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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

The Essay Podcast

The Essay

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: Furniture - A Personal History of Movable Objects

The Essay: Furniture - A Personal History of Movable Objects: Episode 2: Who's Been Sitting in My Chair? Our Shadow Selves

Who's Been Sitting in My Chair? Our Shadow Selves

Episode 2

Episode 2: Who's Been Sitting in My Chair? Our Shadow Selves

Furniture - A Personal History of Movable Objects

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Furniture - A Personal History of Movable Objects, Who's Been Sitting in My Chair? Our Shadow SelvesClose menu

Ian Sansom examines our complex physical, mental and emotional relationship with the chair

Ian Sansom examines our complex physical, mental and emotional relationship with the chair, focusing on Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Van Gogh's painting and Thoreau's Walden.

Are you sitting comfortably? Despite his bad posture, novelist and academic Ian Sansom explores our complex physical, mental and emotional relationship with the chair. Chairs can symbolise who we are, like Ian's comfy old overstuffed armchair, and in 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears', the little bear asks 'Who's been sitting in my chair?' which Ian reads as "Who am I?" Van Gogh painted two empty chairs after his famous fall-out with Gauguin; Henry Thoreau, out in his cabin at Walden Pond, had just three chairs 'one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society'. Ian has 26 chairs in total, but not a 'named chair', which is the 'scholar's burnished throne'. Apart from beds, we share more intimacy with chairs than with any other piece of furniture, but often their symbolism is most powerful when empty, because Ian believes that empty chairs always imply people.

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.

Novelist and academic Ian Sansom explores the history and symbolism of furniture

Series in which novelist and academic Ian Sansom explores the history and symbolism of furniture

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The Essay

Furniture - A Personal History of Movable Objects

Episode 2: Who's Been Sitting in My Chair? Our Shadow Selves

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