Domain remove BOOKCHEF

The British Broadcasting Company began life with a princely £100,000 in capital, about the same sum as half an Alan Yentob. Six wireless firms chipped in £60k and took up their place round a battered board table at the GEC bui lding at Magnet House. Other manufacturers threw in in the remainder for…

I wrote this blog about eighteen months ago and the only response I feel I can have to recent events is to post it again.  For the passage that begins ‘This week has seen...’, I now write - the massacre of innocent people in Paris, the state killing of an individual by use of a drone, the continuin…

Waiting outside the station for the taxi I watch for anyone else who might also be making their way up to the house that used to belong to the poet, Ted Hughes, for a writing course centred around nature.  When my wife read the description of the course to me so many months ago I felt I had to go; …

Above is blue sky, the pale tender blue of an early spring, crossed by wisps of smoky cloud blown by a sharp breeze. There is a call, a shrill cry, and the form of a bird of prey, long wings outstretched, drifts over the bare trees.  The grey brown of its feathers can be seen and its head moves fro…

I Don’t you just love the smell of old books. That whiff of history. ‘Local Radio in the Public Interest’ was a delicious aquamarine pamphlet, published proudly by the BBC in February 1966 as it laid claim to local radio. If there were to be a local radio network once more, the BBC should bloody we…

For over 45 years I have had some kind of relationship with the work of the educator J Krishnamurti.  I have seen him, heard him speak, I have read books, watched videos and listened to audio recordings; I met him briefly once, but he was more interested in my young children than he was in me.  The…

People move from place to place, some search, some flee and others resignedly take whatever faces them.  For centuries there have been the nomadic survivors creating a way of life that gives attention to both the land and people’s needs; ensuring that the delicate balance is maintained and life con…

It occurred to me the other day just how many passionate radio folk also have an unhealthy interest in public transport.  There's clearly a good reason why we both have 'stations' and 'platforms'. A talented colleague, poised to book a fascinating trip of disused Tube stations, …

S Reith did not invent the phrase  ‘inform, educate, entertain ’, I learnt from today's BBC's Charter review proposal documen t.  I really like facts like that. No, it was clever old David Sarnoff, the founder of commercial radio in the US. He wrote that its function was “entertaining, info…