The Essay

Great empty buildings, which only a few decades ago were bustling convents, tower over most towns and villages in Ireland, but they represent a world which is disappearing along with the once all-powerful Irish Roman Catholic Church. In this series of The Essay, Olivia O'Leary, convent-educated and a lapsed Catholic, asks where all the Irish nuns have gone. In her fourth essay, about nuns and poli...

Great empty buildings, which only a few decades ago were bustling convents, tower over most towns and villages in Ireland, but they represent a world which is disappearing along with the once all-powerful Irish Roman Catholic Church. In this series of The Essay, Olivia O'Leary, convent-educated and a lapsed Catholic, asks where all the Irish nuns have gone. In her third essay, about class in the I...

Great empty buildings, which only a few decades ago were bustling convents, tower over most towns and villages in Ireland, but they represent a world which is disappearing along with the once all-powerful Irish Roman Catholic Church. In this series of The Essay, Olivia O'Leary, convent-educated and a lapsed Catholic, asks where all the Irish nuns have gone. In her second essay, Olivia describes th...

Great empty buildings, which only a few decades ago were bustling convents, tower over most towns and villages in Ireland, but they represent a world which is disappearing along with the once all-powerful Irish Roman Catholic Church. In this series of The Essay, Olivia O'Leary, convent-educated and a lapsed Catholic, asks where all the Irish nuns have gone. In her first essay, Olivia recalls her 1...

Environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth travels to the Arctic ice and tundra to look for the ways people and animals shape each other’s lives. In this episode, she journeys to the Yukon River, to see how the history of salmon connects to the present - and shows how even those of us living far away have a relationship with the fish of this great river. Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historia...

A story about how not even superpowers can escape ecological context. In this episode Bathsheba Demuth looks at how reindeer are deeply sensitive to the climate, and how that sensitivity thwarted plans to make them part of capitalist and socialist economies. Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian and writer who spends much of her time in Arctic communities across Eurasia and North America....

Environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth travels to the Arctic ice and tundra to show how humans and animals together have shaped its landscape and history. In this episode she looks at how the human relationship to walruses has changed and changed again, from seeing them as ancestors to part of the socialist future, offering an example of how what we value can endanger—or save—a species. Bathsheb...

A story of how animal cultures come to matter. In this episode Bathsheba Demuth heads to the country of bowhead whales to examine how different people in the Arctic have valued these creatures. She shows how these whales responded to commercial hunting by changing their culture and how their choices pushed into the domain of people. Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian and writer who spe...

Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian and writer who spends much of her time in Arctic communities across Eurasia and North America. Her work draws on archives, ecology, and experience of the landscape to ask how places and people change each other. Her interest in northern environments and cultures began when, at 18, she moved to the village of Old Crow in the Yukon. For two years, she m...

A very personal essay series about communication, listening, performance and British Sign Language (BSL). Sophie Stone considers her own life, career as an actor and identity as a deaf person, through the role of communication, both spoken and in BSL. Hers is an unusual and vivid life – she was sometimes homeless as a child, became a young single mother, broke new ground as the first deaf acting s...

A very personal essay series about communication, listening, performance and British Sign Language (BSL). Sophie Stone considers her own life, career as an actor and identity as a deaf person, through the role of communication, both spoken and in BSL. Hers is an unusual and vivid life – she was sometimes homeless as a child, became a young single mother, broke new ground as the first deaf acting s...

A very personal essay series about communication, listening, performance and British Sign Language (BSL). Sophie Stone considers her own life, career as an actor and identity as a Deaf person, through the role of communication, both spoken and in BSL. Hers is an unusual and vivid life – she was sometimes homeless as a child, became a young single mother, broke new ground as the first deaf acting s...

A very personal essay series about communication, listening, performance and British Sign Language (BSL). Sophie Stone considers her own life, career as an actor and identity as a deaf person, through the role of communication, both spoken and in BSL. Hers is an unusual and vivid life – she was sometimes homeless as a child, became a young single mother, broke new ground as the first deaf acting s...

A very personal essay series about communication, listening, performance and British Sign Language (BSL). Sophie Stone considers her own life, career as an actor and identity as a deaf person, through the role of communication, both spoken and in BSL. Hers is an unusual and vivid life – she was sometimes homeless as a child, became a young single mother, broke new ground as the first deaf acting s...

The BBC has had a powerful influence on our musical taste, and in this BBC centenary year, Nicholas Kenyon, a former controller of Radio 3 and director of the Proms, delves into the archives to explore the BBC’s role in reviving the centuries of early music from before the 18th century. In his final essay, Kenyon looks at how in the early 1970s, the popularity of medieval and renaissance music inc...

The BBC has had a powerful influence on our musical taste, and in this BBC centenary year, Nicholas Kenyon, a former controller of Radio 3 and director of the Proms, delves into the archives to explore the BBC’s role in reviving the centuries of early music from before the 18th century. Today Kenyon explores how in the creative years of the 1950s and 1960s, the revival of early music had a sense o...

The BBC has had a powerful influence on our musical taste, and in this BBC centenary year, Nicholas Kenyon, a former controller of Radio 3 and director of the Proms, delves into the archives to explore the BBC’s role in reviving the centuries of early music from before the 18th century. In his third essay, Kenyon explores how the launch of the BBC’s cultural Third Programme in 1946 rapidly advance...

The BBC has had a powerful influence on our musical taste, and in this BBC centenary year, Nicholas Kenyon, a former controller of Radio 3 and director of the Proms, delves into the archives to explore the BBC’s role in reviving the centuries of early music from before the 18th century. In five programmes he looks at the rare repertory which the BBC broadcast, from its small beginnings in the 1920...

The BBC has had a powerful influence on our musical taste, and in this BBC centenary year, Nicholas Kenyon, a former controller of Radio 3 and director of the Proms, delves into the archives to explore the BBC’s role in reviving the centuries of early music from before the 18th century. In five programmes he looks at the rare repertory which the BBC broadcast, from its small beginnings in the 1920...

Once upon a time, a Shakespeare play on BBC Radio would inevitably feature actors with perfect received pronunciation. Now that has all changed. Actor Samuel West, no stranger to Shakespearian roles, is joined by Dr Andrea Smith to hear how horizons have widened and productions enriched by new voices and new settings for the plays. We'll hear about plays set in India, plays recorded in Welsh, thos...

By the time the BBC had come of age in the 70s and 80s, radio production had become a creative art. The Radiophonic Workshop could famously transport listeners to imagined worlds and this was certainly the case with productions of Shakespeare. Actor Samuel West and Dr Andrea Smith celebrate the creativity that gave us everything from the magic of Puck and Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream to bat...

Actor Samuel West, who has played many Shakespearian roles - some of them on the radio - is joined by Dr Andrea Smith as they take a trip through 100 years (nearly) of Shakespeare on the 'wireless'. Today they focus on one returning character - Juliet from Romeo and Juliet. This is without doubt the most popular play and there are wonderful very early clips of actors such as Fay Compton taking the...

Actor Samuel West is joined by Dr Andrea Smith in a journey through 100 years (nearly) of Shakespeare on the radio. You might think that the years of the Second World War would have given listeners a thirst for history plays and great stirring speeches such as those in Henry V. But in fact it was pastoral comedy that was most popular - a reminder perhaps of the idealised, imagined Britain that peo...

Soon after the BBC was born came the ambition to broadcast Shakespeare plays on 'the wireless'. Theatres refused to allow recording of stage versions so the BBC had to go it alone. The BBC's first Director-General, Lord Reith, thought radio well suited to the task of producing Shakespeare: ‘The plays of Shakespeare fulfil to a great extent the requirements of wireless, for he had little in the way...

Five writers and artists not normally associated with classical music, discuss a specific example of Vaughan Williams’s work to which they have a personal connection, and why it speaks to them. Following on from the successful Five Kinds of Beethoven Radio 3 essay series in 2020, where a wide range of Beethoven fans shared their personal relationship to the composer and his work, this new series g...