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

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Something Understood

Religion & Ethics

Ethical and religious discussion that examines some of the larger questions of life

Ethical and religious discussion that examines some of the larger questions of life, taking a spiritual theme and exploring it through music, prose and poetry

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Something Understood: In the Company of Children

In the Company of Children

25/12/2011

BBC Radio 4 - Something Understood, In the Company of Children

Mark Tully asks what we can learn by taking a child's eye view of Christmas.

Mark Tully discusses how we can approach Christmas in a better frame of mind, if we are prepared to learn from our children.

"But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.", Matthew 19

It is an old saying that 'children make Christmas', but in this Christmas Day edition of Something Understood, Mark Tully considers what it is that we can all learn from that. He asks how a 'child-like' attitude to the celebrations of Christ's Nativity can help us get more from the day, both spiritually and socially. 

In conversation with children's author Michael Morpurgo he discusses both the importance of Christmas traditions that are handed down the generations and what we can learn from children to make the idea of 'a season of peace and good will' more than just a well-meant form of words. 

The programme includes contributions from children, including specially written verse and music and readings from successive younger generations, fictional and real, from the seventeenth century to the present. There's music from Debussy, Johnny Cash and The St. Petersburg Children's Choir and readings from Ronald Searle, Mary Haley Bell and Jean Jacques Rousseau. 

The readers are Madeleine Southey, Samantha Bond, Gene Goodman and Jack Shepherd.


Producer: Frank Stirling
A Unique production for BBC Radio 4.

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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