BBC Radio 4 - Grand Guignol

At the end of the nineteenth century, in the seediest quarter of Paris, a new theatre opened its doors offering a recipe of blood and terror - and soon the Grand Guignol was to become as big as an attraction in the city as the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. The success of an evening's performance - made up of a succession of short comedy and horror plays - was measured by how many members of the audience fainted, as they witnessed gougings, garrottings and gory murders on a nightly basis. After more than sixty years the theatre finally closed its doors, but only after helping influence the development of horror in the cinema, as well as introducing the phrase Grand Guignol into common parlance as a byword for shocking, blood-soaked terror. Sheila McClennon visits Paris to revisit the scene of this most shocking of theatre movements, and also comes to London to find out how the likes of Joseph Conrad and Noel Coward got involved in its English incarnation, which fought a staunch but unsuccessful battle with the censors at the beginning of the 1920s.

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BBC Radio 4 - From The Front Line

Readings from letters, diaries, and poems written
at the front line during World War 1.

Readers
Ian McKellen - Poems by Wilfred Owen
Marcus Stolberg - Letters & Diaries of Medical Corps Corporal Ludwig Kutner
Ivan Cutting - Letters of George Stofer of Saxmunden, Suffolk

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BBC Radio 4 - Schrodinger's Quantum Kittens

Robin Ince examines Schrodinger's Cat, the paradox at the heart of quantum physics, and discovers its influence on science and popular culture. Fifty years after the death of Nobel laureate Erwin Schrodinger, the quantum mysteries of his cat-in-a-box paradox still continue to drive physicists in research today. Can a living thing be both alive and dead at the same time?

Schrodinger's experiment was an almost playful creation, but one that stabbed at the heart of the 1930s physics establishment. By the 1950s, US physicist Hugh Everett concluded that, indeed, both a dead cat and an alive cat can exist, but in separate universes. His 'Many Worlds' theory inspired authors, from Philip K Dick to Philip Pullman.

Robin follows in the Austrian physicist's footsteps to Oxford University, where Schrodinger was once a fellow, and unearths some original archive at Magdalen College. Physicist Sir Roger Penrose speaks about its impact on quantum theory to this day. Why has Schrodinger's Cat gained such currency not just in science but popular culture? Writer Alan Moore tells how it created a new wave of 1960s sci-fi literature.

So why has Schrodinger's Cat caught the imagination of non-scientists? How is it misinterpreted and used to explain mankind's many unknowns? What is its place at the cutting edge of quantum physics? Robin meets today's physicists and thinkers who still tangle with the idea. And we find, no doubt, that Schrodinger's Cat (in all probability) is very much alive today.

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BBC Radio 4 - The Good Conductor

Bernard Hare, former social worker and author of the cult classic "Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew" tells a moving tale of the power of human compassion. He recounts a story from his younger years, of a night when he was desperate to get from London to his home town of Leeds to see his mother on her deathbed. He had no money, and the train schedule meant it looked like he could not get home in time. Then came the saintly intervention of the man Bernard calls "The Good Conductor."

The story, and the lesson taught by The Good Conductor, is one that Bernard himself regularly tells to the young people he cares for as an unofficial social worker: "Pass it down the line."

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BBC Radio 4 - Science vs The Stradivarius

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Can modern technology identify the elusive components that give Stradivarius violins a unique voice? Analysts have submitted the master instruments to a battery of tests, from CT scans to burning original samples of varnish, but are they just chasing a myth? Professor Trevor Cox investigates

BBC Radio 4 - Why Russia Spies

The Cold War is over. But some habits die hard. Since 2007 Russian nuclear bombers have been flying provocatively close to UK airspace, triggering interception by RAF fighters. The Royal Navy has encountered Russian 'hunter-killer' submarines. And as the recent discovery of a spy ring in the United States revealed, Russian agents remain active against the West. With remarkable access to Britain's military and intelligence worlds, Peter Hennessy examines the scale of Russian activity - and what it tells us about the Russia-NATO relationship.

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Dylan Thomas - Under Milk Wood

To Begin at the Beginning….

Allow me to start this wondrous entry with the words of Dylan Thomas as read in the mellisonant tones of Richard Burton. One of my most treasured books, I offer you to borrow indefinitely, switch off the lights and take your imagination for a walk.

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Under Milk Wood is a 1954 play for radio by Dylan Thomas, later adapted for the stage. A film version, Under Milk Wood directed by Andrew Sinclair, was released in 1972. Thomas’s poetic writing and an unforgettable cast of characters makes this a landmark play in the history of both radio and theatre.
An all-seeing narrator invites the audience to listen to the dreams and innermost thoughts of the inhabitants of an imaginary small Welsh village, Llareggub.
They include Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, relentlessly bossing her two dead husbands; Captain Cat, reliving his seafaring times; the two Mrs Dai Breads; Organ Morgan, obsessed with his music; and Polly Garter, pining for her dead lover. Later, the town wakes and, aware now of how their feelings affect whatever they do, we watch them go about their daily business.

In November 2003, as part of the their commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Thomas’s death, the BBC broadcast a new production of the play, imaginatively combining new actors with the original 1954 recording of Richard Burton playing ‘First Voice’. Digital noise reduction technology allowed Burton’s part to be seamlessly incorporated into the new recording, which was intended to represent Welsh voices more realistically than the original.