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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

Private Passions Podcast

Private Passions

Discussion & Talk

Music: Classical

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical loves and hates

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical loves and hates, and talk about the influence music has had on their lives

Private Passions: Roddy Doyle

03/11/2013

Roddy Doyle

BBC Radio 3 - Private Passions, Roddy Doyle

Michael Berkeley's guest is writer Roddy Doyle.

Michael Berkeley's guest is writer Roddy Doyle. His musical choices include works by Pergolesi, Mozart, Steve Reich and Brian Eno.

It was a band called The Commitments that first brought Roddy Doyle fame 25 years ago - not a real group of musicians, but a comic novel about a group of Dublin teenagers who get together and form a soul band. The book and its sequels became successful films. Roddy Doyle gave up his job as a teacher and has gone on to write nine more novels set in Dublin, where he grew up and still lives.

One of them, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, won the Booker Prize and is a memorable tour de force told entirely in the voice of a ten-year-old Dublin boy. Roddy Doyle has also written for children, for the theatre and the cinema, and now, after 25 years, he's back where he started - he's turned The Commitments into a musical which has just opened in London's West End.

Roddy's music choices range from the richness of Pergolesi and Mozart to the sparse modernism of Steve Reich and Brian Eno, with a touching love song to end the programme.

He talks to Michael Berkeley about music while you work, the pleasures of Dublin dialogue, and the joy of taking up the trumpet in middle age.

First broadcast November 2013.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

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