Richard Bacon, 5 live presenter, in his introduction to last week's , called the rather civilised radio industry conference "our Glastonbury." If that's the case, then it was "our ", Radio Academy Director Trevor Dann, who inducted Radio 4 legend Nicholas Parsons into the 'Radio Hall of Fame' at the event. Nicholas couldn't come to the Hall of Fame dinner (at which Dave Lee Travis, Whispering Bob Harris and David "Kid" Jensen were also honoured) so Trevor gave Nicholas his lovely glass bowl on stage before the Festival's special recording of Just a Minute.
It was a genuinely touching moment: Nicholas celebrated by his appreciative radio peers in front of his adoring radio audience. The bowl, inevitably, went on to become a comedy prop in the Just a Minute recording and, for the first time in my memory, a member of the audience made it onto the scorecard (fifth place, sadly).
Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog
Just a Minute is off-air at the moment but will return later in the year.
There are more videos from the Radio Festival .
The is an annual event organised by industry body . This year it took place in Salford and it's intended that it be held there from now on.
In Feedback this week we discussed the deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg but listeners weren't concerned about what he said on Desert island Discs about his inability to give up smoking, or where he took his girlfriends in the days before he met his wife.
No, our correspondents were concerned about whether he should have been on Desert Island Discs at all so soon after the Government had announced big cuts in benefits.
They wondered if his appearance was part of a Government PR campaign to show the warm human side of our leaders who have had to take such tough decisions. Eyebrows were also raised about a storyline in The Archers which seems to fit nicely with a Government drive to get more people online. Paranoia or intelligent scepticism? What do you think?
I talked to the Editor of Desert Island discs Alice Feinstein about that invitation to Nick Clegg:
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Roger Bolton is presenter of Feedback
Listen again to this week's Feedback, produced by Karen Pirie, get in touch with Feedback, find out how to join the listener panel or subscribe to the podcast on the Feedback web page.
Editor's note: The video shows a real cage fight and if you're uncomfortable with the kind of aggression that characterises 'mixed martial arts' you may not want to click 'play' - SB.
As a radio producer I think it's very healthy to make programmes that challenge one's own ingrained ideas. I had grown up with the notion that 'hitting people is wrong' so I was naturally intrigued to meet someone apparently sane and immediately likable who was trying to make a professional go of doing just that.
I also recognised in Mike 'The Goods' Wood that here was a bloke who could fight with his fists but also with his mind. It is rare to meet someone who can be that articulate about their sport and that open to being quizzed about their motivation.
Mike first approached me to make a programme about other cage fighters. He was sick of the unthinking bad press about the sport and even the tabloid name stuck in his craw. Mixed martial artists do not actually fight in a cage; it's more of a giant hexagonal play-pen made of plasticized chicken wire.
But the more Mike spoke the more I thought 'never mind these other guys you're the one'. Convincing Mike of this took a little doing but I am eternally grateful that he succumbed.
From a producer's point of view all the levels of conflict that go into making a good story were there. I wanted to know about the phenomenal rise of mixed martial arts despite official attempts to ban it and whether or not it was linked to the recession. Was it a proving ground for young men (for it is usually but not exclusively men) with precious few other options and an outlet for their natural aggression, or really just a pantomime of thuggery. There is also inevitable conflict with the sport itself; however much disciplined devotees such as Mike would like the sport to be ennobled, the crowd pay to see blood and carnage.
It was important I felt not to pussyfoot around this. I needed listeners to engage with the visceral nature of the fighting itself but without choking on a roast potato and so I was relieved when the transmission slot was moved away from its original slot on Sunday lunchtime to a Friday morning.
Then there is the level of personal conflict. Mike's partner of more than 8 years is a ward sister who specialises in the care of stroke patients. One of the most dangerous risks of recognised fight moves such as the triangle which involves having your carotid artery squeezed to cut blood to the brain is that it could trigger a stroke.
Gill has never seen Mike fight. She puts it simply "I have no interest in watching him getting punched" but she's proud of his dedication, even when his obsessive nature and subsequent absenteeism from the family nest drives her bonkers and the rainy day money has gone on yet more specialist pre-match training. This ambivalence is why I made sure a colleague, Katie, recorded Gill's thoughts as she was coming off shift just as Mike was entering the 'cage' for his big fight 130 miles away.
Finally of course there's the murky arena of inner conflict. Mike regularly asks himself 'why?' and the answer he gets back is elusive but as the programme progresses I hope listeners will hear that at its heart it is really a programme about fathers and sons, both the hovering spectre of the biological father Mike never knew but also the close relationship with his own son 7 year old Joe. For me their conversations are the most revealing parts of the programme and why I gave Joe the last word.
Jane Ray is producer of Inside the Cage
Listen to Inside the Cage, presented by Felicity Finch, on Radio 4 at 1100 today or on the Radio 4 web site.
The video shows Mike Wood's fight featured in the programme.
Mike fights under the code. The next BAMMA fixture is at Metro Radio Arena, Newcastle, on 4 December.
I missed the much-discussed phonecall yesterday about the three-monthly Rajar figures so I went looking for Alison Winter, the Radio 4 audiences guru. We found a quiet corner and whispered the headlines to and fro. It's all rather good - actually I think very good. So congratulations to the programme-makers and to Mark Damazer.  Radio 4 reach this quarter is 10.37 million. That means that 10.37 million people have listened to Radio 4 for at least 15 minutes a week in the last three months.
Last quarter Radio 4 got its highest figures ever - and our best guess is that that is because of the general election and the interest it generated. Those figures for our all-time highest reach were 10.40 million - so this quarter compares rather well. Now it could be that people are still fascinated by politics, but we might reach towards the more appealing notion that perhaps we have managed to retain some of the new listeners we drew in; let's hope we continue to hang onto them. The rather lower share figure might bear this out. Share is the proportion of all listening to all radio in the UK.
And that measure for Radio 4 this quarter is 11.9 per cent. This time last year it was 12.4 per cent. Down, slightly, in this case because, overall,Ìýpeople are listening for a marginally shorter length of time to Radio 4. It could be then, taking the positive view, that we have retained new listeners and that these new listeners still need to be persuaded to listen longer...  Today continues to attract a very large audience to Radio 4 - just over 6.5million every week (Mon-Fri) - and drama too is up this quarter on last.Â
Among specific audience groups, we now have more men listening to Radio 4 than ever before - 5.4 million every week (vs. just under 5 million women). There are also record figures among our core, very loyal, older audiences but at the same time we have more under 35s listening to Radio 4 than at any point since 1999.
And then there is Radio 7. Weekly reach is the second largest ever at 1.045 million.
So a cheery first Rajar experience for me. Please will Tim Harford, from More or Less- a Radio 4 programme launched (I am proud to say) while I was Head of Radio Current Affairs, now tell me what I have got wrong. And what it all really means. Watch this space...
Gwyneth Williams is Controller of Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4 and Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 7.
(Radio Joint Audience Research) is jointly owned by the Ö÷²¥´óÐã 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).
Editor's note: radio drama rivals all other media as a source of innovation and adventurous story-telling technique. Fred Greenhalgh worked on a particularly adventurous example for the Afternoon Play slot at 1415 today. The video shows the recording of one scene on location in New York - SB
John Dryden's three-part serial Severed Threads is all about the random connections between people who have never met each other and how chance events can ripple across cultures and change the lives of people we have never met. It's a mixture of the concept of six degrees of separation and the 'butterfly effect' transposed to globalism in modern India, America, and the U.K.
So it seems natural that I would be brought into the production by my own series of somewhat random connections - knowing a college flatmate of John, who introduced me to him just at the time that my own work in field recorded radio drama could be most improved by working with him.
John records his actors in the real world, in changing, uncontrollable environments like bars, city streets, churches, and apartment complexes. Not only does he record in the real world, but he travels - in the case of Severed Threads to three countries - to get the sound he's after.
In this case, his destination was New York City. What better place to tell a story of lives connected by seemingly unrelated events?
Recording in the Real World
In America we don't have the benefit of an intact cultural memory of radio drama. It seems TV effectively assassinated the public consciousness of the form in the 1960s and today, the aspiring dramatist has to tell the life story of the medium to anyone who wants to listen.
Being that most people raise an eyebrow when they see me with headphones on and recorder in tow, it was freeing to work with a director like John who has the same passion for location recording - of capturing the unique sound of the outside world rather than the artificial deadness of the studio.
Actors march through rooms, pull up next to one another at a crowded lunch table, sit at a bar to yak about sports or watch their family fall apart in the middle of dinner. When it's time for someone to die, well, forget the foley - someone's going to wind up on the ground!
Of course, verisimilitude is stretched - a bedroom serves as the lobby for the church, a basement entryway as a gunshop - but the overall effect is a raw, energized sound. Actors get a chance to stand up, move around, interact. The world is the studio.
Losing Control
Of course, this bold artistic choice brings its challenges to the director. Such as how to remove the Big-ness of the Big Apple so that is sounds like a sleepier town in America's heartland.
Recording on location requires nerves of steel - keeping your cool when cars drive by, airplanes take off overhead, dogs bark incessantly or a foghorn goes off. Or, as in the case of our trip to suburban New Jersey, when an army of gardeners with high decibel equipment shows up in the middle of the session. Juggling an uncontrollable, noisy world with the needs of a large cast and production crew seems a way to drive yourself insane.
And maybe it does. But for John Dryden - who kept a good attitude and smiled through the most stressful parts of recording - maybe it's also the knowledge that all the trouble is worth it.
A Man Walks into a Studio...
The scene in the video above is is a good example. Jim, the American story's protagonist who finds his life as a church leader and businessman crumbling around him, walks up with a newspaper reporter for a live interview which catches him off guard. Combine that raw, energetic performance with a sound environment and you get this finished scene:
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The globe-trotting nature and guerrilla recording style makes Severed Threads a very different kind of production. The story has a lot to say about our real world, which itself is chaotic, shifting, noisy and fast-paced. Our nightly news is filled with the kind of story at the heart of Severed Threads - of wrongs that just are, with no special meaning, and more questions than answers.
But, as Dryden's play points out, there's a lot to learn by going beneath the surface of tragedies, and looking for the threads that bind.
Fred Greenhalgh is Sound Recordist for Severed Threads
Listen to episode one of John Dryden's Severed Threads on Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4 at 1415 today.
John Dryden has written about his free range approach to radio drama - for a production recorded on location in Mumbai - here on the Radio 4 blog before.
The Ö÷²¥´óÐã is famously good at marking anniversaries. Wars, coronations, Darwin's birth, 'Dad's Army.' So it is right that the fortieth anniversary of Radio Four's Analysis, which takes place this year, should be marked in some way. It was at 21:15 on Friday 10 April 1970 that the voice of the urbane Ian McIntyre was heard presenting the very first edition of the programme, "Next Tuesday sees the annual enactment of a classical piece of British folk ritual. Budget Day ranks with the Grand National or a deciding Test against Australia."
One of my favourite editions of Analysis from this period featured Ian McIntyre in Egypt and began in typical style, "A great place for jokes Cairo. I suspect they have a certain therapeutic value; without them the chaos that is Cairean traffic and the inert mindlessness of the bureaucracy would drive everyone screaming up the walls of the Mohammed Ali mosque." A year earlier, also in tourist mode, McIntyre had visited Salisbury, the capital of the former Rhodesia, which got a similar treatment, it was "an agreeable town" with "better curio shops than most cities in Southern Africa" and McIntyre was not one to ignore "the glory of the jacaranda trees."
An article of faith which underpinned the early Analysis was a deeply held commitment to radio itself. Throughout its 40 years, the programmes has been based on a belief that radio, uncluttered by pictures and carefully-manicured presenters, does the job of explaining the world better than any television programme. Which is not to say that Analysis has never had its stars; most notable of these was Mary Goldring who was the main presenter from 1975 to 1984. Her first Analysis in May 1975 began in her famously direct style, "Did you vote in local government elections today? Did you even know that elections were going on outside Northern Ireland?" Mary Goldring probably deserves the accolade of the foremost current affairs broadcaster of her generation and she used Analysis as her main platform. She was not afraid to be outspoken; in 'Whipping the Cream' in June 1981, she made it perfectly clear that she would close 'failing' universities, that the government failed to do so was due to "the vestigial awe of universities" we have and as a result, "the government has lost an unrepeatable opportunity to throw some redundant institutions to the wolves." Ouch!
Analysis today remains Radio Four's most authentically intellectual programme. Listening to Michael Blastland present the most recent Analysis I felt the founding fathers would have recognised in that thoughtful, unadorned and truly 'analytical' edition the qualities of thorough research and rigour to which they aspired, 40 years earlier.
Hugh Chignell is Associate Professor of Broadcasting History at Bournemouth University
Listen to tonight's 40th anniversary edition of Analysis, presented by Michael Blastland, an Analysis producer from the 1990s and now a regular presenter, and produced by Linda Pressly.
There are pictures of early presenters and producers on the programme's web page. Also an archive episode, presented by Ian McIntyre, from 1971.
The picture shows McIntyre in 1977, during his time as Controller of Radio 4
Remember you can download every episode to keep and you're welcome to add your own objects to the collection, which now contains thousands of objects and will be on display on the Radio 4 web site indefinitely. Visit the A History of the World blog for dozens of fascinating posts from behind the scenes by curators and producers.
Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog
Feedback, on Friday, ran an interesting 'audit' of AHOW, concluding, for instance, that the series generated "an unfair share of culture."
Last week R4 was dominated by Chilean miners and Cheltenham chatterers. The most original take on the miners' story must go to Broadcasting House on Sunday which read from Edgar Allan Poe's tale about being buried alive. Further unintentional echoes reached me, in an item that moved me to tears, from an underground bomb shelter in Coventry in John Waite's Pick of the Week when Michael Logan spoke of what happened to him and his family that day so long ago.
I spent the run up to the week in Cheltenham at the literary festival feasting on some of Radio 4's cultural gems and thinking about my former colleague, Nick Clarke, missing again his familiar voice on Radio 4. I was privileged to work with Nick on occasional current affairs programmes and his character and principles infused his programmes- the best broadcasters bring all of themselves to the airwaves; that is partly why they become a real presence in the lives of listeners, and especially so with the intimacy of radio.
Nick's twin sons, Joel and Benedict, helped me read out the winner of the annual Nick Clarke Award for the best broadcast interview in the last year. It was PD James for her Today programme interview of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã Director General Mark Thompson. The crowd talked in the coffee shops and gardens about "Andy" and "Eddie" and we recorded programme after programme to capacity audiences in a huge tent: Start the Week, Open Book, Bespoken Word, Afternoon Readings, The Music group and The Nick Clarke Debate.
Eddie Mair got Tessa Jowell to think aloud about trying for London Mayor in the next election and Mariella Fostrup delivered my aside of the week to James Ellroy in an extraordinary Open Book interview. Ellroy talked about his memoir 'The Hilliker Curse' in which he describes his obsessive pursuit and domination of women following his mother's murder and insisted that he had now atoned - "So you say" was Mariella"s deadpan riposte.
Gwyneth Williams is Controller of Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4
Without doubt, my highlight of the week will be going to the British Museum on Thursday as we reveal the last object in our series A History of the World in 100 Objects. The Radio 4 series has been a centrepiece of our radio programming over the last year and it is destined to be remembered as one of Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio's landmark pieces of broadcasting.
Initially, the idea of a world history brought alive through objects described on radio appeared too demanding for some. However, the use of objects as the starting point for important stories that draw in broader themes while remaining, by their very nature, personal, has been uniquely powerful. As someone who completed history A-Level with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the causes of World War Two but with little or no sense of global or early history, the series has been a revelation.
Read the rest of this blog post and leave a comment on the Radio Blog.
Editor's note: more quite haunting glimpses of our former selves from the You & Yours archive. We've now published all of the five episodes of the programme from the 1970s found in the archive. If you have a recording of an episode of You & Yours from that decade, please leave a comment to let us know - SB.
"Very often you'd groan and think 'I'm not going to do school uniforms again'" Nancy Wise revealed when we discussed working for You and Yours in the 1970s. It must have been a regular topic, as only five complete programmes survive from that decade, and in one of them John Edmunds asks Betty Jerman rather despairingly whether any of the latest school uniform trends will finally enable girls "to look more feminine?"
Although the territory of some of these programmes is the same, it is the odd word or phrase that jumps out and makes you realise how much things have changed. My favourite example of this has to come from the "What's On Your Mind?" section of the programme which dealt with listeners' comments and queries. "The incessant flow of this boy's sales patter was a complete brainwash" complains Mrs Nina Gillings about a doorstep salesman in May 1972. It is only when he has left and she is "perspiring freely" that she realises that she has been "fooled by a confidence trickster"!
I'm jealous of the reporters of some of these pieces too. "Turkey breast cooked with almonds or herb lemon and cream sauce, sole and mushrooms and mussels, strawberry peach salad and orange rum gateaux" are just some of the meals sampled by Tim Matthews at a country house in Gloucestershire in a feature about holidays on a £20 budget. While he interviews the proprietor - the very plummy Captain Barker - you can hear him lighting and sucking his pipe!
Each of these remaining four programmes from the 1970s contains similar gems but then you suddenly come across a comment with contemporary resonance. In a report on care homes for older people, for instance, it is shocking to hear one resident confide that she finds it hard sharing a bedroom with five other people. But then comes some timeless wisdom and advice to those going into a care: "They must realise that they are going into a new life... they mustn't keep thinking about the life they've left and regretting it... but try and take as much possible interest in their surroundings and regard it as an experience from which they can learn something of interest."
We published the first of the five 1970s editions of You & Yours last week. Here are four more quite vivid slivers of social history for you to listen to:
7th June 1971: Nancy Wise presents a programme which includes an interview about family budgets, Tim Matthews reporting on the kinds of holidays you can get for £20 and there's also an item on rheumatism.
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3rd February 1972: John Edmunds presents and Joan Yorke is sent to Walthamstow to look into revolutionary health centres, where doctors are grouped together with nurses all on one site! School uniforms are discussed at length and Derek Cooper goes to Battersea Dogs Ö÷²¥´óÐã to find out if it is possible to keep dogs in today's big cities!
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15th February 1972: Joan Yorke presents advice about the fuel crisis including tips on doing housework during blackouts! There's an interview with the NUT about teacher's pay, Tim Matthews gets to shadow the fire brigade, and there are letters about "slow learners", British rail fares and "new pence".
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25th May 1972 Derek Cooper presents this edition which starts with an interview with Dr Lyall Watson about his new book 'Omnivores', Lucille Hall reports on care homes for older people There's also an item about how to bring up genius children - is it best to be 'totally permissive' or is it all in the genes?
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And here's the earliest episode of You & Yours we could find in the archive, from 7 May 1971, introduced by Jeanine McMullen.
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Clare Walker is a producer on You & Yours
Listen to last week's fascinating look at forty years of You & Yours here.
The picture shows a memo from Controller Tony Whitby concerning a 'possible daily magazine programme'. There are from the You & Yours archive on Flickr.
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Crime writer and radio pugilist PD James has won one of the most prestigious awards in British journalism - the Nick Clarke Interview Prize. She won it for her on-air punch-up with Ö÷²¥´óÐã Director General Mark Thompson, during her guest editorship of the Today Programme on Radio 4 last new year's eve.
Quoted in The Guardian, Evan Davis, full-time Today programme interviewer said: "She shouldn't be guest editing, she should be permanently presenting the programme..."
The shortlist for the award included a number of other heavyweight full-timers: Owen Bennett-Jones, from the World Service; Andrew Hosken, also from The Today Programme; Jeff Randall from Sky News and Mark Lawson courageously challenging Russell Crowe on his accent on Front Row.
The Press Gazette (and the full shortlist), The Guardian and here's the running order from . Mark Damazer, Nick Clarke's friend, introduced the prize on the blog last year.
Editor's note: Radio 4's new Controller has been in the job for three weeks. Her second blog post concerns the party conferences, poetry and anagrams - SB.
The End of the Affair - I mean the party conference season. The Today Programme's set of leader interviews was unmissable. Ingredients: take four fresh, untried would-be leaders with relatively unknown views, facial expressions and speech patterns. Mix boldly with seasoned, piquant presenters.
Shake rigorously and sprinkle with chilli, cinnamon, nutmeg and chocolate (the bitter, dark sort - never sweet) and there you had it... four revelatory dishes served hot to the Radio 4 audience in our breakfast programme. Oh - and each followed by a tasting at the refined political palate of our discerning political editor. This is a time when politics and the changing shape of the state will be central to our coverage on Radio 4 and we will be looking for original programme ideas to track and interpret the future.
I was thrilled by the Ted Hughes poem in his guest-edited edition of .
Wole Soyinka sent me an original poem as a gift to broadcast when I started at the World Service. It was called 'A Moment of Peace' and I include it here as a treat for anyone who cares to listen. We are brilliant at analysis and critique but it is hard to beat the real thing- and a poem on radio... well, it fits:
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My Radio 4 aside of the week is David Mitchell in Unbelievable Truths, which featured on Pick Of The Week. A brilliant sequence on rain ended with a statement that there are no anagrams in rain... "Iran" said David in a nano-drop, "Move on."
Gwyneth Williams is Controller of Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4
Gwyneth Williams was profiled on Radio 4's Feedback this week. Listen to the programme on the Radio 4 web site.
Since Feedback came off the air in late August, the Ö÷²¥´óÐã has rarely been out of the headlines. There was Radio 1's Chris Moyles complaining at considerable length that he hadn't been paid. Then the Chairman of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã Trust, who had old me in June that he wanted his contract extended, suddenly changed his mind and said he wanted out next spring.
And of course there have been the on/off strike threats of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's attempt to cut the cost of its pension scheme which will take up around seven per cent of the licence fee if the last proposal is accepted by union members. Most important for Radio 4 listeners is the new occupant of the Controller's office. Mark Damazer has departed for Oxford University, taking with him his Boston Red Sox sweatshirt and all things Americana.
In has come Gwyneth Williams, born in South Africa, and with a continuing interest in the continent. Still casing the joint, her lips are sealed - for the moment. But those of our listeners are not and in Feedback this week they told Ms Williams what she should and should not do. First here is a brief profile of the new Controller.
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Do let us know what you think Gwyneth Williams should have at the top of her agenda - even Feedback and its presenter if you want! If you really want.
Roger Bolton is presenter of Feedback
Listen again to this week's Feedback, produced by Kate Taylor, get in touch with Feedback, find out how to join the listener panel or subscribe to the podcast on the Feedback web page.
So You and Yours is forty. Congratulations. The programme launched in October 1970 to give Radio 4 listeners advice five lunchtimes a week on 'everyday affairs from savings to sex, from holidays to health'. It swallowed-up older programmes such as Can I Help You, Listening Post, and You and Your Money. And although in the four decades since it's often been parodied mercilessly, it was quickly judged a success, adding to the network's listening figures and drawing praise for its down-to-earth manner.
You'll no doubt have noticed quite a few other series on Radio 4 celebrating their anniversary this year: PM, The World Tonight, Analysis. The coincidence might seem strange. After all, the network itself had been born out of the ashes of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's Ö÷²¥´óÐã Service not in 1970, but in 1967. Yet it was in 1970 that the really big programme changes came.
One man in particular lay behind it all. Radio 4's Controller at the time was the young and dynamic Tony Whitby (pictured), a former civil servant and television current affairs editor. Whitby had a reputation for shrewdly picking out the ideas of others and embellishing them by throwing out his own thoughts and suggestions. He'd no intention of creating a new schedule from scratch. But he wanted a more topical and a more varied flavour - to make Radio 4, in his words, like a 'well-labelled library that has a few surprises in it'. So, in 1970, along came the unashamedly serious Analysis and the magisterial World Tonight, the bright and breezy 'commuter magazine' PM Reports and a phone-in called It's Your Line, the satirical sketch-show Weekending, and, of course, You and Yours.
None of this happened without a good deal of grumbling from listeners and critics. Some thought there were too many magazine programmes. With their succession of disparate items, magazines seemed like an abandonment of quality - suspiciously tailor-made for a distracted, inattentive audience. They were, the Observer muttered, the 'great ragbags of our times': cheap, predictable, and banal.
This was a little unfair. Very different programmes were being lumped-together, then stereotyped crudely. Looking back at the schedule as a whole, what's most striking about Whitby's revolution of 1970 is how genuinely eclectic it made Radio 4, with programmes stretching across a suddenly wider spectrum, from the intellectually demanding or disturbing at one end to the faintly scurrilous or comforting at the other. The changes 40 years ago set Radio 4 on its long-term trajectory: away from the dusty tones of the somewhat middlebrow old Ö÷²¥´óÐã Service, to the tougher, livelier, more authoritative, network we have today.
David Hendy is the author of Life on Air: a History of Radio Four. He teaches broadcasting history at the University of Westminster.
You & Yours producer Clare Walker wrote about her visit to the archive here on the blog.
Editor's note. Clare Walker's post about the You & Yours archive starts with a complete episode of the programme from 1971 which you can embed on your own web site. Click 'embed.' - SB.
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Last month I took the train to Reading, hopped on the bus to Caversham and in a white bungalow in the leafy suburbs discovered a hidden realm - the Ö÷²¥´óÐã written archive. With the 40th Anniversary of You & Yours coming up, I'd been searching for archive material but very sadly discovered that no one had kept the first You and Yours broadcast on 5th October 1970 and that a mere five editions had survived from the entire 1970s.
As Simon Rooks the Head of the Radio Archive explained to me, space was limited back then and programme makers didn't keep a comprehensive record of what went out on air: "The idea was more to select programmes, extracts of programmes, and sometimes commission new recordings itself that were either of clear historical value or would be of likely repeat or re-use value to future programme makers."
So highly topical content of the sort broadcast on You &Yours although a precious record of social history now, may well have been seen by producers then as ephemeral.
So it was time to do some digging in the written archive - to find out how the programme came about and whether we could, at the very least, find the script of the first show.
The Ö÷²¥´óÐã written archive is a tranquil, soothing place. I had to sign a piece of paper agreeing to keep quiet, treat all items with care, leave my water bottle, mobile and pens outside - and proceeded with my stubby HB pencil to a table with files of highly confidential correspondence about You & Yours.
I discovered that the programme was the brainchild of the then controller of Radio 4, Anthony Whitby, but that his idea of having a live magazine programme at noon every day was not met with universal approval. Some producers worried that the name You and Yours was too "twee", others that we might have less time to cover subjects in depth.
"I can see dangers in the suggested "two-way letters and telephone calls" section. Advice given on the air, as you know, has to be accurate. Can it be done under "rush hour" conditions?" wrote producer Barbara Crowther in the June of 1970.
What was incredible reading this correspondence was that the same concerns we have now as producers of the programme, were being discussed back then. "I emphasised I hope rightly," wrote editor Steve Bonarjee, "that we should avoid this becoming a gloom sequence concentrating on miseries and woes. There should be a strong constructive element concerned with opportunities and aspirations and people's concern to make the most of things - even happiness has its problems."
But what about the first programme? Archivist Jeff Walden led me to the microfiche room, reeled up the tape and we whizzed through until we found the running order and script of the first programme.
Topics in that first week included titles such as: 'How to buy your first house', 'Do it yourself trends', 'Pensions for the over eighties', 'Pangs of Parting', 'Tomorrow's Living Rooms' and 'Firework Hazards'!
But have a listen to the first programme we have from the archive. It is only fifteen minutes long as they used to have government announcements on a Friday which meant it was a shorter programme with a leisure theme. Jeanine McMullen is presenting and they are celebrating the fact that Arsenal is aiming at the double in the Cup Final, and interview Danny Blanchflower, former Spurs captain. You wouldn't hear a modern footballer commenting about the game on You and Yours now!
There are also tips for the cheapest ways to experience London for free: Punch and Judy shows, watching people "coolly spending thousands" at the auction rooms of Southeby's and Christies, fishing in the Royal Parks, or tucking into a kipper breakfast in Billingsgate Market.
In the next month we will add the other four programmes from the archive to this page. Just to whet your appetite we get to go behind the scenes at the fire brigade, hear about care homes for the elderly (where one woman discusses coming to terms with sharing a room with five other people!), and there's a discussion about whether it's possible to turn your children into geniuses by bringing them up in a special way! Enjoy!
Clare Walker is a producer on You & Yours
Listen to today's telephone-themed episode of You & Yours on the Radio 4 web site and to Friday's fascinating look at forty years of You & Yours here.
The picture shows page one of the script from the first episode of You & Yours. There are from Clare's visit to the Caversham archive on Flickr.
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17:36, Friday, 29 October 2010
