BBC Radio 4 Extra June 1st 2013 9am, 7pm
Those Radio Times: 1953
Nick Baker introduces a three hour selection of programmes from BBC Radio’s coronation year. It was the year the nation bought into the television miracle, if only to “look-in” to see the new queen being crowned.. Our image of radio of the time is that it was a bit grey and dowdy – an unadventurous medium that would soon be eclipsed by TV pictures. Nick sets out to show this is wrong – with a feisty interview with Evelyn Waugh, a revealing Have a Go from Ramsbottom, with Wilfred Pickles and some risqué material from Twenty Questions (“Do they wobble while they do it?”). TV didn’t have big names to call its own yet, and these entertaining three hours celebrate the radio stars of 53: Pickles, Ben Lyon and Bebe Daniels, a young multi-voiced Johnny Morris and the famously grumpy Gilbert Harding among them.
Pictured:Multi-voiced Johnny Morris
BBC Radio 4 July 8th 4pm
Hersch on Herschel
Musician and comedian Rainer Hersch on the life of near namesake William Herschel - a German-born British composer and astronomer who discovered Uranus, and infrared radiation. Herschel also composed 24 symphonies. In Rainer Hersch’s spare time his is a keen amateur astronomer with, like Herschel, a telescope in his back garden. Hersch has a German background and is a serious and highly trained musician who has turned to Astronomy in his spare time. The timing of this documentary will mark the end of the life of the Herschel Space Observatory (the largest telescope ever launched into space), which has been observing the Universe in the infrared part of the spectrum. An entertaining reflection on astronomy and music.
