Original version

BBC Radio 4 LW

Book of the Week

Audiobooks

Factual

Serialised book readings, featuring works from various genres

Serialised book readings, featuring works of non-fiction, biography, autobiography, travel, diaries, essays, humour and history

BBC Radio 4 FM

Book of the Week: Picnic Comma Lightning

Stephen Mangan

Laurence Scott

Elizabeth Burke

Alexandra Quinn

Book of the Week: Picnic Comma Lightning: Episode 1: Augmented Reality

Picnic Comma Lightning

Episode 1

Episode 1: Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality

BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, Picnic Comma Lightning, Augmented Reality

A meditation on modern life, inspired by the death of author Laurence Scott's parents.

A philosophical meditation on 21st-century reality, inspired by the death of the author Laurence Scott's parents. Read by Stephen Mangan.

An innovative examination of the nature of reality in the 21st century by award-winning author Laurence Scott - part personal memoir, part philosophical exploration. Read by Stephen Mangan.

When he was in his early thirties, Laurence Scott's parents died soon after one another, and he found his whole world altered beyond recognition. He says, "Death runs like radioactive iodine through your sense of reality, allowing this reality to be looked at in high contrast, its structures glowing. It has a way of making things very true, but also, somehow, less real." 

As he begins to navigate this new reality, he realises that in politics and public life, the nature of reality - what is true and what is fake - has become an urgent issue. Questions of how we experience the real world, how we access its truths, have become mainstream concerns. Today, in an age of online personas, alternative truths, constant surveillance and an increasingly hysterical news cycle, our realities are becoming more flimsy and more vulnerable than ever before.

In the first episode, Laurence Scott gives a vivid poetic description of the grief he experienced when his parents died, and explores recent discoveries in neuroscience, and the concept of augmented reality. 

Laurence Scott is a writer, broadcaster, academic and a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Arcadia in London. He is author of The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize, won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize, and was named the Sunday Times Thought Book of the Year. In 2011 he was named one of ten New Generation Thinkers by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the BBC. 

Read by Stephen Mangan
Adapted by Elizabeth Burke
Produced by Alexandra Quinn
A Loftus production for BBC Radio 4.

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.

By Laurence Scott. Philosophical meditation on 21st-century reality, inspired by the death of the author's parents. Read by Stephen Mangan.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Book of the Week

Picnic Comma Lightning

Episode 1: Augmented Reality

Contributors

Genres

Formats

Brand

Series

BBC Radio 4 LW

About BBC Radio 4