bees will be doing less foraging - so they'll be collecting less and feeding more off the current reserves.

One of the best parts of our evening classes was learning about the different types of honey, and that it's what the bees forage on which influences the taste. Honey from heather for example (very strong) tastes markedly different to honey from flowers (very delicate). Ours likely to come from a variety of flowers, trees and crops, and Clive says this will make it taste what he describes as a typically English honey.

The endemic nature of the disease means it's very likely our bees already have it. Fran's off this week to do some work with Clive to monitor for it. There should be something on that on the programme soon.

And our suits are beginning to look and smell like the real deal. No longer pristine white, they're now covered in bee poo. And they stink of smoke.

Fran Barnes adds:

It's official, we have 'swarmy' bees. I've just been to the hive with our mentor, Clive Joyce. Only to discover in the 7 days of rain we've had the bees have been very busy. Unfortunately their efforts have not been directed into the honey-making deparment (it being too wet for them to fly mostly) but, instead, they have been making many Queen cups.

This is not good news. Queen cups are the spherical cells which a new Queen grows in. For the uninitiated (which included me up to a couple of weeks ago), the worker bees occasionally decide they want a new Queen (or 10 in our case). They then create big round cells which the current Queen lays an egg in. The workers then fill this with Royal Jelly to create a very large, fully formed bee - a Queen.

We really don't want more than one Queen in a hive as the bees will swarm off with the old Queen to create a new colony. When that happens the chances of getting any honey are remote. We 'dealt with' the Queen cells and will have to be very vigilant over the next few months. We're slightly mystified why they're doing this, usually bees only produce extra Queens and swarm when they run out of room. The Farming Today hive is still as spacious as a New York loft apartment.

If the bees do swarm and take our current Queen with them this would be very annoying, particularly as we've only just named her. She's called "Auntie" - thanks to all your suggestions - from the intellectual, to the surreal (?). We need to keep Auntie happy in her hive.

While there, Clive also put in a floor. This will enable us to count the dead varroa mite which fall through the holes of the new floor onto a piece of white cardboard. Any more than 6 a day is a problem apparently. Watch this space next week. Would love to hear your comments about swarmy bees and your efforts to control varroa mite. Anyone harvested any honey yet?

• Previous posts about the The Farming Today bees are here (27 April) and here (1 May).
• The Farming Today web site.
• by (used ).

Fran Barnes is a producer at Farming Today

About 3 years ago, and very new to the job of Commissioning Editor for Drama for Radio 4, I was walking back from the bank to my office when my mobile rang. It was Patrick Rayner, the Head of Drama in Scotland.

"Jeremy, I know it stretches the definition of classic a bit and it is not Scottish, but what would you think of us doing one of the George Smiley trilogy as a Classic Serial?"

"It's a great idea, and it's classic enough for me." Pause "But why not do all three?" I said.

"Well we could, if you think the Network could stand that much Smiley."

"Yes I do. How many other Smiley novels are there?"

There was a comical interlude where from our collective memories we tried to remember all the other novels in which one of the smartest and most intriguing characters in twentieth century British fiction featured. It was like one of those games you played at drunken parties at university - we both knew there were a lot, we couldn't quite get all the titles in a sequence, but we reckoned we were talking about eight titles, which is about twenty hours of air time. Most Classic Serials run for between two and three hours; twenty hours is kind of uncharted territory.

Now commissioning programmes is quite a complicated process - given that I commission 400 hours of drama a year and am bombarded with programme ideas from every which way it takes a lot of administration, which involves systems and form filling-in, and box ticking and all the other gubbins associated with bureaucracy. But in the end you know it is a good idea or not almost instantly. And this was very definitely a Good Idea.

"Ok lets do the lot," I said.

Patrick, who has delivered over forty brilliant Sherlock Holmes, and was about to direct Paul Temple all for Radio 4, was absolutely the right person to do them, the television versions were ancient, the radio versions equally so (all with different actors playing Smiley), and it was exactly the kind of ambition we were looking for the drama output on the Network. I also thought it would be something of a treat for the audience, a Classic Serial to relish.

I needed to convince my boss (Mark Damazer, the Controller of Radio 4). I casually floated it past him one morning -

"Mark, what would you say to us doing the complete Smiley?"

He paused. His eyes lit up and he launched into a one sentence eulogy about Smiley - albeit a very long sentence, kind of ten minutes long. Well maybe fifteen. We had a deal.

So why has it taken nearly three years to get to air? After all one episode of a Classic Serial takes about five days to record, edit and dub.

I asked Patrick to make tentative soundings about the rights.

In principle they were available.

In practice they were not.

Months - where nothing much happened - passed.

Now I had never met John le Carré, but nothing ventured nothing gained I sent him a letter asking for his help in persuading his secretive American agent to grant us the radio rights. It is the kind of letter you send, and never expect to get an answer to, so when a few days later my assistant told me that John le Carré's wife was on the phone I was astonished. She told me her husband thought the Radio 4 plan was an excellent idea and they would look into securing the rights.

What the combined heft of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã Copyright Department, Controllers and commissioners had failed to unlock over months the author himself opened within days.

But that is only the start.

Believe me, turning 2000 odd pages of brilliant prose into twenty hours of compelling dramatisation is not a simple matter. We hired the best writers (Robert Forrest whose version of Resurrection by Tolstoy was peerless and whose Pillow Book rendered a book of ancient Japanese courtly lists into a superb murder mystery) and Shaun McKenna (his To Serve Them All My Days was compelling), had lengthy discussions about whether or not to use a narrator, on who should play George Smiley (well Simon Russell Beale of course, to the part born I say), spent ages working out how to play out the series (in one twenty hour block or threaded across the schedule for a year), on setting up a co-production between Ö÷²¥´óÐã Scotland and the London Radio Drama department, etc., etc.

All I had to do was encourage the team - Patrick and Marc Beeby (his co-producer), the two writers, the Broadcast Assistants, the sound engineers and the illustrious and brilliant cast who have done the real graft.

But I think you are in for a real treat.

• The Complete Smiley starts this afternoon with Call for the Dead and continues until April 2010.
• Mark Lawson interviewed John le Carré at length on last night's Front Row: fascinating.
• Radio 4 Controller Mark Damazer welcomes the Smiley season, calling it 'treat radio'.
• All programmes tagged 'le Carré'
• of Simon Russell Beale as George Smiley.

So - after years of planning - tomorrow at 1430 in The Saturday Play slot - the great Smiley project begins with Call for The Dead. There have been some rather lovely TV trails for it. And next week at the same time comes A Murder of Quality. We will do all eight of the Smiley novels (he features lightly in one or two) over the next year or so.

Nobody has ever done all the novels in this way before.

The Radio 4 wellspring comes from the head of Radio Drama in Scotland, Patrick Rayner, whose previous works include hefty and successful adptations of Paul Temple, Simenon, Holmes et al. He approached me nearly three years ago and asked whether I might be interested in running all of John le Carré's Smiley novels. I was wildly enthusiastic (I am a fan) but had assumed that we would would never get the rights.

But we persisted - and with the help of le Carré himself - we succeeded. Indeed he has been enthusaistic about the project from day 1 and has been encouraging and helpful. Tonight on Front Row he talks to Mark Lawson about Smiley, his own career in espionage, his feelings about the cold war. It's another one of Mark's terrific interviews and is a wonderful accompaniment to the series.

Simon Russell Beale is Smiley and having heard tomorrow's play (a privilege that goes with the job) I can say that he's marvellous. He does it differently to (who was so memorable in the early 80s Ö÷²¥´óÐã TV version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) but/and superbly. A little faster than Guinness - with terrific clarity. He captures his intellect and forensic qualities beautifully. The whole cast do the novel justice and the adaptation by Robert Forrest is very clever. Listen out for the beginning and the way he deploys George Smiley's wife - Lady Ann Smiley (played by Anna Chancellor).

I realise this blog post is of the gushing variety but I hope you will forgive me. It is treat radio.

And the rest of the Smiley novels lie ahead. Enjoy.

• The Complete Smiley starts Saturday with Call for the Dead and continues until April 2010.
• Jeremy Howe, Commissioning Editor for Drama at Radio 4, explains the genesis of The Complete Smiley
• All programmes tagged 'le Carré'

ANNOUNCERS' WEEK: DAY FIVE

Many years ago, there was a rookie girl announcer reading the travel news on Radio 4. There was a spot of bother near , which she confidently names Toe-chester. The phone rang. Peter Donaldson (for it was he) said: "It's Toaster, dear girl, as in pop-up". The announcer (for it was I) would like to say she never made that sort of mistake again. She'd like to. How important is it to get it right with people's names, place names, particular words? On the world's premier speech network, extremely important. It's not just a matter of professionalism, it's good manners.

It's why we have a dedicated Pronunciation Unit, peopled by a select band of crack linguists, and a battery of pronouncing dictionaries on our desk. The Unit's website is called Speakeasy: in the course of a day's newsreading you can be consulting it or phoning the team many times. This past week, we've all become expert at Sri Lankan names. For example, the leader of the Tamil Tigers, pronounced: vell-uup-ill-AY pruh-BAA-kuh-ruhn (-uu as in book, ay as in say, aa as in father). Or the Sri Lankan PM, : muh-HIN-duh ruj-uh-PUCK-shuh (-u as in cup, j as in Jack, sh as in ship). This is Speakeasy's guide.

Never assume you know how to say something. There are traps everywhere. , the former Prime Minister of Thailand, pronounces himself Taksin Chin-a-wat. The 'ra' remains utterly silent, like the P in . Of course I said it incorrectly the first time I encountered him, and thought crossly afterwards he was just showing off with his extra syllables.

It didn't stop me being smug when other people fell over it , though. And local British names , with their cunningly obvious spellings, can make you very vulnerable. (See above: 'Towcester')

How authentic does it have to be? Of course it's Paris, not Paree, but do try to get Sarkozy right, (emphasise the last syllable) without all that ostentatious gargling over the French rrr.

How do you try to make it right every time? What if it's late at night and you can't find the name on the website? If it's a foreign name, check with the appropriate language service at Bush House. If it's British, try that region's local radio station.

If it's late-breaking news and you've already started the summary, you might have about 18 seconds while an audio clip is playing to dash through the website looking frantically (but vocally calmly) for it. If it's spelled incorrectly on your script, you're toast. There's nothing else for it but to draw on your experience, your nouse, and utter it with all the suavity expected of a Radio 4 newsreader. (But do, if you can, try to track down one broadcaster's efforts when confronted live, for the first time, with Phuket. No, it wasn't a Radio 4 person. The very idea.)

Any tips? Don't change down a gear in your delivery when a big pronunciation approaches. It's your job to make something that's hard to say sound fluent, matter-of-fact. Even so, every broadcaster has had the following experience: As the bulletin proceeds, there is a corner of your brain that's steadily cantering up to the Becher's Brook of that Really Difficult Name. You're into the story: up you soar, it flows beautifully, you've said it like a native. Mentally executing a victory air-punch, you proceed to the next story and promptly crash on a really hard word, like 'the'. Rats.

• Susan Rae's profile on the Radio 4 web site.
• The Speakeasy web site is only available on the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's internal web site but there are lots of useful posts from the Pronunciation Unit on the Editors' blog.

I've got the day off today so I'm at the kitchen table with a large cup of coffee (and porridge bubbling) planning a busy bank holiday weekend on the blog. Between now and Monday I've got five really interesting posts to publish. Later today you'll be able to read Susan Rae's fifth and final snapshot from the announcer's life. By the end of the day I should have Controller Mark Damazer's latest post - this time about Today (Mark's a pretty busy man, though, so don't be upset if I have to move that one back). Tomorrow, to coincide with the beginning of Radio 4's The Complete Smiley, I've got a lovely behind-the-scenes post from Jeremy Howe, Radio 4's commissioning editor for drama, about the season.

On Sunday the Farming Today bees will make their final appearance here before they get their own blog on the Farming Today web site (I hope they'll keep in touch, though) and on Monday, to coincide with the first of this year's Reith Lectures (given by Professor Michael Sandel) I've got another fascinating glimpse behind the scenes from Jennifer Clarke who's producing the online ('multiplatform') elements of the lectures this year.

Keep up with the action here on the blog by following on Twitter and don't forget to subscribe to the blog's RSS feed (and I've burnt the porridge).

UPDATE: you'll probably have noticed that Mark Damazer's Friday blog post is not about Today at all, but about The Complete Smiley instead. That's the fast-moving world of blogging for you.

ANNOUNCERS' WEEK: DAY FOUR

Friends are always telling me I have the best job in the world. "You spend your entire working day listening to Radio4!" they say. Well, that's true, but only partly true. You see, we hear the programmes, but not in the same way we would at home. All the announcers have developed a weird, secondary sense of hearing - one where we're just aware of what's going on, while concentrating on other things.

The other things could involve testing the lines for Any Questions, checking the audio levels in The Archers or making sure we know who's presenting Front Row. On top of that, we field calls from producers making sure their programmes are ready to go, the Met Office with updated shipping forecasts or the team in the office with material for our announcements, so there's little time to actually listen to the programmes!

But this secondary sense of hearing is amazingly effective and kicks in every time there's more than 2 seconds of silence on air. When that happens, we all drop whatever else we're working on and jump to action. Was the silence just part of the programme, or has something unscheduled happened? 99% of the time it's the former, but every now and then we have to step in and sort things out (that's when your pulse races a bit too!).

So we do hear the programmes, but we can't always listen to them. There is one great secret the announcers have though, and it concerns that secondary sense of hearing. Away from work, we can listen to what someone is saying, while evesdropping on another conversation. So if you find yourself next to a Radio 4 Announcer, beware - they might be listening to your every word!

• Super-hearing is one of
• Wikipedia's entry on

ANNOUNCERS' WEEK: DAY THREE

The real book at bedtime for the Radio 4 announcer is our Book of the Week at half past midnight. By this time we are entering the last quarter hour of our late shift and the part that is arguably the busiest for us.

If you're familiar with the end of our day's transmission we close every night with the same format... the midnight news, a story, Sailing By, the shipping forecast and a sign off.

Sailing By is a bit like Marmite - you either love it or hate it. The theme tune was written by and heralds the start of the shipping forecast. I think it is quite a melancholy tune, but there are plenty of listeners and colleagues who love it.

Two of us work the late shift up until midnight. During that time we provide cover and most importantly support for each other, because now that we are self operating we put the programmes to air on our own. If for any reason something were to go wrong, one of us would be telling you - whilst the other announcer would be fielding phone calls or sourcing a different piece of audio to play - should a programme have to be abandoned for technical reasons. By midnight though, we call time on one announcer, and the other is left to manage the network alone until one o'clock.

The late shift has a completely different feel from a day shift. After the hustle and bustle of the day the office gradually empties and you're left on your own, with your colleague tucked away in the studio until you take over. When I first started at Radio 4 it reminded me of being left to babysit your brother and sister when your parents went out for the night. The shift begins at half past 4 in the afternoon - with a meeting in the Presentation office. This is to ensure that you are across any changes to, or sensitivities surrounding the rest of the day's transmission. After that, one announcer goes into the FM continuity studio, the other prepares for their evening ahead and collates and times the shipping forecast due for broadcast on long wave just before six.

The problem with this job is that you talk to yourself and often out loud. As Chris said in his blog - timing is crucial if you're going to deliver a polished performance and for me it's like crossing the finishing line if you get to the pips on time after a very long read.

The shipping bulletin is made up of three parts - the general synopsis, the coastal reports and the inshore waters. It can take anything from 10 to 11 and a half minutes to read. Once the microphone is live there's a sense of no going back. The danger of doing such a long read is that it is easy to go adrift - losing or gaining a minute - or becoming caught up in the poetry of the piece that you almost "sing" its delivery. At this point my mind is in danger of wandering from its purpose and a conversation begins in my head that runs something like this: "Have I just read that bit twice?".

"Gale force 9 - I'm glad I'm not out there."

"I'll just nudge the volume on the National Anthem - give it a good rounding off before the pips" I glance up at the clock, my concentration harnessed and my hand poised on the fader to play the Queen as I bid you goodnight. "Are you asleep now?" It would be so tempting to ask you out loud and then I'm minded of the nurse, the taxi driver, hotel porter, fire-fighter, houseman, new parent, light sleeper... I'm in good company. The reality is that as I hand over the network, switch off the computers, gather up my papers and turn out the light... Someone, somewhere is also working for a living. "Good night!"

• The illustration is from the 1928 Ö÷²¥´óÐã Handbook
• Diana's profile from the Radio 4 web site

ANNOUNCERS' WEEK: DAY TWO

There are some things on Radio 4 that you only notice when they go wrong. For continuity announcers the potential for things to unravel is never more than a stone's throw away, but it edges just a little bit closer each day at midday. This is when we split the output between FM and long wave for the lunchtime shipping forecast, and although you're not supposed to notice, the next four minutes are amongst the trickiest of the day.

Well, actually the first three minutes and fifty seconds are generally fine - but the last ten seconds can be as hairy as an unkempt yak. Let me explain.

First, meet the cast. There are three of us: two announcers - one on FM and one on long wave - and a newsreader.

At midday on FM there are four minutes of news. Not three-and-a-bit, not four-and-bit. Four minutes. Exactly.

On long wave there is a minute of news headlines followed by three minutes of shipping forecast. One plus three equals four. Happiness.

At exactly four minutes past twelve the newsreader and the long wave announcer finish their performances, perfectly synchronised. The FM announcer and the long wave announcer then say - simultaneously, whilst listening to each other - "And now You and Yours with..." And the mighty ship of daily consumer news that is You & Yours sets sail on both long wave and FM at precisely the same moment.

When this works - and it usually does - everything is as smooth as a well-buttered bar of soap.

But in a wonderfully British way, the weather can spoil the whole thing. Not surprisingly, the shipping forecast changes its length according to what the weather's doing. Some days, there are no gales, the sea is calm, the visibility is perfect and Malin is much the same as Hebrides, which bears a striking similarity to North Utsire. The result is a shipping forecast that is shorter than the required three minutes. On other days there are gales all over the place, the sea is up and down like a sailor's breakfast and the shipping forecast is what we continuity announcers describe as "too long".

So while on FM the news is beautifully calm and measured, on long wave the shipping forecast is hurtling towards the 12:04 deadline at the sort of speed that would challenge all but the most expensive shorthand secretaries. And it's scandalous how few really good shorthand secretaries serve on ships these days. So at 12:04 the newsreader finishes on FM and the shipping forecast on long wave is still going. Misery.

And this is why, if the weather is not up to much and you listen to Radio 4 FM at exactly four minutes past twelve, you might just hear a rather pregnant pause while the FM announcer waits for his long wave colleague to declare "and that's the end of the shipping forecast." But you'll have to listen very closely because there are some things on Radio 4 which, even when they go wrong, we still might just get away with.

ANNOUNCERS' WEEK: DAY ONE

3.30AM The alarm goes off, but it doesn't bother me. That's because I'm already staring at it. In fact, I've been staring at it on-and-off since about two o'clock, when I jolted awake after a horrible dream in which I overslept until half past seven, raced in to find Radio 4 on a loop of Sailing By and got told off by James Naughtie, the UN Secretary General and my old primary school teacher Miss Carruth. Still, it could have been worse. I could have been naked.

I drag myself out of bed, awash with relief and exhaustion, through the shower and into whatever clothes come to hand. Then I make a large flask of tea. This is a Very Important Task, as it will get me through the initial period from 5.20 - when I'll guide Radio 4 through the shipping forecast, News Briefing, Prayer for the Day and Farming Today - until 6.00 and the start of the flagship Today programme.

I arrive at work at around 4.30, read through News Briefing, tweak my scripts and do some timings. It's around now I notice I'm wearing jogging bottoms, a sequinned blouse and odd socks, and my hair is standing on end like a fright wig. Thank goodness it's radio.

Everything up to and including the Six O'Clock bulletin comes from a separate studio, so it's 6.25 before I join the mêlée in the main Today studio. I'm constantly amazed at how fresh the presenters look. (I'm beginning to think those muesli-yoghurt pots on the tea trolley that no one ever eats must be some kind of organic facial scrub.) The programme trail which runs before the news provides just enough time to say hello and machete my way through the mountain of newspapers that invariably engulfs my keyboard.

Once inside the Today studio, it's vital to stay focussed, for the distractions are legion. While you are reading there might be a sports or business presenter, Cabinet minister, religious figure, celebrity or other esteemed personage arriving or departing; someone could be making frantic signals for water, getting tangled in their headphones, rustling paper, whispering, wheezing, fumbling, rumbling or just having a jolly good stare. Well, it's not often you see someone in a sequinned blouse that time of the morning.

By the end of the shift, I have consumed my own body weight in carbohydrate but I'm still standing. Yes, the early starts are tough; but the payoff is being a part of one of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's most prestigious and influential news programmes. It's like having a ringside seat at the most exciting show in town.

I hear they're planning a for the studio. Note to self: do something about fright wig.

• Follow Kathy on Twitter: .
• Kathy's profile on the Radio 4 web site.
• by . Used .

We launched the Radio 4 blog back in February with a post by Controller Mark Damazer called 'And now on Radio 4' - a phrase you'd have heard about 13,500 times in the last year if you'd managed to listen to every programme transmitted. So it seems only right that every day this week you'll be able to read a blog post by one of Radio 4's announcers, starting today with Kathy Clugston's ode to the pre-dawn and to the Very Important Task of making a big flask of tea.

Starting tomorrow, it's 'Announcers' Week' on the blog. Each day, for the whole week, I'll bring you a post from one of Radio 4's announcers - the preternaturally calm crew who sit at the eye of the network's daily storm of news and comedy and weather and documentaries and drama (and the shipping forecast) and make sure everything keeps flowing as it should.

Monday's post is by Kathy Clugston (follow Kathy on Twitter: ) and takes us to the Today studio before dawn...

When you make a radio programme, you wait for the transmission date, you hope for a couple of reviews in the paper, you listen to the transmission and then it's gone. Elvis by Bono has had a different journey. It's attracted world wide press, has become the this week on the Times Online, been parodied in and even been .

We knew this programme had the potential to be special a long time ago. Bono had read out his poem 'Elvis - American David' to Des Shaw at while he was recording an interview about and said to him that he could do whatever he liked with it. It's written as a 6 minute list of Elvis's life. Des made a CD of the poem, passed it onto sound engineer and composer Chris O'Shaughnessy who gave it to me later that week knowing that I'd listened to U2 since I was 15. When I heard it, I immediately started hearing a soundscape of Elvis archive and music mixed around the poem - it stirred the imagination.

We weren't sure what to do with it, and sat on it for 2 years until Radio 4 seemed ready for this kind of material. When I managed to secure the commission from Caroline Raphael as a joint / production, I asked Chris O'Shaughnessy to produce it and compose original music to link the sections. I gathered the archive and let Chris do the rest. U2's management graciously let us have artistic freedom. The result is an extraordinary rhythmic 'composition' of sound that charts Elvis's life and music and shines a light on the cult of Elvis.

Since then, the programme has taken on a life of its own. There has been an avalanche of press around it - from all the major papers around the world to tiny websites run from small towns in America. I guess Elvis and Bono sell. ran it as their lead news story and apparently were pleased with the results. Many of the stories have criticised the poem, the conceit, but those who have listened have been generally positive, calling it a 'radio event'.

Critic Jane Anderson from the summed it up by saying, "I was aware that I was meant to feel somehow blessed to hear this, but I didn't. With my headphones heavy with prejudice I sat back and listened, only to be startled out of complacent disdain by the electrifying brilliance of this recording. It's no grovelling paean to Presley, and Bono's surprisingly sharp appraisal of the man's life is made truly remarkable by producer/sound engineer Chris O'Shaughnessy's inspired layering of effects, clips and archive recordings."

• Bono, the Ö÷²¥´óÐã, the programme's producers and composer Chris O'Shaughnessy have agreed to do something unusual and to make 'Elvis by Bono' available on the Radio 4 web site as a permanent tribute to Elvis Presley. Click here to listen.
• The picture was taken in 1964 and was sourced through the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's picture library, which is called 'Elvis'

The first time I came down the hill on my bike and turned into the back gate of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã in Bristol, I tried to cycle as I tell my actors to read the poems for Poetry Please - ordinarily, as if for the first time, as if nothing was easier in the world, as if there wasn't a microphone in front of them, or - in my case - Karen McGann of Ö÷²¥´óÐã4 with a camera to her eye, leaning out the window of a van cruising slowly alongside me.

The take was fine, but once in television is never enough. The next time the wind had got up; how would Byron cycle into work, I wondered. Again Karen and the van tracked past. Poets, famously, don't drive, but I couldn't remember any great cycling poems either. We like to think of Philip Larkin in bicycle clips but what about Coleridge (doped in charge of a penny farthing?), or Stevie Smith (not waving but indicating?), or T. S. Eliot (at least his trousers wouldn't get caught in the chain). When was the first bike anyway (could Chaucer ride one?), and why couldn't I resist throwing some nonchalant I'm-not-looking-at-the-camera-look that could only show me as an arty tosser - the poetry producer, for God's sake, on his bike, of course.

I can do radio, but doing radio for the TV wasn't easy. Next up after the Ben Hur bike ride was me in my office. I found having to act reading or typing or moving listeners' request letters across my desk incredibly hard - every gesture seemed hammy, a pantomime performance of "work", the opposite of the beautiful simplicity of the programme I was trying to show being put together. The talking was easier. The programme is very popular even if a detractor might see it as a mildewed bit of public service - a request show with a poetry DJ - tucked away in a corner of the West Country. I was keen to trip that version up. I too had derisory words for Poetry Please once, but I have changed my mind and have something of the zeal of the convert about me. So I plugged away and said what I thought. The set helped too. My office is echt Ö÷²¥´óÐã arts producer, with beetling cliffs of poetry books and CDs and old newspapers. And though I was crap at looking like I was reading it, having a collected A. E. Housman to hand helped somehow. Karen filmed on.

One received idea of the programme - spare me please, an angry performance poet who thinks they are shaking up the establishment - is that it trades in literary warm beer, cricket, English spinsters on bicycles (ah, my imagined poetic cyclist peddles past at last): a world long extinct if indeed it was ever extant, but this is far too crude an account. On Poetry Please we do Grantchester and honey and blue remembered hills and oh to be in England but we do much else as well. Peter Reading and Kathleen Jamie are there, as well as laureates old and new, there are black readers, gay poems, fresh work alongside most-loved lines, and I guarantee everyone will hear new things in every edition of the programme - and by new I mean poems that - as Ezra Pound said they must - make news that stays news. This is what I tried to say.

Making the programme for me is a repeated education - first in poetry itself; it is extraordinary and wonderful that so many Radio 4 listeners carry so much poetry with them; second it offers wider lessons in humankind, that people who write letters on bunny rabbit headed paper or who declare their age to excuse their wobbly hand are not silent and morose or swamped by television or debt but are getting on with their lives, living with poetry that makes reading their letters an uplifting privilege. As producers we must try to rise to the request: the best readings by the best readers (we are good at that, after my clumsy office acting, Karen filmed Kenneth Cranham reading - peerlessly - from 'A Shropshire Lad' for the programme), then the simplest of presentation from the warmest of hosts (Roger McGough, who is marvellous at that), and that's it, then shut up and let A. E. Housman tell you how it was to love a man who died and tell you in such a way that you can never hear enough of him telling you it over again though every time it makes you cry.

Roger McGough reading the poem he wrote to mark the 30th anniversary:

• Poetry Please: Thirty Years of the People's Poetry. The Ö÷²¥´óÐã Four television documentary is on Sunday evening at 2130.
• Poetry Please on the Radio 4 web site.
• Let poetry into your life: the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's Poetry Season on television and radio in May, June and July.
• Roger McGough's page on the Radio 4 web site, his own and and his .
• A nice article from the Ö÷²¥´óÐã Shropshire web site about A.E. Housman's 150th birthday.

We've made a couple of tweaks to the homepage today.

We've slightly enlarged the top right 'Find a Programme' panel, in order to present the link to all current Radio 4 programmes more clearly. The top picture promotion area has therefore been slightly reduced and, in order to preserve the image shape, we've moved the text to the bottom.

Here are some other changes which should go live shortly, in response to audience feedback:

• Clearer links from programme homepages to the pages about their recent editions.
• A new weekly schedule grid view, which horizontally aligns programmes by time.
• On the daily schedule page, the greyed-out calendar links from previous/next months will become clickable.

And looking a little further ahead:

• We'll start to move archive audio to the new site and will review the ways users get to this content. (In the meantime, remember that you can still access these archives via the links on the right hand side or in the navigation bar on programme pages.)
• Work has started to redevelop some of our programme microsites (eg The Archers, In Our Time) and add some new features.

Thanks again for your constructive feedback so far.

Leigh's previous posts on this topic:

• Designing the new web site, 9 March 2009.
• More on the new R4 web site, 19 March 2009.
• The countdown has begun, 30 March 2009.
• The new web site: one week on, 6 April 2009.
• Some changes to the new site - and a favour! 16 April 2009.

The on Monday - Radio's big awards night of the year - is a largely enjoyable ritual. The evening at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London's Park Lane is long - but there is more goodwill around than in many of these sort of occasions. And it is the only time the industry can see itself in the round - or a semblance of the round.

Thus those assembled in the cavernous ballroom come from the Ö÷²¥´óÐã and Commercial Radio, from big stations and small stations and from those who are in music radio and those who focus on speech. In recent years alcohol consumption has fallen and the acceptance speeches have been shorn of most of their baroque ornamentation.

Radio 4 did fine - even if the predominant hue was silver rather than gold. The tally was 3 Gold awards, 10 Silver and 2 Bronzes. In some other years we have won more Golds and fewer Silvers - but it's still a decent haul and down to the skill of the programme-makers - both from within the Ö÷²¥´óÐã and the independent radio companies that provide us with many excellent programmes. Here are the details:

Radio 4's winners

.
Gold: Mr Larkin's Awkward Day
Silver: The Color Purple
Bronze: Goldfish Girl

Gold: Fergal Keane interviews Lana Vandenberghe

Silver: Today

Silver: Poetry From The Front Line

Silver: Mike Thomson

Speech Radio Personality of the Year
Silver: Eddie Mair

Silver: Evan Davis

Gold: Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show!
Bronze: The Now Show

Silver: Anatomy Of a Car Crash
Bronze: Leonard and Marianne

Silver: Attacks in Mumbai

Silver: 1968 - Myth or Reality?

Silver: World On The Move

Radio 3 - happily - won the - for the first time. Here is the list of all the awards made on the night.

Of course every year there are some programmes - whether big programme strands or individual documentaries - you particularly wish had won the top bauble... but restraint is called for. It would not be right to single out in public any single programme.

The Radio 4 winners were all top notch. Count Arthur Strong, winner of , is a very strong flavour - one very much to my taste. We know that there is a section of the audience that doesn't get it - but we also know that another section of the audience loves it with feeling. Steve Delaney - the comic genius behind the programme - picked up the award as himself. I had wondered whether he might make his acceptanace speech in character. There will be another series. Catch it.

The was won by Mr Larkin's Awkward Day - written by Chris Harrald. It provides a delicious insight into Philip Larkin's character - and has a tremendous sense of period. We will repeat it.

And Fergal Keane's interview with Lana Vandenberghe (from the programme strand 'Taking a Stand') - who when working at the Independent Police Complaints Commission in London leaked documents about the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. Fergal pressed her hard - but with careful politeness. A terrific piece. Listen to the programme here.

• The and the .
• The Guardian's Media Monkey .
• The Telegraph's Anita Singh .
• Steve Delaney in The Guardian in 2004.
• Fergal Keane wrote about Lana Vandenberghe.

I'm sitting in the Radio 4 Continuity studio - or 40B as it's officially known - counting the minutes till the final pips of my shift when an e-mail arrives from Anna, our message board moderator. Someone's posted a comment about me: they've picked up on a couple of things I've said on air that they found amusing, which makes a nice change. In fact they've slightly mis-quoted what I said and I think their versions are funnier... although not the kind of thing I could have said on air.

And that's the essence of this job. Knowing what to say, when to say it, how far to go and when to stop and simply be silent; less is sometimes more.

I see my role as being the listener's friend - yours I hope. You and I are both fans of Radio 4 and - since I don't have time to hear our programmes in advance - are sharing the experience of listening together. I have a slight advantage in that I know exactly what's coming up in our schedule and I want to convince you to stay and share these wonderful programmes with me.

You'll notice I referred to listener in the singular. Yes, the research gurus tell us we're reaching an audience of nearly 10 million a week but in my studio it's only ever two people: you and me... and occasional honoured guests who come armed with cameras.

I guess the studio has the look of a flight deck about it but the views aren't quite as exciting; one of the downsides of being in a Ö÷²¥´óÐã secure area is the absence of daylight. But I do sit facing studio 40A, my second professional home: this is known as Long Wave Con and carries those bits of our output which are broadcast on split wavelengths - Yesterday in Parliament, the Daily Service, and the Shipping Forecast.

Probably just as well that the views are relatively uninspiring as I should be concentrating on the six computer screens facing me and the sound desk at my fingertips.

Beyond my desk lies some sophisticated sound processing, designed to ensure that the Radio 4 sound maintains the right dynamic range and subtleties demanded by our wide array of programmes, the transmitter network and... you. I am the last human being in the broadcasting chain and but a fader slide away from taking Radio 4 off air. And yes, it does keep me awake some nights.

Those six screens help me decide what goes out through the desk and on the air, most importantly the one with the schedule. This is the masterwork evolving from Tony Pilgrim's planning, our Operations Team who check and process all the programmes, and our Promotions Team who make all the pre-recorded trails you hear through the day, often using Announcers - currently I'm locally known as R4's voice of Fertility having promoted documentaries on the children of sperm donors and Life as an Old New Mum.

But back to that schedule screen. Once again the power vested in me is awesome; with one careless use of the keyboard I could wipe out the next episode of The Archers, move Woman's Hour to the middle of the night and replace You and Yours with some stand-up comedy. But in the interests of my Ö÷²¥´óÐã pension I restrict my actions to inserting late arriving programmes (e.g. the recent Case Notes special on Flu), adding extra trails and doing my sums.

Maths is a vital skill demanded of an announcer. In any one hour I must add up the time occupied by programmes, trails, scripted announcements and news then subtract that figure from 59 minutes and 55 seconds; what remains is up to me to fill in the most succinct, entertaining and promotional way possible.

This is a near-perfect job if you're a Radio 4 addict like me so long as you remember the golden rule: don't listen to the programmes - at least not too closely. You may be enjoying the thrilling denouement of the Afternoon Play but if I'm sitting in Con I must be 'reading the road ahead': is my newsreader ready to go and levels checked; is the Moneybox Live studio ready and tested to follow the news, have I a suitable pre-recorded trail cued and ready, are the pips primed and - oh yes - what on earth am I going to say?

• Chris joined the Radio 4 announcer team in 1995. Here's a short biography from the Radio 4 site and his .
• Some on duty in studio 40B in April 2009.

is a graphic designer, former radio presenter and full-time parent from Hastings. He's assembled an awesome collection of radio station ephemera at It's a quite dazzling mosaic of brightly-coloured pop culture stuff from thirty-odd years of radio and, of course, there's some in there. Some of it quite strange. If you have any Radio 4 material from over the years, he'd like you to . Michael's also .

The are a ritual.

Once every three months R4's Head of Audience Research (he does many other things too) phones up on a Wednesday evening and reels off a few key numbers for Radio 4 and Radio 7. The conversation lasts about 30 seconds - and we are both exaggeratedly laconic. Yesterday he began with "Quite good really" or words to that effect and then went on to say... "9.98million/12.5%/6.69 million/PM all-time high/everything up/Radio 7 984,000."

I said "That's OK then. And if we indulge ourselves by musing about rounding up to the next significant figure we get to 10 million for Radio 4... but we must not cheat." End of conversation.

I will decode - and all of what follows applies to the first three months of 2009.

9.98 million people per week listened to Radio 4 for at least 15 minutes per week. (This figure is called 'Weekly Reach'). This figure has been exceeded only once in the last ten years or so - during the Iraq war in 2003.

The average amount of listening per week of those 9.98 million is 12 hours and 50 minutes.(Radio 4 has the highest average weekly listening figure of the national stations). Radio 4 listening now accounts for 12.5% of all listening to all radio in the U.K - the highest figure since the current measuring system for radio listening was introduced over a decade ago.

Weekly Reach for Today is 6.69 million. That too is a very high figure and when Today's figures are strong it helps the overall R4 figure. PM's figures - 3.84 million and a 15.1% share - have never been better - or at least not since the new measurement system was introduced.

But it was not just News programmes that did well this quarter. Drama and Comedy for instance had a bumper quarter too. And Radio 7's weekly reach was its best yet at 984,000.

But - and it's a very big but indeed - RAJAR figures - whether up, down or sideways - do not tell the whole story about Radio 4 or Radio 7. Quality, range, distinctiveness, originality all matter and are not always reflected in the RAJAR figures. I remember one quarter a couple of years back where I thought we had transmitted some really outstanding programmes but the RAJAR figures were not particularly noteworthy. And - painful though it may be to admit - the reverse is also possible. But I hope not in this case.

The radio industry, unlike television () does not have overnight figures. Occasionally one yearns for evidence that a particular programme or piece of scheduling has reaped rewards - but on the whole the absence of the 'overnights' is a liberation. You can put in a greater number of 90 minute plays on Saturday afternoons - for instance - without instantly fretting about the impact on a particular Saturday afternoon's listening. One day the technology may allow for overnights in radio - and I can't deny that I would be reading them voraciously - but for the time being I enjoy not having them.

So it's been a good RAJAR quarter and I hope we have been delighting and stimulating you - but I am acutely aware that what goes up can come down - so we won't be spending the day awash with champagne.

• (Radio Joint Audience Research) is jointly owned by the and commercial radio trade body the . Participating listeners are asked to record their radio listening in quarter-hour time blocks for one week.
• The RAJAR figures for 'linear listening', not including on-demand listening or podcasts, and the official (PDF).
• The Ö÷²¥´óÐã's RAJAR press release leads on Radio 4's record quarter.
• Ö÷²¥´óÐã News Online , leading on Chris Moyles.
• Trade paper Radio Today's .
• Media Guardian .
• Paid Content, a digital media trade paper,
• Journalism trade paper Press Gazette .
• Wikipedia's .

Fran Barnes, a producer on the programme and half of the intrepid bee team, has sent me a second installment in the Farming Today bee saga. I'm posting it on her behalf this time but she'll contribute directly in future and the programme team are planning a blog of their own:

"Just taken Charlotte Smith to the hive to record Farming Today This Week for broadcast Saturday 2nd May. Charlotte is pessimistic about our bees and raised serious questions about whether they would survive the year, given the disease problems the British honeybee faces.

This was a shock to me. I've always been perfectly optimistic. It hasn't really occurred to me that our colony could die (read about bee parasite in Wikipedia and hear more about it on last Tuesday's Farming Today). I had just assumed that was the kind of thing that happened to 'other' beekeepers. Should I start bracing myself for this possibility? Seeing our (still nameless) Queen working hard in the hive it's hard to believe at this stage anything untoward could happen. The Queen's laying 1800 eggs a day and the hive is looking very busy. The bees are starting to 'draw out' the comb from the new frames in the hive. I'm always so fascinated and taken aback by the industriousness of the bees that important questions like "when will we get some honey" didn't cross my mind. I must ask Clive next time.

On the subject of honey... Chris and I attended the most well-received of our beekeeping evening classes last night. It was the session about honey extraction and we sampled 5 different types of honey as well as honey cake and mead. We decided that honey tasting is very similar to wine tasting - if you're used to cheap plonk then expensive stuff doesn't quite taste right. We're both slightly embarrassed to admit that neither one of us particularly liked heather honey - the gold standard of honey. We had thought we'd take the Farming Today bees 'to the heather' this year, but perhaps not.

On another note, while at the apiary I re-hived a swarm Clive had collected. There's so much to learn, and the more we learn the more intrigued we are. More on the swarm next week."

Fran Barnes

• Chris Impey's introduction to the Farming Today bees on the blog last week.
• Listen again to the bees' on-air debut on Farming Today last week.

has been gracing Radio 4 for many years with her distinctive gifts so although (as in all things) we are impartial - and there were other considerable candidates - it is very fine that she is .

As it happens today's Woman's Hour comes from Manchester (we normally do one edition a week from the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's Manchester studios) and Carol Ann Duffy has an academic post there - but that is less the point than the capacity of Woman's Hour to attract a huge range of interviewees - with a fair amount every year choosing the programme as a place to talk when there is a wave of public interest in their story (cf Sharon Shoesmith).

The question is asked many times - why have a programme called Woman's Hour? And as its editor, Jill Burridge, pointed out recently on Feedback if we started Radio 4 today we might not provide a programme with that title. But there is a great deal to be said for stability and longevity when the quality is there. It is a hugely recognisable title and that helps its pulling power - though it would not work without a skilled team and presenters of the quality of Jenni Murray and Jane Garvey.

Listen to the interview:

• Listen to Michele Roberts and Roger McGough on this morning's .
• A of 21 Poets Laureate from The Guardian.
• Andy McSmith's handy in The Independent.
• on Twitter mostly focus on memories of the GCSE syllabus and mostly on Duffy's gender and her sexuality.