Radio
The Jazz Loft Project
A new exhibition at the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts offers insights into the midnight ramblings of some of the greatest jazz musicians ever, including Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Zoot Sims, Charles Mingus and Roy Haynes, who were all recorded and photographed by Eugene Smith, as they jammed after hours at his loft.
Finding Frida Kahlo?
Five decades after her death, the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is at the centre of a controversy as bizarre and gripping as the scandals that define her in the popular imagination, following the discovery of an astonishing trove of letters, notebooks, paintings, sketches and personal effects that is either one of the greatest art finds of the century or the most brazen hoax since the Hitler diaries.
Denmark’s Energy Island
The island of Samso generates much more energy than it uses – all from renewable sources. How a conservative farming community came up with a radical solution to our addiction to fossil fuels.
A Moveable Feast
These two reports were broadcast on BBC radio in July 2009. The first was on Radio 4’s literature programme, Open Book. The second was on the World Service arts magazine, The Strand. They are about a new edition of Ernest Hemingway’s memoir about the time he spent in Paris as a young man, A Moveable [...]
Mum’s The World
Home birth has been steadily increasing in New York for the past decade, as middle-class mums seek alternatives to the increasingly standardised, managed approach to childbirth in US hospitals. Doctors, rather than midwives, are in control. The result is one of the highest caesarian rates in the world.
Lost in adaptation
Ever since the 1970s, American network programmers have been trying to replicate the success of All In The Family, which took an existing British show called Til Death Do Us Part, polished it for a CBS audience and ruled prime time for a decade. The results – including mediocre, short-lived versions of Fawlty Towers, Cracker and This Life – have rarely been up to much.
You Tube Orchestra at Carnegie Hall
At Carnegie Hall in New York, the You Tube Symphony Orchestra made the first grand gesture of a campaign to persuade young people that with talent, discipline and a broadband internet connection they can swim against the cultural flow that values celebrity over artistry.
Bilingual West Side Story
The Puerto Rican Sharks – one of two rival gangs fighting over a patch of Manhattan turf – now speak and sing in Spanish. But is a linguistic shift enough to make West Side Story relevant again? Or has one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities simply changed too much with each new wave of immigrants for the show to keep up.
The Lost Veterans
Advocacy groups estimate that at least 1,500 veterans from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are sleeping rough in America’s cities. Have the lessons of Vietnam been learned?
Repetitive Beats
Back in the early days of BBC 6 Music, there was incredible scope for creative programme-making. Budgets were minimal, but it says a lot for the pioneer spirit of the network that I was given the chance to write, produce and present a four part documentary. Its title was Repetitive Beats: A Social History Of Electronic Dance Music.
