Showing posts with label Radio 4. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Radio 4. Show all posts

Wednesday, 23 February 2011

Luise Rainer

A wonderful interview with the gorgeous Hollywood legend, Luise Rainer, on BBC Radio 4. At the age of 101 she is the oldest living Academy Award winner. John Humphrys, on the Today programme this morning, said that she describes her friendship with Greta Garbo during the interview. She doesn’t. But what she does do is talk about Garbo as a kind of concept.

Tuesday, 27 July 2010

Lynn Barber on Men

Did anyone else here Lynn Barber on Radio 4 on Sunday? I was only half listening and I didn’t hear the whole thing because I turned it off. But I did hear this bit quoted in the Telegraph today:
“My thinking after that was that I must get a boyfriend immediately and that I haven’t got time to waste going punting or to dinner with them. Why don’t I just go to bed with them first, eliminate them if they are no good and not waste time.”
I was left with the impression that Lynn was so desperate to have a boy from Oxford lined up to marry before the three years were through that there wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do nail one - she wasn’t going to bed for love or pleasure. Hearing what she said just before and what said just after (about her relationship with her husband) sealed that impression.

This seems to confirm my point:

“ (Lynn said) ‘I would criticise more what I call the Elizabeth Taylor syndrome, where highly sexed women feel they have to marry the man they sleep with. Then they get divorced and do the same thing over and over again. This seems to be happening in America now.’ (Byrony Gordon writes) Given that Barber went on to marry a fellow student, David Cardiff, with whom she stayed until his death seven years ago, you have to concede that she has a rather good point.”
Were all the 50 boys studying at Oxford?

Friday, 9 October 2009

Thought For The Day

There was a deadlock in the final vote at the LICC debate last night: “This House Believes that Humanist speakers should be included in BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day."

Proposing:
Dr Andrew Copson, British Humanist Association.
Ariane Sherine, Atheist Bus Campaign.

Opposing:
Canon Giles Fraser.
Rt Rev Nick Baines.

Chairing: Radio 4 Today presenter, Edward Stourton.

The closing count was 21 for, 21 against and 10 abstentions. The network manager for Radio 4 was there and, of course, he abstained and kept his real opinion private.

I voted for the motion on the assumption that a humanist thought for the day would be philosophical rather than divisive.

Some members of the audience assumed that a humanist take on Thought For The Day would eventually become a series of platitudes, rather like listening to Imagine being played over and over again on the slot every week. The criticism followed an example of a humanist Thought For The Day by Ariane Sherine (founder of the Atheist Bus Campaign), which was very benign in its promotion of kindness, tolerance, forgiveness and plaurality of beliefs. She also argued that secularists had been marginalised for centuries. Rt Revd Nick Baines, Bishop of Croydon, said: “I was nearly in tears when Ariane was saying how deprived humanists have been.” (This was all the funnier when Ariane rolled her eyes.)

I think that we don’t know what we would hear so it would be interesting to find out.