'I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore'. These are the words of the news anchor-man in the film Network, now adapted for the stage. The director Ivo van Hove tells Francine Stock how this satire on global capitalism and chasing ratings with populist rants has such relevance today. Composer Nico Muhly also looks to Hollywood, adapting Hitchock's film Marnie - and the novel that inspired it - for the English National Opera. Born into poverty, Marnie becomes trapped in a web of lies and angrily claws her way out. Anger pervades Darren McGarvey's book, Poverty Safari, as he takes the reader on a journey into Britain's deprived communities to give voice to people who feel misunderstood and unheard. He explores how stress pervades the streets where he was brought up, while the scientist Caroline Relton studies how stress and other environmental factors can be passed down through generations, affecting our genetic make-up. Producer: Katy Hickman.
Kultur & Gesellschaft
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Weekly discussion programme, setting the cultural agenda every Monday
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Folge vom 13.11.2017Anger and deprivation
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Folge vom 06.11.2017Heart of Darkness: Conrad and OrwellAndrew Marr discusses the work of Joseph Conrad with his biographer Maya Jasanoff. Conrad wrote about the underbelly of colonialism, terrorism, immigration and isolation and Jasanoff looks at the turn of the twentieth century through the lens of his life and work. While Conrad's Nostromo reflected the changing world order with the emerging dominance of the US and global capitalism, the FT columnist Gideon Rachman looks at the decline of the West amidst the growing power of the East, as well as reflecting on Britain's imperial amnesia. A young George Orwell was also part of the British colonial system in its slow death throes in Burma and the academic Robert Colls explores how these experiences shaped his later work. Ishion Hutchinson has been called a post-colonial poet and his latest collection is haunted by Jamaica's fractured past. Producer: Katy Hickman.
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Folge vom 30.10.2017Animals: tamed, exploited and resurrectedAmol Rajan discusses the uneasy interaction between the animal kingdom and humans. The anthropologist Alice Roberts looks back to the moment hunter-gatherers changed their relationship with other species and began to tame them, paving the way for our civilisation. Gaia Vince visits the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica where local people have found a way to both exploit and protect a natural resource, the olive ridley sea turtle. Re-introducing native species can be fraught with difficulties: John Ewen was part of the team who successfully re-introduced the hihi bird to New Zealand, but can lessons learnt with songbirds help with schemes to bring back wolves, lynx and beavers? And resurrection science may be the stuff of films like Jurassic Park, but it is also an exciting - and potentially dangerous - new field of study. Britt Wray offers a warning about the risks of de-extinction.Producer: Katy Hickman.
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Folge vom 23.10.2017Living with the GodsAre humans distinguished not just by a capacity to think, but by our need to believe - where the search is not so much for my place in the world, but for our place in the cosmos? Neil MacGregor, the former Director of the British Museum, discusses Living with the Gods, his Radio 4 series, in which he focuses on the expression of shared beliefs, across thousands of years, and around the globe, through objects from the Museum's collections and beyond. The curator Jennifer Sliwka looks at a world in black and white, in a celebration of the monochrome in art across the centuries, from medieval sacred works, where the elimination of colour was thought to focus the mind, to contemporary paintings. The historian Dan Jones tells the story of the ultimate holy warriors, the Knights Templar, a story of power, politics and fanaticism. The writer Caspar Henderson takes a step back to consider the awe-inspiring - from divine visions to transcendent moments - and to ask whether we are in danger of losing our sense of wonder in the modern world. Presenter Andrew Marr Producer Katy Hickman Photograph: (c) The Trustees of the British Museum.