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BBC Radio 4 FM

BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

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Open Book

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Programme looking at new fiction and non-fiction books

Programme looking at new fiction and non-fiction books, talking to authors and publishers and unearthing lost classics

BBC Radio 4 LW

Open Book: 23/05/2010

23/05/2010

BBC Radio 4 - Open Book, 23/05/2010

Mariella Frostrup visits a lighthouse to tell the story of Paul Gallico's The Snow Goose.

Mariella Frostrup and Michael Morpurgo visit a Lincolnshire lighthouse to uncover the story behind the writing of Paul Gallico's timeless classic The Snow Goose.

Last November, Radio 4 listeners voted The Snow Goose their favourite Neglected Classic. Paul Gallico's novella tells the touching story of a teenage girl and a solitary artist, brought together by a wounded goose. In the week the book is dramatised as a Classic Serial, Mariella Frostrup and the writer who nominated it, Michael Morpurgo, visit the Lincolnshire lighthouse that inspired the story. They discover how the man who illustrated The Snow Goose, the artist and naturalist Peter Scott, influenced Gallico - and the modern-day resident of the lighthouse previously inhabited by Scott, David Joel, introduces Mariella to the snow geese he keeps there as a tribute to the book. Mariella also speaks to the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard - Scott's first wife - who remembers her own encounters with Paul Gallico, and explains how she came to be the model for an iconic illustration of Fritha, the book's heroine.

Producer: Thomas Morris.

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

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23/05/2010

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