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I can always tell when we've recorded a good edition of The Bottom Line: it is one where I have not had to speak very much.

Don't get me wrong. I love speaking. It's what I'm paid to do. And before we record the programme I always make sure that I have plenty to say on the topics we're discussing.

Fortunately, however, I'm modest enough to know that the Bottom Line is really about the guests rather than the presenter. And for the programme to succeed, it needs to show the guests at their most fluent and expressive.

And that is where the challenge of the programme lies.

To succeed, the conversation has to fizz; the guests have to bounce comments off each other and push their point out, rather than have it pulled from them. In short, the guests have to converse like the professional talkers who fill the airwaves - journalists, politicians, artistic performers and academics.

But the interesting fact is that when you take a significant number of business people out of their comfort zone and put them in a radio studio, they are not relaxed about practising the art of conversation.

Business-people are trained in all sorts of communication: they can bark orders or sell washing powder or talk to Powerpoint presentations. They are just not bred to appear on Midweek.

Put a microphone in front of many of our guests they are a little taciturn; they like to think about what they're saying; they are worried about disagreeing with the other guests or speaking out of turn. Sometimes, they even wait to be asked a question.

Unchecked, none of these habits give the programme the natural flow we are looking for. (After all, you would never feel a dinner party had been very stimulating if it consisted of the host simply asking a sequence of questions to one guest at a time). So my job as presenter is to make all the guests feel comfortable with the task at hand.

Now, over time I've made an interesting observation on what works and what doesn't in making the more reticent guests relax.

I used to give a rather vague pre-show chat to them all, emphasising that they should feel free to speak without being spoken to; that they could make their point when they wanted to, and even interrupt if it sounded natural.

But this turned out to be too imprecise. Business-people are task oriented and hungry for new skills. They want their briefing to be more target-driven.

So I have discovered that if, before the recording, I instead tell them that "on at least three occasions in the programme, you should make a comment without having been asked anything by me", they converse in a far more casual way.

In fact, some of the best conversations occur when I jokingly suggest the show is a competition to see who can initiate the most points and talk most.

Tell them that, and the discussion flows. I have to do very little work. To the listener the result is a programme that has a more variable pace and one that is altogether easier to listen to.

But I expect it's only programmes with business guests that would find the way to foster a natural-sounding round-table chat by giving specific advice upfront of a rather unnatural kind.

Evan Davis presents The Bottom Line, Dragon's Den and Today

• The new series The Bottom Line begins this evening at 2030.
• Some pictures taken in Broadcasting House last July

I first came into contact with the world of aged thirteen, and it wasn't through his books.

My elder brother, John, the two boys from next door and I were into role playing games, such as Dungeons & Dragons, and when I say we were into it, I mean we were lost in it, obsessed, consumed by worlds scribbled on character sheets and graph paper. One summer we spent every waking hour playing, the curtains drawn tight to block out sunlight and add atmosphere. It's a wonder we never came down with rickets!

Our heads were full of Orcs, Dragons and (actually, we never did encounter one of them, simply because they sounded rubbish)... until one dark autumn day when a package arrived on our doorstep; an ancient package, a package containing some unknown, intolerable evil.

Some weeks before, my brother had announced, in a conspiratorial manner, that he had ordered a new role-playing game called (which was referred to under the rather unfortunate acronym of CoC). It was a 'horror' role-playing game (a first) based on the work of the great HP Lovecraft. 'Wow' I said 'who's he?' When the package arrived (it wasn't evil or ancient really, just a pristine, well-presented jiffy bag) all was revealed.

Lovecraft wasn't merely straight horror, it had a mythos built around it, with creatures of unfathomable mystery such as the fungal , the , and the rather less exotic . The rules of the game were also slightly different, in that they had a whole section dedicated to insanity. Amazing; your character could not only have their arms and legs ripped off, but they could also completely lose their minds as well.

Nestled deep in the centre of Lovecraft's mythos was the darkest tome known to man, the anti-bible, the dreaded, the indescribable, the completely unreadable , written by the 'mad Arab' Abdul Alhazred. Now, to our young minds, this book actually existed (I'm still not a hundred percent sure it doesn't) which added to the sense that what we were playing, what we were recounting, what we were experiencing was somehow really evil, that we were actually dabbling on the fringes of the occult, and it all therefore became just that tad bit more exciting.

We only played the game twice. I don't know why as they were the best gaming sessions we ever had. One adventure (my brother wrote and umpired all the adventures) was called The Man Who Made Monsters, which was a sort of 1920s-set Frankenstein/zombie affair, and the other one ended up with us running around a foggy forest with shotguns, whilst being hunted by some hideous beasts from outer space. Can't actually remember what that one was called, but it was brilliant.

And that leads me to the literature of Lovecraft himself. Since discovering CoC (that really is most unfortunate, isn't it?) I've returned time and time again to the short stories. Now, some may say that Lovecraft is not great literature, and they'd probably be right, but what he has in spades is ideas, and the ability to create atmospheres and plant truly horrific imagery in the space of a short sentence. Just give this a go:

I was much less disturbed by the vulgar tales of wails and
howlings in the barren, windswept valley beneath the limestone
clifftop; of the graveyard stenches after the spring rains;
of the floundering, squealing white thing on which Sir
John Clave's horse had trod one night in a lonely field;
and the servant who had gone mad at what he saw in the
Priory in the full light of day.
The Rats in the Walls

Marvellous. 'The floundering, squealing white thing...' what is that about?

Another thing Lovecraft is extraordinarily good at is titling his work, which goes a long way with me as I'm particularly bad at it. , , ; these titles reek of the genre that spawned them, as well as having a pungent whiff of pulp about them. If you read expecting a deep and meaningful dissection of what it meant to be human in 20th Century America, well, more fool you.

Now, this leads me to the moment I was asked to pitch for Weird Tales, stories 'inspired by' the work of Lovecraft. Important phrase that 'inspired by' not 'based on'. First I looked for triggers in all I remembered from his work, and the first thing that sprang to mind was one of the titles, my favourite title, , and went from there. I even actually got to use the phrase itself as a direct homage; it was one of the last things I did on the script, when the producer said we needed a couple of lines to insert in the introduction.

The story I've written is, I hope, a modern story. It's not set in the 20s and Lovecraft's beloved Arkham doesn't feature either. There's no reference to tomes of evil magic, and there are no shambling space creatures in search of blood. But it does explore one vital Lovecraftian theme, and that is....ahh, I'll let you find out.

It's been a pleasure though, to write a play based on the work of someone who had such an impact on my early life; not only Lovecraft; but my brother, John, who created stories for us to play all those years ago, and who made supreme evil that little bit more fun than football, hanging out at the rec' and all the usual stuff 'normal' kids got up to in small town England in the early 1980s.

Richard Vincent wrote tonight's episode of Weird Tales

• Bookmark this page for all three Weird Tales blog posts.
• Listen to episode three of Weird Tales tonight at 2300 (and on the Radio 4 web site for seven days after that).
• Follow programme makers on Twitter and look out for Lovecraft references during transmission. Use the hashtag if you're listening.
• There are from Weird Tales 2: Split the Atom, on Flickr.
• H.P. Lovecraft has . So does .
• is by and it's used .

Editor's note. Here is producer John Dryden's final Six Suspects blog post - this time about the process of recording the pivotal party scene - used throughout the adaptation. Fascinating. And after it (scroll down), something marvelous: eight deleted and extended scenes, nearly twenty minutes of audio all together, given to us by John for exclusive publication here on the blog. My recommendation: put your headphones on and listen to them in sequence - it's like a scary ride through the backstreets and penthouses of the story. John's post starts with the party scene itself - SB.

The party sequence in week two - where Vicky Rai is murdered - presented a number of challenges as the sequence of events is repeated each day but each time from a different suspects point of view. The party itself was recorded in a number of different ways - Vicky's speech for instance was recorded with 'live' party crowds who he could bounce off and who could react to him. We recorded him close and from within the crowd so that we could cut between perspectives. We also recorded a lot of lines clean of the party so that they could be dropped in over the many party wildtracks we recorded.

This was mostly the case with the dialogue lines from the various suspects. We recorded a lot of crowd reactions to the different events of the party - 'anchor points' we called them. These were events that had to happen in every episode - the fireworks, the power cutting out, the gun going off, the lights coming back on, the discovery of Vicky's body. As the audience are pretty sure by now that someone is going to murder Vicky at the party (they are told as much by Arun Advani at the end of episode four), the fireworks are a kind of tease - anticipating the actual gun shot that will come later.

How the guests at the party were to react when the lights came back on and discovered Vicky lying on the ground was something we didn't decide on until late in the day. In fact we recorded the guests reacting in a number of different ways but opted eventually for the idea that they would think he was playing a joke on them. This allowed for a gradual realization that he was dead. It seemed right that they would think it was a joke at first - Vicky being the prankster type.

In terms of editing, we first of all created a master party sequence which had all the 'anchor points' but none of the perspectives of the different suspects. It was a sequence with Vicky in 'full frame' from his speech to the discovery of his death. This took quite some time to make, because it was constructed from so many different elements and we wanted it to seem like someone had turned up to a party in Delhi with a tape recorder or video camera and just recorded everything that happened there - like it was found material.

Once the master sequence was completed we used it at the end of episodes 6-10 in various configurations, dropping in the lines from the various suspects over the top. That's the sequence you can hear at the top of this blog post.

John Dryden is producer of Six Suspects

Deleted and extended scenes from Six Suspects, recorded live in Mumbai for the Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4 adaptation:

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

• The last three episodes of Six Suspects are still available to listen to on the Radio 4 web site. A Ö÷²¥´óÐã audio CD is planned.
• Read John Dryden's two posts about recording the series in India.
• The picture, , is by . Used .

This week in deepest, darkest Glasgow I've had the great pleasure of producing the 3rd series of corner shop comedy 'Fags, Mags & Bags' for Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4. (Let's get the plugs in early, lead character Ramesh would expect nothing less! Starts Wednesday 10th February at 1130)

Myself and the writers Donny Mcleary and Sanjeev Kohli have always been keen to explore multimedia and social networking to reach the widest possible audience for the show and for fans to interact with the programme online. We produced two YouTube clips last time round to promote the show, and for this new series I thought it would be interesting to give fans a peek into the backshop of 'Fags, Mags & Bags'. Across our and we've been posting pics in real-time from the studio, offering little insights and exclusives into the recording process, and providing unsubstantiated gossip about cast members. Fans of the show have really gone for it and I think we've added about 100 fans since the start of the week so it's also helping create a buzz about the show ahead of transmission.

I have to say we're as proud of our as Ramesh is of his Wall of Crisps or indeed his unrivalled selection of part-work magazines. We've had the page from the very first series and it now boasts over 600 members and effectively charts the evolution of the show with pics and content from all the series recordings. It keeps the show alive when it's not on-air, and allows fans to chat directly to Donny and Sanj as well as show off their encyclopaedic knowledge of the show. (Who would have thought that Chutney Windmills and the Lembit Opik Pitta Heater would have entered the British consciousness?)

As for the recording, well, doing it in early January in the middle the worst winter for over 30 years has not gone without its challenges. Thankfully actors are a hardy bunch. If you book them, they will come. In 'Fags, Mags & Bags' we've put together a great core cast who not only bring their great acting abilities but their bonhomie and ready wit to the proceedings which adds to a great atmosphere in the studio. From a producer's point of view this is priceless as that energy and enthusiasm really comes through in the recording.

To mix things up and bring something new to an episode we also like to invite along special guest stars. In series one we had The Fonejacker Kayvan Novak, in series two Eastenders star Nina Wadia made a stunning appearance, and this year we've had the great pleasure of welcoming (Titanic) and the one and only (Doctor Who 7) along to the studio. Writer Donny was particularly excited about working with Sylvester as he's a huge Doctor Who fan, and watch out for an inadvertent joke about David Tenant in that episode, a very funny and happy accident!

Now for a week of editing and artificially creating the soundscape of shop. My best FX of last year was creating the sound of a Chup-a-Chups lollipop display crashing to the floor using a broom and lots of pen tops. As Ramesh would no doubt say, "it was both amazing and great".

Chris Beattie is producer of Fags, Mags and Bags. He's

• The Fags, Mags & Bags has 625 fans and plenty of behind-the-scenes insights from the shop.
• Watch the 'shopumentary' and lots of on YouTube.
• Gus took the picture in the studio. There's another picture .

After more than three years today sees lift off for 'A History of The World' - the biggest factual series in my time at Radio 4 - 100 parts, each 15 minutes. Neil MacGregor - the Director of the - explores A (and it is 'A' not 'The') History of The World.

I've written about this series before - but it's an exciting day. The work of some of Radio 4's greatest producers and editors has been married to some of the Museum's most scholarly and brilliant minds to create these programmes. It's been a marriage, and like all marriages has had its challenges. But three years on all here at Radio 4 respect the British Museum enormously: it has been a privilege to be involved with them. It is a magnificent institution. Neil is a fabulous presenter - charismatic and perceptive.

A few of you will be irritated by the temporary loss of Book of The Week - but this is something special. So please try it. There are three transmissions for every episode 0945, 1945 and 0030- and we are podcasting the entire series in perpetuity - a first.

The website was only finished this weekend - truly - but has lots to offer and we really want you to upload your own objects that have global connections. Every object you upload will have a page accompanying it.

The idea for a history based on objects began as a Radio 4 idea - but has spread across the Ö÷²¥´óÐã and around the country to hundreds of museums. It's the front cover story of the Radio Times too.

I shall cut a celebratory cake with the key Ö÷²¥´óÐã people involved in the Radio 4 series today - and I hope very much that you enjoy listening.

My favourite object doesn't even feature for another few months! Though this week's Swimming Reindeer (Thursday) is rather remarkable.

I hope this does not all sound too effusive... but it's been a passion around Radio 4 for a long, long time.

My fingers are crossed. But it's good.

Mark Damazer is Controller of Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4

• A History of the World in 100 Objects has a lovely web site where you can learn about the 100 objects and all of the others contributed by dozens of British museums - and you're invited to add an object of your own.
• The first programme in the series was on Radio 4 at 0945 this morning - repeated at 1945 and 0030 tonight. Listen again here and subscribe to the podcast here.
• The video shows Kwame Kwei Armah talking about his object - the ticket his mother bought for her journey from Grenada to Britain in 1962. You can see more videos on the A History of the World web site.
• The hash tag for A History of the World is . Use it on Twitter or other social networks when you're talking about the project.

I have only done a few radio plays and still feel very much like a novice but I have to say all my experiences so far in the recording studio have been thoroughly enjoyable.

I think the reason I enjoy it so much is because you aren't being watched. The director, producers and sound engineer are in a separate room, listening to you so they aren't scrutinising your every movement. You don't have to worry about your appearance, or learn your lines (always a bonus).

There is still a lot of interaction between you and the other actors and you record in a large room, divided into different areas e.g. kitchen, bedroom, staircase. It almost feels like you are in a giant dollshouse and this only adds to the feeling of 'playing' which gives such a sense of freedom when you are performing. I always thought that the sound effects would be added on in the editing process but you are often provided with personal props that are used during the scene e.g. the office characters in, 'Weird Tales' where all provided with mugs of coffee to drink while gossiping during our first scene.

It was great to be involved in, 'Weird Tales' because there was real scope to play around with the characters and have fun due to the comic elements and the slightly fantastical nature of the script. I had talked to Luke beforehand and we discussed the idea of the three office workers being similar to the three witches in, 'Macbeth'. They huddle around the water cooler gossiping, talking about future predictions and cackling amongst themselves. During my time as an office temp, I have met some great characters and I wanted to draw on these memories when creating the character of Louise. She is the mother hen of the office, dominant and protective over her clique, but with a naughty sense of humour. I was also aware that they had to be believable characters so I had to reign it in so as not to make her too much of a,'grotesque'.

We began the day with a read-through, which is an opportunity to hear the play 'lift' off the page as you hear each actor's interpretation of his or her character. It was lovely to hear the comedy in the piece combined with the spookiness as the story reaches its climax.

I had a bit of a break before I recorded my scenes so I decided to sit in the recording booth and have a listen. It's a great way to pick up tips as you hear the director give notes to the actors and watch the sound engineers play around with the different sounds. At one point a note was given to one of the actors to smile during a particular line and you could really hear the difference it made to the tone of the delivery.

Then it was my turn! It all went very well. There are always minor problems to work through, e.g. you all have to be close enough to the microphone and if there are a few actors in the scene, the logistics of who stands where and when have to be worked through. You generally get a chance to have a quick rehearsal before recording and after each take; Luke would come into the studio and give us any notes. We then wait for the green light and go for it (whilst trying not to rustle the pages of your script as you turn the page).

I always feel like I come away from doing a radio play having learnt so much about the different techniques involved. Can't wait to hear the finished result!

Emma Stansfield is an actor

• We'll publish a third blog post to coincide with episode three of this short series next week. Bookmark this page for all three Weird Tales blog posts.
• Listen to episode two of Weird Tales tonight at 2300 (and on the Radio 4 web site for seven days after that).
• Follow programme makers on Twitter and look out for Lovecraft references during transmission. Use the hashtag if you're listening.
• There are from Weird Tales 2: Split the Atom, on Flickr.
• H.P. Lovecraft has .
• shows a 1954 edition of Weird Tales, featuring stories by Lovecraft and other horror pioneers. It's by and it's used .

John Dryden's second post about recording Six Suspects for Radio 4 - SB.

We recorded a lot of crowd reactions to the different events of the party - 'anchor points' we called them. These were events that had to happen in every episode - the fireworks, the power cutting out, the gun going off, the lights coming back on, the discovery of Vicky's body. As the audience are pretty sure by now that someone is going to murder Vicky at the party (they are told as much by Arun Advani at the end of episode four), the fireworks are a kind of tease - anticipating the actual gun shot that will come later.

How the guests at the party were to react when the lights came back on and discovered Vicky lying on the ground was something we didn't decide on until late in the day. In fact we recorded the guests reacting in a number of different ways but opted eventually for the idea that they would think he was playing a joke on them. This allowed for a gradual realization that he was dead. It seemed right that they would think it was a joke at first - Vicky being the prankster type.

In terms of editing, we first of all created a master party sequence which had all the "anchor points" but none of the perspectives of the different suspects. It was a sequence with Vicky in "full frame" from his speech to the discovery of his death. This took quite some time to make, because it was constructed from so many different elements and we wanted it to seem like someone had turned up to a party in Delhi with a tape recorder or video camera and just recorded everything that happened there - like it was found material.

Once the master sequence was completed we used it at the end of episodes 6-10 in various configurations, dropping in the lines from the various suspects over the top (Exclusive sound samples from the recording will be available here tomorrow).

• Six Suspects is transmitted in the Woman's Hour drama slot at 1045 and 1945 daily until 15 January. Listen to this week's episodes on the Radio 4 web site.
• Radio 4 Controller Mark Damazer wrote about John's production of Q&A (the story which became Slumdog Millionaire) here on the blog in February.
• There's some discussion of Six Suspects on the Radio 4 message board.
• by . Used .

It's in the can! All ten episodes of Rebecca Stott's compelling new novel The Coral Thief, are recorded and edited and ready for broadcast.

When I was searching earlier in the autumn for a Book at Bedtime to fill January's wintry evenings, my editor handed me The Coral Thief to see if it might fit the bill. And it did. A pacey thriller, a passionate and heady love affair, peppered with scientific ideas and historical insights, it seemed just the right combination for an ear-catching listen.

Once I had the green light from Radio 4's commissioning editor, the hardest part began: the abridging process. Because of the complicated nature of the tale, the interweaving of detailed fact and an imaginative, page-turning - but in truth, complicated - plot, a highly experienced abridger was necessary - we were turning the book round quickly too. Despite, or because of the challenges, one of the most interesting parts of my job is to work with the abridger, in this case Viv Beeby, making the tough decisions on what should go and what should stay.

Some of the detail had to be sacrificed - a plot like this lends itself to nail-biting endings but you have to ensure you can mold the episodes so that the characters, ideas and the period atmosphere maintain their substance. There was much illuminating detail we wanted to retain. For instance, the bronze horses taken down from the Arc de Triomphe by Wellingon under pressure from the Venetians who wanted them back speaks volumes about the political machinations in Paris following Napoleon's surrender. Then there are the moving sequences where Lucienne describes the experiences of her family during the worst excesses of the French Revolution which say so much, not least about her personality and what drives her.

Casting is crucial - and this time, unlike some others, the narrator's voice was clear to me from the start. I'd worked with Dan Stevens earlier in the year, reading William Fiennes' The Music Room and I knew he could carry off both the drama and the science entwined in the book. I felt he would bring our narrator, Daniel Connor, a young ambitious and engaging natural scientist, to life brilliantly. I knew that he could also lift Lucienne Bernard off the page and make this beautiful cross dressing thief sound seductive and charismatic, and all with a French accent.

Dan was enticed by the book and subsequently the scripts. Well prepared, once in studio he got stuck into telling the story and recreating the characters. He quickly nailed our English narrator, and Parisian temptress, as well as a sinister French detective, a Scottish professor and a number of brigands and thieves. Once we'd finished, the author, Rebecca Stott, came in to record her fascinating reflections on writing the novel; listen to her describing how she recreated a Paris that would be lost by the mid-nineteenth century when the wide boulevards we know today were built. Paris in the days of The Coral Thief was more akin to our pictures of Dickensian London - and a perfect setting for a novel of intrigue.

Listen to Rebecca's reflections here:

Elizabeth Allard is producer of The Coral Thief

• Rebecca Stott's The Coral Thief is this week's Book at Bedtime. Listen again here.
• Jane Garvie interviewed Rebecca Stott about The Coral Thief and her upbringing in the Plymouth Brethren on Woman's Hour before Christmas. Listen again here. She's also got about the novel on .
• shows an inscription on the walls of the Paris quarries. It was taken by . Used .

Editor's note. Have you been listening the current Woman's Hour serial? It's called Six Suspects, an adaptation of a story by Vikas Svarup, author of Q&A, the novel that was filmed as Slumdog Millionaire. One of the most distinctive things about Six Suspects is the amazing sound - it's unusually atmospheric and authentic - utterly absorbing. I asked producer John Dryden to explain how he captured the sound of Mumbai - SB.

What next? I'd worked in India several times before. I'd done the romantic epic (A Suitable Boy), the uplifting modern-day coming-of-age story (Q&A), but what was I going to do with this larger-than-life and slightly fantastical whodunit in which all the characters were at worst evil and a best mildly unlikeable. There is little of the milk of human kindness in the world of Six Suspects. It's all highly entertaining stuff in prose, but how were we going to make it compelling to listen to as drama?

I was looking for a very particular sound with Six Suspects. Set in modern-day India, it examines the lives of the suspects in the murder of a character (Vicky Rai) who is so evil you almost like him. The characters are so extreme the story verges on comedy - but I didn't want this just to be a comedy. There seemed to be so many more levels in the novel. I wanted the performances and production to work against the comedy and create a tension that I hoped the audience would feel and would suck them into the drama. So we worked on an approach in which the comedy and extremities would appear to be happening in the real world. Key to achieving this was the sound design. Sound designer Nick Russell-Pavier, sound recordist Ayush Ahuja and myself worked closely together in the weeks leading up to recording, planning each scene in detail. Being really well prepared allowed us to be more flexible when the recording actually took place.

Every scene was blocked out in detail. There were no actors standing around fixed microphones in this production. What the characters appear to be doing - whether walking up the stairs, running down the street, driving - the actors playing them are actually doing. We recorded it all in real locations with the microphone on a boom tracking the actors in their highly choreographed performances. We didn't record any of the drama in studio except for the voice over of the narrator, the investigative journalist Arun Advani - an element that gives the drama an investigative documentary feel.

We made the drama in India, in two primary locations: one a flat in Mumbai around which were streets we could record in; the other a rural location a few hours outside of Mumbai, which was much quieter and gave us more control. We used a variety of recording techniques - the tracking microphone on a boom - radio microphones in busy locations when we didn't want to draw attention to ourselves and for phone calls - small recorders which we gave the actors for certain fast movement sequences such as when Munna Mobile runs down the street after stealing a phone. We aimed to keep the microphones moving all the time to give an uneasy grainy quality to it all. We also recorded lots and lots of wildtracks, which we could later layer under scenes in post production - again to keep this sense of movement, of things always changing, as the fast-moving story progresses.

We recorded the drama in India over two weeks in May 2009 and I then went to work on several other productions before coming back to the material in August to begin the edit. The post-production took about ten weeks. I edited on Pro-Tools building the sequences as composer Sacha Puttnam began creating themes that I could start playing around with. The themes were inspired by music we recorded in India - raw, imporivised, performances by Indian musician. Gradually the shape and style of the drama began to emerge. At this stage, the script (a brilliantly constructed script by Ayeesha Menon from the novel by Vikas Swarup) was largely put aside as the characters took on a life of their own. For a final mix I worked with Nick Russell-Pavier in the studios at Essential Music. This is pretty much how we put the production together.

John Dryden is producer of Six Suspects

• Six Suspects is transmitted in the Woman's Hour drama slot at 1045 and 1945 daily until 15 January. Listen to this week's episodes on the Radio 4 web site.
• Radio 4 Controller Mark Damazer wrote about John's production of Q&A (the story which became Slumdog Millionaire) here on the blog in February.
• There's some discussion of Six Suspects on the Radio 4 message board.
• by . Used .

Editor's note: Weird Tales is back. Three more uncanny stories inspired by the master of otherworldly horror H.P. Lovecraft. Stephen King called Lovecraft "the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale." Tonight's first programme, by Melissa Murray, is called Connected. Read more about it on the Radio 4 web site. Here Stephen Hogan, who plays Lovecraft in the series, talks about the experience:

I loved playing Lovecraft; dark, damaged, brilliant, reclusive. When I discovered that he'd spent almost two years of self imposed exile in his bedroom as a youth, the only human contact being with his mother who supplied his basic needs, it seemed to provide the perfect context for his introductions to the tales. A sensitive, tortured soul who seemed dislocated from everyday life and society, was it his childhood or natural disposition?

His dark, paranoid almost psychotic take on life, destiny, fate and the supernatural was all reflected in his tales and in so doing created a new genre, which more so than ever seem to chime with the times we live in. Old certainties, values and beliefs seemingly no longer pertain in so much of the world - a world HP knew intimately.

When playing him, I imagined him, filthy, unwashed, surrounded by the detritus of months of living alone, delusional, almost schizophrenic in his hearing of sounds and voices from a malign higher power, randomly deciding an unlucky individual's fate - hopefully setting the tone for these strange, dark, wonderful 'weird' tales. I hope you enjoy them.

Stephen Hogan is an actor

• We'll publish blog posts to coincide with episodes two and three of this short series too. Next week's will be by Emma Stansfield, actor and the week after's by Richard Vincent, writer.
• Listen to episode one of Weird Tales tonight at 2300 (and on the Radio 4 web site for seven days after that).
• Follow programme makers on Twitter and look out for Lovecraft references during transmission. Use the hashtag if you're listening.
• There are from Weird Tales 2: Split the Atom, on Flickr.
• H.P. Lovecraft has .
• shows a 1936 edition of Weird Tales, featuring stories by Lovecraft and other horror pioneers. It's by and it's used .

I remember 5 years ago - after my first Radio 4 Christmas at the helm - being amazed when I was told how much money listeners gave to the Radio 4 Christmas Appeal (for the work of St Martin-in-the-Fields with homeless and vulnerable people across the UK). I knew of the existence of the Appeal (it has been around for 83 years since Lord Reith granted it) - but not its magnitude.

Every year I muse on the ratio of the amount of money donated to the number of minutes or hours of broadcast time devoted to publicising the appeal. And my hunch is that this ratio is astonishingly high for Radio 4. It is both true and excellent that Children in Need/Comic Relief do so well. They raise tens of millions in a terrifically entertaining way. That takes many hours.

is a tad quieter on-air. The Vicar, Revd. Nicholas Holtam launched it early on a Sunday morning in mid-December and we did a programme on how the money raised makes a difference to those who received it. And there have been other on-air reminders.

By the twelfth day of Christmas, the appeal had raised over £700,000, which is just below what was raised in the whole of last year's appeal - despite the recession.

One of our Radio 4 Appeal charities recently put it rather beautifully when they said: "we were so moved by how our appeal touched the hearts of so many generous strangers". I can only echo that sentiment for this year's Christmas Appeal and say 'thank you' on behalf of Radio 4.

Mark Damazer is Controller of Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4

• to the Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4 St Martin-in-the-Fields Christmas Appeal, supporting work with homeless and vulnerable people across the UK.
• Listen to the 83rd Annual Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4 St Martin-in-the-Fields Christmas Appeal and Libby Purves' Received with Thanks on the Radio 4 web site.
• More information at the web site and web site.
• The Radio 4 appeal has , which also covers the Christmas appeal.
• The picture shows a beneficiary of St Martin's work with the homeless with his new birth certificate. Paying for replacement documents is one of the simple things St Martin's can do to help vulnerable people get back to work and a stable life. It was taken by producer Sally Flatman.

I last saw John Cushnie in mid-December recording a special Christmas edition of Gardeners' Question Time (GQT) at The Museum of Gardening History in Lambeth Palace.

He was well - and in full flow. He was a handsome man and a very big presence. There was no sign at all of anything wrong - so his death on New Year's Eve comes as a very big and unwelcome shock.

GQT has an alchemy. It is not merely a programme of gardening experts about trees and plants. That is the core of the matter - but it is also about character and wit. And John Cushnie had those qualities in abundance. He did not do vanilla. His answers - delivered in that instantly recognisable Northern Ireland brogue - were, of course, always informed - but they were laced with acerbic wit and warmth. He spread joy during the programme recordings - a joy which was transmitted to the audience at home.

And thus it was during that particular recording. John was asked to sum up the 2009 gardening weather in Northern Ireland. He immediately went into a fluent riff about the unfortunate timing of the hot spells, wet spells and dry spells. Everything had come at precisely the wrong moment. Potatoes had been a calamity - but he had managed to grow a few things successfully even so. As per normal everyone was laughing.

Then someone from the audience produced a sample in a plastic bag of a plant that she wanted to preserve. John was apoplectic - about the state of the plant - and his advice was trenchant - along the lines of "Get rid of it - now. Entirely. Forever. Awful." This was a common Cushnie response to a plant specimen - or even genus - that aroused his ire. And there were quite a few of those...

All the banter ('crack' seems the right word for John) was never at the expense of the knowledge. He knew a tremendous amount about a tremendous amount of horticultural life and that showed too.

We will miss him a great deal.

Mark Damazer is Controller of Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4

• John Cushnie's last appearance on Guardeners' Question Time was on the 27 December Christmas Special.
• John Cushnie's obituary .