Auntie Beeb

BBC’s Peel Acres with guest Johnny Flynn

by

Tom Ravenscroft invites actor and musician Johnny Flynn to Peel Acres: the home of his dad, former BBC Radio DJ John Peel, who passed away in 2004, and his legendary music collection.

LISTEN HERE:
The Collection – Peel Acres – Johnny Flynn – BBC Sounds

Tracklist
1 Johnny Flynn & Laura Marling “The Water”

2 Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band “Dachau Blues”

3 Doug Kershaw “Spanish Moss”

4 Peter Green “Burnt Foot”

5 Mike Seeger & Tex Logan “Katy Hill”

6 Bob Dylan & The Band “Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread” (Take 2)

7 Pixies “Gigantic”

8 The Cramps “Can Your Pussy Do The Dog?”

9 Autopsy “Retribution for the Dead”

10 Michael Chapman “Wrecked Again”

11 Leonard Cohen “Bird on the Wire”

12 Peter Green “Bottoms Up”

Nuclear apocalypse film “Threads” was ‘the most horrific, sobering thing I’ve ever seen’

by

Ahead of a timely re-airing of Mick Jackson’s famously bleak docudrama, its director recalls why he unleashed a mushroom cloud on Sheffield in 1984

ne Sunday night in September 1984, between championship darts and the news with Jan Leeming, the BBC broadcast one of its bravest, most devastating commissions. This was Threads, a two-hour documentary-style drama exploring a hypothetical event deeply feared at the time and also somehow unthinkable: what would happen if a nuclear bomb dropped on a British city.

Made by British director Mick Jackson with Kes author Barry Hines, and set in Sheffield, it begins with a young couple, working-class Jimmy and middle-class Ruth, dealing with her unexpected pregnancy in familiar kitchen-sink drama surroundings. International tensions build slowly in the background as the minutes tick by, bursting in through newspaper headlines, radio and TV news, and the ominous words of narrator Paul Vaughan, known then as a presenter of BBC science series Horizon.

Then come CND protests; council officers being summoned to an emergency bunker; and animated films on TV instructing people how to survive. Forty-seven minutes in, a nuclear bomb drops. The film ends more than a decade later with Jimmy and Ruth’s baby, Jane, now an adolescent, giving birth in a world devastated by nuclear winter.

Bringing horror into the homes, shops and streets of a very ordinary world, Threads is a brilliant, terrifying film, and for anyone who has seen it (I watched it in 1999 on a dusty VHS), its effects will have been long-lasting. To mark the film’s 40th anniversary, I have examined its creation and legacy for a forthcoming radio documentary, Archive on 4: Reweaving Threads, 40 Years On, digging into the BBC vaults to show how the film has influenced writers, politicians and fans (including Jim Jupp of the brilliant Ghost Box record label, who has created an exclusive soundtrack for the programme).

The BBC has shown Threads only three times to date: in 1984; in August of the following year, to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and as part of a cold war special on BBC Four in 2003. Another – timely – showing is planned for October. When I watched the film at the end of the 20th century, Threads felt like a piece of history. Today, in a world of conflict in Russia, China and the Middle East, and expanding nuclear capabilities, it no longer does.

In a light-dazzled sunroom in Santa Monica, California, Mick Jackson, director of LA Story and The Bodyguard, is remembering the film of which he’s most proud. “You know that on the Internet Movie Database, at the end of each entry for a film, there’s a space for people to write their own comments? I’ve checked that page for Threads practically every year. It varies with the state of tension in the world, but regularly there are [new] entries there saying: ‘I saw this as a kid sitting around the door when I was supposed to be in bed’, or ‘I came to this because people had talked about it and it’s the most horrific, sobering thing I’ve ever seen’.” The latest reviewer, jotchy-14285, posted in June, saying: “Just watch it people, judge for yourselves and hope that the ones with their fingers on the buttons have seen it as well…”

A science documentary-maker in his early career, Jackson joined the BBC in 1966, soon after the corporation decided to ban another film it had commissioned about the effects of a nuclear bomb: Peter Watkins’s The War Game. Blending documentary, newsy vox pops and a cast of amateur actors and extras, it was dropped from the schedules following advice from the Home Office, but later won the 1967 best documentary Oscar after a cinema release. “So I entered a corporation where everybody felt a great deal of shame, that the BBC has somehow betrayed them,” Jackson says.

Read more

BBC Proms 2024: Nick Drake – An Orchestral Celebration

by

Olivia Chaney
Olivia Chaney

Live at the BBC Proms: BBC Symphony Orchestra, guest artists and conductor Jules Buckley honour Nick Drake in arrangements including Northern Sky, River Man, and Time Has Told Me. Presented by Elizabeth Alker.

There has never been an artist quite like Nick Drake, one of the great poets of the folk-rock movement. Fifty years on from his death at the age of just 26, the British singer-songwriter has found a new, cross-generational audience – many of them beguiled by his fragility and fatalism, his music’s mingling of the outwardly simple and the inwardly complex.

For this tribute Prom, Jules Buckley brings together a selection of artists to join the BBC Symphony Orchestra for a unique celebration, with songs including ‘River Man’, ‘Cello Song’, ‘Time Has Told Me’ and ‘Northern Sky’. INTERVAL: John Wilson, presenter of the TV and radio interview series This Cultural Life, joins Radio 3 presenter Elizabeth Alker to discuss the words and music of Nick Drake. Olive Chaney (vocals/piano/guitar) Marika Hackman (vocals/guitar) BC Camplight (vocals/guitar) Scott Matthew (vocals/guitar) The Unthanks BBC Symphony Orchestra Jules Buckley (conductor)

The Unthanks
The Unthanks

LISTEN at: BBC Proms – 2024 – Prom 8: Nick Drake – An Orchestral Celebration – BBC Sounds

BBC is far from perfect, but it did give Ivor Cutler and Monty Python to the world

by

The daft ditties of Glasgow’s Ivor Cutler and Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks might never have seen the light without the BBC, writes Aidan Smith.

By Aidan Smith | January 2020

The BBC is under threat. Yes, again. It’s not perfect. Sometimes it annoys and occasionally it infuriates. Like when the in-house diversity focus group decides – in the interests of inclusiveness for other minute markings on the clockface, presumably – that the new Crackerjack shouldn’t start at the sacred and literally time-honoured “five-to-five”. But think of this right now: we wouldn’t have had Terry Jones without the Beeb, nor Ivor Cutler.

I’m thinking of Ivor because he’s being celebrated by Celtic Connections with tomorrow’s performance in his Glasgow birthplace of a tribute album of his daft ditties and I’m thinking of Terry because like the Norwegian Blue parrot he’s no more, ceased to be, an ex-comedy genius.

Jones and the rest of Monty Python’s Flying Circus emerged, big foot bursting through a bucolic sky, at the end of a decade of merciless mirth at the expense of the natural order. Politicians were sent up by the satire boom and then Python set up the Ministry of Silly Walks. The government of the day, still believing in deference, was appalled at this snook-cocking by the state broadcaster. The government of this day, even though it controls much of its own message, still manages to be appalled by the Beeb and perceived bias and is planning stiff retribution.

Read more