Today’s guest editors (BBC Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
A Point of View: On Resolutions (BBC Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Monstrosities Mon Amour Substack
Shipping Forecast Day (BBC Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
The days around new year offer a lovely, woozy limbo away from normal life – perfect for the comforts of radio. Today’s second post-Christmas guest editor didn’t get the memo. “You previously predicted a 10% chance that AI will lead to human extinction in the next three decades,” said Sajid Javid to 2024 Nobel prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, two days after Christmas. “Ten to 20,” Hinton updated him. The bleak midwinter, indeed.
Following Frank Cottrell-Boyce and chief scout Dwayne Fields’s perkier turns on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day respectively, Javid’s stint exploring “the good, the bad and the ugly” of AI felt as heavy as the gut after festive excess. It wasn’t that his questions about AI and productivity, sexual imagery and medicine weren’t terrifyingly urgent, just that they’d better suit a snappy series – preferably after our baubles are back in their boxes.
After Javid, Oxford University’s vice-chancellor, Irene Tracey, highlighted threats to university education and her work on chronic pain, while cyclist Laura Kenny, the UK’s most decorated female Olympian, had a moving chat about baby loss with swimmer Rebecca Adlington in a programme largely exploring sports in schools. The best show, however, came from Floella Benjamin on Monday, delving compassionately into the “crisis” in children’s programming, as kids migrate from public service broadcasters towards unregulated online material. “My mantra is childhood lasts a lifetime,” she said.
Slots with Noughts & Crosses writer Malorie Blackman (brilliant on how drama offers children “empathy… a world outside their own sphere”), poet Lemn Sissay on watching Play School while growing up in care, and Lady Benjamin chatting tenderly to south London academy pupils felt genuinely motivating. The show ended with archive recording of Benjamin’s first Play School appearance, racing leaves with Johnny Ball – a soul-tingling delight for anyone who grew up watching her, as I did.
Another bite-size joy last week was writer Megan Nolan on Radio 4’s Sunday morning essay slot A Point of View. She began it back home in Ireland for Christmas (“my birthplace as a holding pen for heightened emotions and reactions entirely absent in my everyday life”, she said, so relatably) before tackling the charged topic of resolutions, especially for those of us hoping for radical change.
She spoke movingly of her admiration for “sober addicts… people who have broken habits so dramatically and against all odds [that they] act as walking rejoinders to the idea that change is impossible”. Her nine minutes also tackled biohacking, “capacious” capitalism, depression and friendship in brain-whirring ways. A future series of reflections on resolutions, I fancy, would be a winner.
A new podcast launched over Christmas too – the fabulously titled Monstrosities Mon Amour, made by writer and social historian of modern places John Grindrod and published through his Substack newsletter. A half-hour celebration of postwar locations and cultural artefacts, Grindrod explains, “that give other people the right hump”, the show’s tone is warmly, welcomingly geeky. Episode one features former Riba curator Mike Althorpe hymning the glowing subterranean modernity of Corby bus station, while episode two celebrates postwar Swindon with arts writer Helen Barrett.
Finally, Radio 4’s all-day 1 January celebration of the Shipping Forecast at 100 (which I wrote about for our sister paper, the Guardian) showed off the station at its most magical. My highlights included the show Soul Music on the bulletin’s theme tune, Sailing By; actor Ruth Jones as Gavin & Stacey’s Nessa Jenkins reading a stormy snippet (“There are warnings of gales, I’m not gonna lie”), and an epic 11pm sound poem about the Beaufort scale, stunningly produced by Falling Tree, entitled Sea Like a Mirror. Radio’s comforts cresting all day from dawn to dark – what a great start to 2025.
