A motorbike adorned with a zebu skull is one of the central images of Djibril Diop Mambéty's classic 1973 film, whose title translates as The Journey of the Hyena. Listed as one of the 100 greatest films of all time in the Sight and Sound magazine poll, it mixes West African oral traditions with influences from the French New Wave and Soviet cinema. Mory and Anta are two young people growing up in a newly independent Senegal who fantasise about leaving Dakar for a new life in France, but how can...
Jul 26, 2022•45 min
Glenda Jackson is the subject of a BFI season and in this film she plays part of a love triangle in John Schlesinger's follow up to his Oscar winning Midnight Cowboy. The plot written by Penelope Gilliat centres on an artist who has relationships with a female job consultant and a male doctor. Was the 1971 film ahead of its times? Matthew Sweet re-watches it with guests including Glenda Jackson, playwright Mark Ravenhill, film historian Melanie Williams and BFI National Archive curator Simon McC...
Jul 25, 2022•45 min
From the kit for athletes to interviews which tell us the impact of race times changing – Islam Issa hears about an oral history project in Scotland which aims to capture experiences of past Commonwealth Games held in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Another project explores the commercial and business links between commonwealth countries and what attempts to build connections tell us about and sharing units of measurement, currencies and the impact of EEC membership. New Generation Thinker Islam Issa tal...
Jul 25, 2022•27 min
"The beauty of speed. Time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created the eternal, omnipresent speed." Part of the 1909 manifesto drawn up by Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti that declared the aims of the groundbreaking Futurist branch of modernism. Their rejection of the past included embracing the march of machinery, the power of youth and of violence so how do we view this now? Matthew Sweet is joined by Steven Connor, Selena Daly, Rosalind McKeve...
Jul 22, 2022•44 min
Murals which aimed to synthesise the history and culture of Mexico, Japanese novels exploring urban alienation, an exhibition of Bauhaus paintings from Germany which inspired a generation of Indian artists. Presenter Rana Mitter is joined by Jade Munslow Ong, Christopher Harding, Maria Blanco, and Devika Singh. Amongst the Modernist writers and artists mentioned are: Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro Mexican artist Diego Rivera, and poet Manuel Maples Arce Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral Cuban no...
Jul 21, 2022•44 min
How a disaster in the 1922 led to new thinking about record keeping. Ahead of the ICHORA conference Dr William Butler, Head of Military Records and Jenny Bunn, Head of Archives Research from The National Archives join Naomi Paxton to discuss some of the researchers across the UK who have helped catalogue our history and about a research project based on documents held by the royal hospital which tell us about pension negotiations and disability history. You can find more about the records held a...
Jul 21, 2022•32 min
The Daleks are back! As restorations of the two 1960s Dr Who films are rereleased in British cinemas, Matthew Sweet lifts the lid on the most memorable monsters of post-war British science fiction. Expert guests will have 2000 rels - that’s 45 earth minutes - to explore Dalek culture, politics and philosophy, and to explore how Terry Nation’s creations carry the weight of the second world war, the cold war and contemporary arguments about race and difference. Matthew is joined by Roberta Tovey, ...
Jul 14, 2022•46 min
Tariq Ali picks Pather Panchali and New Generation Thinker Sarah Jilani describes Jalsaghar or The Music Room. Rana Mitter presents this programme which looks at what marked out the directing of Satyajit Ray. The BFI has a season of his films screening across July and August and is re-releasing The Big City. Rana's other guests are the programme of the BFI season and herself a film-maker, Sangeeta Datta, and Professor Chandak Sengoopta from Birkbeck, University of London. Sarah Jilani researches...
Jul 14, 2022•45 min
How does France look when viewed from different places and at different times? Graham Robb knows France well from his academic career and decades of travels and offers an alternative route through French history in his new book. Hannah Scott has looked at the role of low-brow music in forming an idea of ‘Britishness’ for the French at the height of cross-channel rivalry in the last century. Tash Aw has translated the latest work of biographical writing by Édouard Louis. Professor Ginette Vincend...
Jul 13, 2022•45 min
Aethelflaed and Bertha are two of the figures discussed in the new history of women in the Middle Ages written by Janina Ramirez. Choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh has taken the heroine who fights Tancredi the crusading knight and reframed the story set to the music composed by Monteverdi's Il Combattimento. Cat Jarman is a bioarchaeologist who has tracked the way a Viking ‘Carnelian’ bead travelled to England from 8th-century Baghdad, with all that it tells us about women and power. They join Sha...
Jul 13, 2022•45 min
From Beyonce to Octavia Butler, from Chris Ofili to Jordan Peele, the speculative and the mythical have been used as powerful tools to shape Black art, film, music and writing. Ekow Eshun, who has curated a new exhibition on this theme at the Hayward Gallery, joins Shahidha Bari along with DJ/turntablist NikNak and New Generation Thinker Louisa Egbunike to discuss how this idea of the Black Fantastic relates to and in some ways challenges Afrofuturism. In the Black Fantastic runs at the Hayward ...
Jul 07, 2022•46 min
How does money shape history and how do we write about it? Anne McElvoy discusses those questions with a finalist in the political writing category of the 2022 Orwell Prize. In Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire, Kojo Koram traces the some of the economic problems faced across the world today with wealth inequality, with sovereign debt, austerity, and precarious employment and how they are bound up in decolonisation. She also talks to leading UK economist Richard Davies about h...
Jul 06, 2022•45 min
Whether it’s Jane Eyre transported to India, childrens masks used for political protests or film posters that trigger memories, there are endless fascinating stories nestled amongst archives that researchers are diligently bringing to the fore. Dr Naomi Paxton meets three researchers who work in archives that focus on Indian culture and history to find out more about some of the unexpected stories hiding amongst the books, prints and film paraphernalia. Dr Monia Acciaria is Associate professor i...
Jul 06, 2022•30 min
Varney the Vampire was a blood soaked gothic horror story serialised in cheap print over the course of a couple of years in the nineteenth century. The resulting "penny dreadful" tale spilled out of a large volume when it was finally published in book form. In spite of his comfort with crosses, daylight and garlic, Varney's capacity to reflect on his actions made him an early model for Dracula. Matthew Sweet explores why a work, so often overlooked, was so important to the development of the vam...
Jun 30, 2022•45 min
David Chalmers is credited with setting the terms for much of the work done in the philosophy of mind today when he posed the 'hard problem' of consciousness: how does matter, which is fundamentally inanimate, give rise to or interact with consciousness, which is qualitative and phenomenal - always a 'what it's like'? His most recent book, Reality +, is an investigation of the possibility that our entire experience could be an illusion. Iain McGilchrist is a literary scholar turned psychiatrist ...
Jun 29, 2022•45 min
For evolutionary scientists studying religion, it's more fruitful to examine what people do in religious contexts, rather than listen to what they say they believe. There's a new recognition that as well as looking at behaviour, people studying religion must take account of the religious experience of believers. But how do you do that? And what does doing it tell us? Rana Mitter is joined by an evolutionary psychologist, an anthropologist, a historian and a poet to discuss. Robin Dunbar is an ev...
Jun 28, 2022•45 min
Geoff Dyer, Dame Sheila Hancock and Rachel Stott join Matthew Sweet to discuss the work and performance of writers, artists, athletes and musicians near the end of their careers. Old Rage by Sheila Hancock is out now. The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer is out now. Rachel Stott is a composer and plays viola with the Revolutionary Drawing Room, the Bach Players and Sopriola. Producer: Torquil MacLeod
Jun 23, 2022•46 min
The German Romantic author of horror and fantasy published stories which form the basis of Jacques Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann, the ballet Coppélia and the Nutcracker. In the theatre he worked as a stagehand, decorator, playwright and manager and he wrote his own musical works. His opera Undine ended its run at the Berlin Theatre after a fire. During his lifetime he also saw Warsaw and Berlin occupied by Napoleon and during the Prussian war against France, he wrote an account of his ...
Jun 22, 2022•45 min
Waiting is an inevitable part of life, whether it’s in the waiting room of a GP surgery or waiting for lockdown to end. As part of the Waiting Times project, Dr Michael Flexer, a publicly engaged research fellow at the University of Exeter, explores different concepts of waiting and suggests that some forms of waiting – for seeds to grow, for the curtain to rise in a theatre – can be positive. https://WhatAreYouWaitingFor.org.uk Professor Victoria Tischler is from the European Centre for Environ...
Jun 22, 2022•36 min
John Gallagher with an exploration of Sheffield's cultural history through new words, music and film.
Jun 21, 2022•45 min
Can a 40-hour film of a Massachusetts garden or a project documenting rice growing over 40 years help us to understand our planet better? Who makes and who watches such projects? Matthew Sweet is joined by film historian Becca Voelcker who has watched projects recorded in Japan, Colombia, Scotland and America; Thomas Halliday, whose book Otherlands charts the changes in the earth's ecologies through deep time; and by environmentalist Rupert Read, who is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the U...
Jun 16, 2022•46 min
Understanding James Joyce's eye troubles gives you a different way of reading his book Ulysses. That's the contention of Cleo Hanaway-Oakley, who shares her research with presenter Shahidha Bari. Emma West has delved into the history of the Arts League of Service travelling theatre, who went about in a battered old van performing plays, songs, ballets and 'absurdities' to audiences from Braintree to Blantyre. And we look at the Royal Society of Literature's annual Dalloway Day discussion of Virg...
Jun 15, 2022•45 min
Damon Galgut's novel, The Promise, explores the decline of the white Afrikaner Swart family and their failed promise to their black domestic servant. The family resist giving her, her own house and her own land as South Africa emerges from the era of apartheid. Land also occupies Julia Blackburn in her new book Dreaming the Karoo, which explores traces of the indigenous /Xam people who were driven from their ancestral lands in the 1870s. And, New Generation Thinker Jade Munslow Ong has been look...
Jun 14, 2022•45 min
Bill Paterson is a founding member of the 7:84 company established by John McGrath, his wife Elizabeth and her brother to create radical, popular theatre. Fusing techniques popularised by Bertolt Brecht with Scottish performance traditions, their best-known play The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil (1973) explored class struggle, the clearing of the Scottish highlands and the impact of drilling for oil. With energy in the news again, and the resurgence of political theatre on the Brit...
Jun 10, 2022•44 min
Is that strong, inescapable image of 19th century city streets in our heads the right one? It's possible that there's a gap between the realities of street life in the Victorian city and how it has been thought of and portrayed in subsequent eras. Matthew Sweet is joined by historians Sarah Wise, Oskar Jensen, Lynda Nead and Fern Riddell to sift hard facts from picturesque imaginings. Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London by Oskar Jensen is out now. Sarah Wise is the author...
Jun 09, 2022•45 min
Witches, statues, God's body, the Ottomans, medieval church going and seventeenth century England as a "devil land" are the topics explored in this year's shortlisted books. Rana Mitter interviews the authors ahead of the announcement of the winning book on June 22nd. The six books are: The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs by Marc David Baer The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World by Malcolm Gaskill Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688 by Clare Jackson Going to Church ...
Jun 07, 2022•45 min
Covert queer communities are examined as Naomi Paxton is joined by Dr Tom Hulme and Dr Ting Guo. Tom Hulme is senior lecturer in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen's University Belfast. As part of the research project Queer Northern Ireland: Sexuality before Liberation, Tom draws on under- or never-before used archives to reconstruct Northern Ireland's queer past from the late 19th century to the beginnings of the gay liberation movement in the 1960s. https://g...
Jun 07, 2022•40 min
he film starring Michael Caine was adapted from a 1970 Ted Lewis novel set in an underworld of gangsters and teenage pornography. Mike Hodges, Nick Triplow, Pamela Hutchinson and John Gray talk with Matthew Sweet about the influence of the book and re-watch the film, which has just been restored in 4k and returns to UK cinemas this summer. Originally set in Scunthorpe, Lewis' novel Jack's Return Home was relocated to Newcastle/Gateshead for the film which Mike Hodges adapted and directed. Jack's...
Jun 02, 2022•45 min
In Amia Srinivasan's book The Right To Sex she discusses some of the most hotly controversial topics of today: sex work, pornography, the nature of sexual liberation. What can and should a philosopher bring to these debates? Also, we explore one of the philosophical techniques informing Srinivasan's work: genealogy. First named by Friedrich Nietzsche (although arguably practiced by philosophers before him) and developed by Michel Foucault and Bernard Williams, amongst others, genealogy seeks to ...
Jun 01, 2022•45 min
Smugglers, refugees, trade and melting ice and polar exploration are part of the conversation as Rana Mitter is joined in the BBC tent at the Hay Festival by Nobel Prize-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose books have drawn on his birthplace Zanzibar and the refugees arriving at the Kent coast; climate scientist Professor Emily Shuckburgh, who worked at the British Antarctic Survey; and Joan Passey, author of Cornish Gothic, a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Ar...
Jun 01, 2022•45 min
